Boxer (Live In Brussels)

Brand new sealed Album, RSD Limited Edition, Clear vinyl.

Boxer: classic stuff, definitive album for one of the definitive indie rock bands of 21st century. One of the best live bands too. The National curate festivals and massively influential artist compilations, Matt Berninger’s relationship with his brother was deemed a worthy subject for a critically-acclaimed documentary, they’ve been this close to debuting at #1 on Billboard and won a Grammy in a category that actually gets televised. It’s been a very, very long time since the National actually had anything to prove, and yet they take the stage as the same Cincinnati transplants who spent years getting ignored in New York long before their infamous tour with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah show. It’s easy to imagine them spending each pre-show reading and internalizing every backhanded compliment about their erudite image and fanbase and getting back into that 2005 headspace. Oh, and the city of Brussels seems pretty awesome too. So it’s hard to rate Boxer (Live in Brussels) both as an actual experience and as a recorded document of music. I would have paid a significant amount of money to watch Boxer live in Brussels, and not a single dollar for Boxer (Live in Brussels).

At the very least, Boxer (Live in Brussels) keeps most of its promises—Boxer played in full, in order, with no encores or stage banter indicating it was indeed recorded in Brussels and not the CalCoast Credit Union Open Air Theatre or Verizon Hall or any other late-2017 tour stop. “This is a sad record,” Berninger jokes at the end of “Guest Room,” before mentioning the tendency of grammar-minded fans to hear the title of the next song as “Racing Like a Pronoun.” That’s about it. And so the utility of Live in Brussels is less about whether the National improve on any of the originals so much as offer something different than an album that has been a fixture for the entirety of its existence.

Live in Brussels inevitably capitalizes on the personal nostalgia driving any 10-year anniversary year celebration—the night you got way too drunk and sung “Fake Empire” in a cab home, the night you got way too drunk and listened to “Slow Show” while scrolling through ex’s Facebook profiles, and so forth. It also skews the global context of Boxer and shows just how much it was a product of its time. “Fake Empire” is technically the National’s biggest hit, so it at least feels weird as the opener of a live set in 2017. It sounds a little jauntier, less solemn than it did originally—it was released towards the very end of Dubya’s second term, after all, where more hopeful times were clearly in sight. Were it written for 2018, “Fake Empire” would be both way too on-the-nose and too obtuse. “Mistaken for Strangers” likewise took on a very time-specific kind of sociopolitical heft shortly after its release and feels weirdly quaint in retrospect: a portrait of “economic anxiety” when that term felt like less of a coded euphemism. The central metaphor of “Start a War” was daring, but not insensitive. Those songs still feel like people falling apart, not an entire society.