Alligator

Talvez o melhor texto que já li sobre o Alligator (e sabe Deus quantos já terei lido).

Da Stylus Magazine:

The NationalAlligator
Beggars Banquet, 2005

A telegram from midnight of the 21st century, recorded in the long shadows of 2004’s “Armageddon election,” these deceptively small snapshots tell a bigger story. As rock music slumped through middle age “Alligator” felt like an affirmation and a eulogy for the energy and optimism that had sustained it since the mid fifties. The characters Matt Berninger allusively sketches are little men – and they are always men – under enormous pressure. Different songs enact different reactions from the “fuck me and make a drink” desperate lust of “Karen” through the brooding nostalgia of “Daughters of the Soho Riots” and the denial and finally despair essayed in “Baby We’ll Be Fine”; never has a song with such a title been so ironic. The song’s anti-hero details the mundane strains of his life in nightmarish detail before collapsing in on himself with the line, "I don’t know how to do this… I’m so sorry for everything.”

Rock bands don’t apologise, it’s not in their nature, but the world has become so much harder. The National sound like the previous years’ garage rock revivalists beaten down by the sheer grey weight of life itself. The slower songs have a rich warmth to them, sympathetic strings sweetening the sorrow. When they come out on the attack it is not with the petulant passions of adolescence but the suicidal swagger of men with nothing to lose. The protagonists of “All The Wine" and “Lit Up” are pretty much beat, but they sure as fuck aren’t going down without a fight. It’s defeat, but a glorious one. And there, at the end is “Mr November”. Whilst a couple of years later the band would authorize “Mr November” T-shirts emblazoned with the face of Barack Obama it seems more likely the song is loosely inspired by John Kerry; the sixties fossil, once the hero now forced to admit he doesn’t quite know what to do. The sound is like a battle raging in thick fog; opaque violence. Though their side would eventually win through this is the sound of the optimistic, utopian spirit of rock under fire.

«When they come out on the attack it is not with the petulant passions of adolescence but the suicidal swagger of men with nothing to lose»

Nas imortais palavras do amigo Nuno Santos (ainda por cima, um sósia do Matt Berninger...), oh pá.