Matt Berninger picks the album that will “blow your mind”
There aren’t many vocalists who can capture that sense of melancholy like Matt Berninger. Even though The National have made songs outside the traditional gothic tropes, Berninger’s husky baritone voice and helpless timbre when singing tracks like ‘Afraid of Everyone’ are the perfect mix of Morrissey and Nick Cave in their prime. Although the frontman does have a track record of writing soul-destroying music, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a taste for lighthearted material either.
When discussing his favourite records, Berninger was as indebted to the alternative revolution as he was to post-punk. Going through his selection, the frontman would talk about the pivotal role that Nirvana’s Nevermind played in his generation, bringing everything back to basics and setting rock on a course towards more harrowing subject matter than anything too flashy.
It’s easy to see how a band like The National found their footing in that kind of landscape as well. With most of the glossified sounds of 1980s hair metal and pop music out the window, there was more room for songwriters to write about their deeper feelings, especially when bands like The Cure and R.E.M. were still making waves on the scene.
Although Berninger has sung praises for many alternative giants over the years, he remembered being inspired when hearing Violent Femmes for the first time. While the band’s rootsy style and trademark cynicism evoked the sounds of 1990s-style irony, the fact that they were pulling it off in 1983 around the same time as Def Leppard’s Pyromania, made the band light years ahead of their time, with ‘Blister in the Sun’ and ‘Gone Daddy Gone’ not getting screentime as a hit until much later.
When first putting the record on, though, Berninger was taken aback by what he heard, telling Line of Best Fit, “From the strangeness of the album cover, it looks like it’s gonna be choir music or some sort of soft folk singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell sort of thing. Then you listen to the music, and it’s these wack-a-doodle, dark, sketchy, madcap, angry, hilarious, confessional songs. It was unclassifiable.”
Although Nirvana was slowly sinking their teeth into the cultural zeitgeist at the time, Berninger would say that many songs on Violent Femmes’ debut are good enough to go toe-to-toe with the grunge classic, explaining, “This record is one that just sort of blows your mind, it’s almost like Nevermind. It’s so emotional and crazy and so infectious that you can’t stop listening to it. And so many songs on this record are just as good as ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.”
While the hilarious sides of the record may have informed Berninger’s musical sense of humour, it would be the more confessional nature that is more indicative of where he would be taking his music. Like Violent Femmes, Berninger knows how to strike a balance between songs that cut to the core rather than dwell on the melodrama of the lyrics. Even though many artists can write songs about how black their heart is, Berninger learned from the 1980s giants that sketching his innermost feelings is critical to having the audience come with you on a musical journey.
