In This Week's Issue

I'm still a little scattered after music-award ballot-counting (yes, I know the winners already, but I'll never tell!), but I have to give a big shout-out to Frank at one of my favorite music blogs, Chromewaves. He's always shown STLog (and now A to Z) linkage love, so I'm happy to return the favor by sending traffic his way for his fantastic National review. The Brooklyn band is playing the Duck Room on Monday night, and judging from his review (some of which I'll excerpt below), we should be in for a treat.

Playing to a sold-out house, the six-piece band (violinist/keyboardist/unofficial sixth man Padme Newsome was along for the tour) stepped up and made a compelling argument for themselves as best goddamn band in the world right now. Okay, that's a bit of hyperbole, but only a bit. Tight, taut and intense, The National powered through an impressive 19 songs in an hour and a half with a set list drawing heavily from Boxer and Alligator, with a couple nods to earlier works Cherry Tree and Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers. Live, the Boxer material lost a bit of the album's texture and orchestration but that was more than compensated for in more inventive guitarwork from the brothers Dessner and energy from the band overall. Similarly, the more overt rockers - "Mr November", "Abel" and "Murder Me Rachael" - were amped up further and were quite simply explosive.

Get your sad on!

I'll be at Electrelane tonight at the Creepy Crawl, and then hitting Mangia for Heroes of the Kingdom; won't you join me?

-- Annie Zaleski