Trouble Will Find Me

Trouble Will Find Me is yet another album by indie rock band The National. I must state this is a good album and I like their work. Still this this their first album the murmuring singing of Matt Berninger started to annoy me somewhat. Also the album has a weaker second half (apart from "Graceless" and "I Need My Girl"). Some selection/shortening wouldn't have been the worst decision All in all still a 3.5 star effort, but could have been better.

I don't have anything in particular against this band but I also don't quite get the hype. They have locked in their particular downbeat indie rock sound and I don't find much variety, from song to song or between the albums.

Every time I listen to the National, I'm impressed. Their music is so haunting and beautiful. Sometimes it feels a bit monotonous, which I think is the reason I don't listen to them often, but it's nice to listen to on occasion. 4 stars.

Really solid album as expected from The National, but it wouldn't be the first, second, or even third album from them I would personally choose to include here. I think a bit more selectiveness makes sense.

Rating: 7/10 Best songs: I should live in salt, Sea of love, I need my girl

Looooots of National on this user submitted list. I guess the finishers if this marathon are mostly sad dads? This is neither their best, nor their worst record. It's better than good. But I would hesitate to say it's great. And I think it's the lack of hooks. Don't swallow the cap and Graceless are upbeat tracks that really stand out. And the really down tempo tracks make me feel the way I like feeling too. Overall this is good, not great

good stuff

In the year since I last got an album from The National, I still haven't really dived deep into their music. I think it's perfectly fine and you have to be in the mood for it. I'm rarely in the mood for it. This is a fine album but I don't think essential. My personal rating: 4/5 My rating relative to the list: 4/5 Should this have been included on the original list? No

Sleek indie, has it’s appeal but not my cup of tea

Trouble will surely find you if you guys keep on adding more albums from this band. The further you advance into The National's discography, and the further the music goes into eyeroll-inducing, glossy yet ultimately meat-and-potatoes offerings. For me, the breaking point is their 2019 LP *I Am Easy To Find*, possibly even *Sleep Well Beast* in 2017. Even the many nicely-syncopated rhythms found on those two records can't make up for how uninteresting most of their songs truly are. And I'm not even talking talking about the absolutely bland next two studio albums, where those rhythms simply seem to have gone A.W.O.L.... Today's suggestion is from an earlier year, so there are still salvageable elements in its first half, mostly owing to how those sorts of imaginative rhythms are serving better songs on average... But the seeds of the later artistic debacle of this generally overrated band are clearly sown in the second half of this album. Pretty sad in retrospect, and not in the way The National intended to be. The musicianship is still stellar everywhere on a purely technical standpoint, sure. But even the most gifted musicians can churn out secondary drivel when they're not struck by genuine bursts of inspiration. To go into more details on that personal assessment of mine... The odd meters in the first couple of tracks of *Trouble Will Find Me* are admittedly refreshing, and also useful to make up for Matt Berninger's increasingly monotone vocal performance by this point of The National's career. In "I Should Live In Salt" and "Demons", the American indie-rock / chamber pop act indeed add or subtract beats to create admirable hypnotic effects within their music. You can also add the elated build-up of "Sea Of Love"' and its interesting use of an extra 4/4 bar in its chorus, or the oddly-placed toms or snare drums in "Don't Swallow The Cap" and "Heavenfaced" to that shortlist of songs displaying original arrangements on moving songs. Oh, and "Fireproof" is a very pretty tune, too. So pretty that it doesn't need the work of the math nerds members within the band, who usually like to season their best cuts with all those strange rhythms... Unfortunately, all of this only happens in the first half of this LP. Most of the second side -- one rare exception with that quick return of the odd-meter thing in the otherwise relatively underwhelming closer "Hard To Find" -- is, for all intents and purposes, a... borefest! Take away the subtly off-kilter arrangements, and the music in *Trouble Will Find Me* reveals how linear and meat-and-potatoes it truly is in its beige core. "Slipped" is nothing but a 100% skippable track. Very few good musical ideas are spread real thin during the course of "Humiliation" and "Pink Rabbits". In a faster category, "Graceless" indeed feels like it is lacking the grace of its elder brother "Sea Of Love". As for "I Need My Girl", it is objectively a somewhat decent love song, even if not much happens there either. But does this composition deserve such a popular success on my streaming service, with almost *200 million views*??? Please, gimme a break, will ya? The only explanation is that a lot of The National fans -- to which you can probably add millions of Taylor Swift fans who got to know the band through her -- are not very demanding when it comes to that sort of dross. Wallpaper music will have them all teary-eyed, I imagine. You gotta be clueless in a "style-over-substance" fashion for that to happen. Sorry but I have better ways to spend my time than watching the paint peeling off. 3/5 for the purposes of this list dedicated to essential albums, mostly because of the fine tracks on the first half of this album. 8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3) ---- Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ---- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 109 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 117 Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 257 (including this one) ---- Émile, *quatre* nouveaux messages pour toi au dessus, du *Solid State Survivor* de Yellow Magic Orchestra au *Atrocity Exhibition* de Danny Brown

Pretty good indie album, but didn't get much out of it if I'm honest.

Surprisingly good for an indie record.

The link to the album in Apple Music took me to a rationalistic looking American album with Stars and Stripes and eagles. That was the list exciting thing about this album.