The National @ Forest Hills Tennis Stadium

The National; Daughter
@ Forest Hills Tennis Stadium
Forest Hills, NY - October 6, 2017

The National have come to play. While some of their peers (much beloved) are already nostalgic for themselves in keeping with their rock nerddom, these fellas who used to be a "Brooklyn band" but are now a project of globe-spanning artists continue to look ahead. This is a recurrent theme but not without healthy doses of looking back. Their seventh album, Sleep Well Beast, is almost completely detached from that cringe-inducing genre label "chamber pop" thrust on the band (not totally incorrectly, far from it) when they reared their heads with Alligator and Boxer.

In fact, it may be too far removed. The new record features enough tracks with beeps and boops that one wonders if the Devendorfs were even around for some of it and hell maybe even one of the two Dessners. But no matter, come live time the five are still in cahoots along with their usual accompaniment of friends. And though they continue to look forward with their sound, they are also maybe for the first time a ROCK BAND, which is to say looking back to how they got to play music in the first place. The swagger, the showmanship, the recognition that they are a known commodity and not a secret hip thing playing a flower shop on Cortelyou Road. New material "Day I Die", "The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness" and "Guilty Party" are HITS in a Universe in which this kind of music would still be a hit. It could even turn out to be the case in this Universe.

They even do covers now. For this stop they too felt the need to acknowledge the Ramones (as others who play this box have done before). In keeping with the style of the time, they whipped out "The KKK Took My Baby Away".

And this was the other crossroads: the context for this half-quietly political band took them back and forth. "Fake Empire" has a different meaning now than it did 10 years ago. Ditto for "Mr. November". Berninger even found a way to recharacterize "Bloodbuzz, Ohio", wisely assuming a large chunk of the massive crowd were fellow Ohio ex-pats, urging them to go back and reclaim their homes from the hostage situation currently unfolding in this tattered Republic.

And while some of the new sounds and the crowd chatter and the demographics all scream "YACHT ROCK DAD ROCK" much sooner rather than later, if there is a band who is going to work it well and still be their own thing, it's the National.

Serious, shy but game English (with a twist of Swiss) outfit Daughter were a fine compliment to the headliners, mixing that...dare I say it...chamber pop (kind of) with dashes of pop-rock when applied.