The National - Sleep Well Beast

Double LP white vinyl

Featuring "The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness" "Guilty Party" and more!

Includes 24" x 24" folded poster and printed inner sleeves

Limited time album download included

Back on 2005's Alligator, when many of us first met The National, they were still a rock band. That version of The National wasn't too terribly different from the one that evolved out of it; back then, they were still interested in layered arrangements and dour vulnerability and quietly dramatic melodic swoops, writes Stereogum. But they also came up with big, nasty, cathartic choruses. Some of their songs sounded like anthems, and when they performed those songs live, they took on a messianic intensity that they quickly discarded on later records.

Later efforts became a dark, sophisticated swirl, red-wine music, music that people would put on at dinner parties when they wanted to seem cool.

So it's a shock to put on Sleep Well Beast, the band's seventh album and first in more than four years, and realize that it rocks. Sleep Well Beast will play at dinner parties, but the dinner parties might get a little stormier than they once were.

The new album does a better job than any past National album at integrating the experimental-music passions that the two Dessner brothers, Bryce in particular, have been chasing during their personal time over the past decade. You can hear that in the way the processed guitars on "The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness" impersonate car alarms, or in the way drums and synths skitter and pulse all over the title track.

"Even more than their last few album, it's an intricately arranged affair; you can hear layer after layer of strings and keyboards and guitars on every song. But instead of derailing the songs, those experimental touches have made the songs bigger and grander. And they've also jacked up the urgency." — Stereogum.com

Side 1

Nobody Else Will Be There

Day I Die

Walk It Back

Side 2

The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness

Born To Beg

Turtleneck

Side 3

Empire Line

I’ll Still Destroy You

Guilty Party

Side 4

Carin At The Liquor Store

Dark Side of the Gym

Sleep Well Beast

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