The National’s turn at the Bowl on 9/11

Kevin Bronson on
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Of all the chilling moments on the chilly evening of 9/11, one eight-minute stretch of the National’s set at the Hollywood Bowl rattled the spine. It came when the Cincinnati-bred, Brooklyn-based indie rockers played an obscure 2003 album track “Thirsty,” followed by 2007’s “Fake Empire.”

With a full moon flanking the Bowl to the east and the flag hanging solemnly at half-staff adjacent to opposite big screen, frontman Matt Berninger explained that he wrote “Thirsty” in the days after the Twin Towers fell. Neither the cameo by porcelain goddess Annie Clark nor the chatter from the wine-addled audience softened the blow of Berninger’s baritone when he sang “There’s nothing in the air today / Now I know, I’m not so important.”

Coupled, then, with “We’re half-awake in a fake empire,” Berninger and mates provided a little poignant, and possibly subversive, dessert for a crowd that opener Neko Case pointed out “smelled like charred chicken.” For five albums, the National’s music has blurred the line between sadness and rage, and certainly the 10-year anniversary of a nation’s nightmare inspired those twining emotions. Whether wrestling with the deeply personal or broadening his scope, Berninger intimates that – owing to apathy, or narcissism, or even blinding jingoism – we are all complicit in our own doom.

By the end of the night, the rage that the National had flashed in “Squalor Victoria” and “Mr. November” had won, with Berninger smashing the Bowl’s on-stage clock as curfew approached. It all but upstaged the starkly pretty highlights earlier – “Afraid of Everyone” and “Sorrow,” both duets with Clark (whose appearance seemed extraneous and too neatly timed with the release of her new St. Vincent album “Strange Mercy”) – and “England,” which the National performed with the Calder Quartet. In the latter, the lyric “I’m in a Los Angeles cathedral” played well to the hometown folks.

Opening acts Case and Sharon Van Etten each were poignant, but in a different way. T Bone Burnett guested with the amiable Case, whose voice carved hillocks out of every phrase, and probably stopped a whole lot of people in mid-chicken leg with the opening line of “Hold On, Hold On”: “The most tender place in my heart is for strangers.” The most proper sentiment for the occasion.