Sleep Well Beast (White Vinyl)

Sealed brand new double album pressed on white vinyl housed in a gatefold cover. Includes free digital download voucher.

The National's hauntingly side-eyed 2007 ode to nationalism, "Fake Empire," has gotten big responses at their recent shows, unsurprisingly. Yet the Ohio-bred indie-rock achievers aren't a political band per se. Frontman Matt Berninger generally turns his brooding baritone toward the dark end of relationships – with one's self, a lover, a society – backed by a band that can sometimes suggest Wilco channeling Joy Division. Lyrically and sonically, the National's seventh LP plumbs anxieties more deeply than ever. The result is a disarmingly potent album, not just emotionally but politically as well.

"Keep the weed next to the bed/Light the water, check for lead," hollers Berninger, near hysterical, on "Turtleneck," a rattled paranoid rocker equal parts R.E.M. and Television at their most screamingly unhinged. A rallying cry it ain't – more a guilty confession of fearful retreat in a self-loathing UV glow. Numbness as coping mechanism is a recurring theme. On "Walk It Back," the singer is "always checking out," getting baked "until everything is less insane," while stoner synths shimmer, and a nefarious treatise attributed to Karl Rove terrifyingly unspools ("We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality").

There's added depth to the lyrics here, which might be due to Berninger's new co-writer: Carin Besser, his wife and a former fiction editor at The New Yorker. It shows: "Carin at the Liquor Store" rhymes "I wasn't a keeper" with "dead John Cheever," while the psychic struggle of "I'll Still Destroy You" alludes slyly to Romeo and Juliet's feuding Montagues and Capulets ("It's so easy to set off the molecules and the caplets"). Humor flashes from the band's trademark sleek gloom, as do love songs, which have a new presence and sexiness, buoyed by backing singers Lisa Hannigan (especially on "Dark Side of the Gym") and Justin Vernon.

A1		Nobody Else Will Be There
A2		Day I Die
A3		Walk It Back Written-By [Excerpt] – Ron Suskind
B1		The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness
B2		Born To Beg
B3		Turtleneck
C1		Empire Line
C2		I'll Still Destroy You
C3		Guilty Party
D1		Carin at the Liquor Store
D2		Dark Side of the Gym
D3		Sleep Well Beast Orchestrated By [Additional Orchestration] – Maaike van der Linde