Matt Berninger, the lanky and oddly volatile frontman for Cincinnati-born indie-rock lifers the National, has very strange ideas about proper rock-star behavior. He is a soothing, sonorous baritone prone to sudden bursts of screaming; he wanders about the stage like he’s lost a contact, not so much menacing as befuddling, with a poor roadie in tow to help keep his microphone cord untangled. The National veer from morose piano-driven balladry to thrilling guitar-driven anthemia, flirting with U2-style bombast at times but never quite giving in to pandering cliché. And Berninger, happily, is no Bono, slouching elegantly and tottering from floor monitor to floor monitor so as to make himself even taller. His fans stand there, rapt, waiting for him to croon something profound or say something outrageous, praying that he doesn’t fall offstage.
The National broke out with their third album, 2005’s bummed-out and propulsive Alligator, by which time they’d moved to New York City, as bands often do, and risen to a certain critical prominence, as bands full of sad young literary men once did. This past weekend in Cincinnati, they hosted the Homecoming festival, a two-day blowout with a pair of giant outdoor stages set up in downtown’s alarmingly picturesque Smale Park, along the banks of the mighty-enough Ohio River. Father John Misty, Feist, the Breeders, Alvvays, and Julien Baker led the rest of the impressive and sonically precise lineup; the National headlined with a greatest-hits set Saturday night and a full replaying of perhaps their best-loved album, 2007’s even gloomier Boxer, on Sunday night. (Alligator is better. Fight me. Actually, don’t fight me. We National fans are not, generally speaking, fighters.)
Music festivals have, of course, long been ubiquitous, and monolithic, and homogenous to the point of boredom, with little sense of surprise or wonder left. (Unless you can book Beyoncé.) But this felt different: an enduring and often brilliant band reconnecting with its own stomping grounds, surrounded by like-minded artists old and new who make sense and magnify the effect. The Homecoming is a festival with a point, and a point of view, and a sense of place, and a vision of nostalgia that still allows for a bright, or at least vividly glum, future.
Anyway, the various bridges were very impressive and Instagram-able, and Berninger, holding court as king and jester both, was in a particularly reflective mood: “I found a spot where I’m pretty sure I barfed 20-25 years ago,” is one thing he told us. When he’d forget a line, which happened often, he’d sometimes punch his mic to the ground, usually snatching it back up before the poor roadie even had a chance to intervene. Or, for no immediately discernible reason, he’d toss a full cup of water straight up in the air and let it rain back down on his bandmates, who after nearly 20 years together are no longer fazed by much of anything.
Same deal with Berninger’s family. During one of his many midsong sojourns into the crowd, he ran into his mother, literally: “Sorry, Mom. Can somebody get the mud off Mom’s butt? I knocked her into a mud puddle.” As a peace offering, the band played what Berninger described as his mom’s favorite National song, from their very early EP, Cherry Tree. The chorus is, “You’re a wasp nest.”
As festivals go, this was a smaller, more personal affair, evocative of Wisconsin’s Eaux Claires festival, started in 2015 by the National guitarist Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver mastermind Justin Vernon, a quirky and bucolic throwdown now so beloved they don’t even bother announcing the lineup beforehand anymore. The Breeders, ’90s alt-rock stars from nearby Dayton, Ohio, who put out a great comeback album in March and played Saturday afternoon, were one of the only Homecoming artists to predate the National, and among the few to mess much with distortion or gleeful dissonance. (“Cannonball” is forever their biggest, crunchiest hit; the sweet and scouring “Divine Hammer” is the one you want.) Most of the rest of the lineup consisted of proud contemporaries (Feist, who got even huger in the mega-indie-flush mid-’00s, brought a surprising amount of distortion and gleeful dissonance herself) or subtle disciples, evoking either the National’s melancholy bombast (flamboyant synth-poppers Future Islands) or hushed elegance (stunning chamber-soul singer Moses Sumney).
And when both ends of that spectrum came to feel a little confining, you could people-watch (T-shirts for the local Rhinegeist Brewery far outnumbered shirts for any one band). Or marvel at the Cincinnati skyline (Smale Park is within a block of both the Reds’ stadium and the Bengals’ stadium). Or add another layer to your outfit (at night it was just chilly enough to remind you of the Midwest’s capacity to disappoint you). Kids ran happily amuck. A little girl on a picnic blanket read a Shel Silverstein book while the long-running German duo Mouse on Mars played fussy electronic music to a modest Saturday-afternoon crowd; later that evening, another girl squeezed out a glob of hand sanitizer as Father John Misty crooned, “Just think of all the overrated hacks running amok.” Beards, and sunglasses more aspirational than strictly necessary, abounded, as did a certain sardonic Midwestern affableness. “I’m not actually polite,” announced a lumberjack-looking fellow pretending to cut in line for the port-a-potties. “I just look polite.”
They don’t make bands like the National anymore, or, at least, bands like the National don’t get as big anymore. Alvvays, cutting but good-natured Canadians with a sad-librarian affect and a throwback sort of bouncy indie-pop exuberance, nonetheless have a familiar mix of introvert and extrovert to them. Sunday night, singer Molly Rankin bellowed the scruffy anthem “Archie, Marry Me” like it deserved to be a massive hit, evoking the 10-years-past era when it might’ve actually been one; the band put out one of 2017’s best records, Antisocialites, which manages to make lovelorn sadness feel celebratory and communal, a portable festival of one.
Father John Misty, of course, is about as prominent and enjoyably maddening as this sort of thing gets nowadays, refracting classic-rock troubadour grandiosity through a thoroughly modern tweetstorm lens. To play in Josh Tillman’s sizable band, you have to plausibly look like Josh Tillman in disguise, with some combination of the Civil War beard, the foreboding shades, the fearsome Mount Rushmore facial structure, the bitchin’ trench coat. “Don’t be alarmed,” he crooned on Saturday night, rumbling through the new “Mr. Tillman,” a sing-song-y paranoiac tune from his upcoming album God’s Favorite Customer. “This is just my vibe.”
He sounded fantastic and enormous, less prone these days to distracting banter, content to forcefully declaim his wordy jams that all sound like a TED Talk about the slippery slope between self-satisfaction and self-loathing. He’s got dark jokes about “this godless rock that refuses to die”; he’s got just a little stage banter. (“How long was my shirt unbuttoned like that? God damn it. There goes my integrity.”) He plays an appealingly listless tambourine. “Like a carcass left out in the heat,” he bellowed during another new one, “This love is bursting out of me.” And we felt the death, and the bitterly oppressive heat, and also, only somewhat sarcastically, the love. He made you want to burst into applause, but only after loading up on hand sanitizer.
The newer artists who best evoke the National’s moody but triumphant vibe tend to be far more delicate, which only makes their climactic moments of grandeur hit harder. Julien Baker, mostly playing solo Saturday night with a lonesome guitar, some keyboard, and a variety of loop pedals, is a hushed powerhouse, swallowing the enormous moonlit outdoor space that tried to swallow her, making the great song- and album-opening line “I’m staying in tonight” feel like a rousing call to arms. Moses Sumney, shrouded in all black on the same stage in the medium-hot Sunday-afternoon sun, played the same game of attack and retreat. Songs from his great 2017 album Aromanticism lose some of their arresting nuance in a festival setting (a guy behind me humblebragged about almost buying a condo across the river as Sumney tenderly sang “Indulge Me”), but the glamorous mystique was undeniable. “He’s so cool,” noted a far more reverent lady nearby. “Like, I wanna hug him, but he’s too cool to be hugged.”
The National guitarists (and twin brothers) Bryce and Aaron Dessner are longtime curators and programmers with adventurous instincts: The Homecoming blowout was produced in conjunction with the MusicNow Festival, which Bryce founded in 2006 to bring classical and new-music heavyweights to Cincinnati. All weekend, you could pop into smaller, far more hushed indoor venues for a taste of that side of the band’s expanding empire. Sunday afternoon at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Bryce sat in with the Chicago contemporary-music sextet Eighth Blackbird and the omnivorous and mysterious peak-indie deity Will Oldham, making challenging and satisfying work of ancient murder ballads, or a deep cut from undersung 20th-century minimalist composer Julius Eastman, or Oldham’s own sizable catalog of sensual, cerebral singer-songwriter fare. It was a perfect respite, a thoughtful opportunity to recharge before the National jumped back on the main stage to play rock gods again, in an agreeably disheveled fashion.
Boxer is a great record, deeply romantic and achingly forlorn. But the “play a classic album in full” gambit, however alluring its nostalgia factor, usually works better on paper—in practice, it forces any particular band to contend with any particular album’s most boring songs. (The snoozy final three, in Boxer’s case.) The National’s career-spanning set Saturday night was a far looser, goofier, more joyous affair, and while the boisterous horns and extra drummer helped, that is largely down to Berninger, who has perfected the art of turning deep-thinking awkwardness into first-rate frontman authority. During “Abel,” an Alligator highlight and perhaps the band’s fastest and loudest song, he bumbled back into the crowd, screaming the refrain “My mind’s not right” with such fervor that he forgot to sing whole other parts of the song. The imperfections are a crucial part of the perfection.
Same deal for Alligator’s “All the Wine,” my personal favorite National song, the Dessners’ chiming guitars interlocking beautifully, bassist Scott Devendorf driving them forward, and his non-twin brother and drummer Bryan Devendorf backing it all with, as usual, just a little more force and intricacy than the song seems to require. That always works out perfectly, too. “All the Wine” is likewise an excellent primer on Berninger’s faintly bizarre lyrical stylings, his precise and poetic mixture of self-love and self-owns:
I’m put together beautifully
Big wet bottle in my fist
Big wet rose in my teeth
I’m a perfect piece of ass
Like every Californian
So tall I take over the street
With high beams shining up my back
A wingspan unbelievable
I’m a festival, I’m a parade
Saturday night, he forgot the line I’m a festival, or maybe just sheepishly omitted it. At least he didn’t slam his mic down in response that time. Though by that point, it hardly needed to be said.
