The National is the next great American rock band
The title “America’s Radiohead” has been flung around a lot, either admiringly or despairingly, over the past quarter-century, but the Brooklyn-Cincinnati rock band The National have done more than most to merit the description. Like Radiohead, they specialize in doom-laden, portentous but oddly beautiful songs that seem entirely out of kilter in today’s homogenized musical landscape. As with their Oxford cousins, the band contains two brothers. One is an eminent classical musician, while the other has one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary rock. And they are unashamedly, even defiantly cerebral at a time where intellectualism has been surgically removed from the genre.
