MATT BERNINGER

Get Sunk (Concord Records)

MATE, GET OUT OF my head, ya bastard.

To be fair, I was thinking about one particular song from the new Matt Berninger album on a really cold, wet day, on inadequate sleep and hunger gnawing away unreasonably. Winter loomed over me, and whatever summer was – who can remember now? – was about as distant as my (oh-woe-is-me) youth. So, yeah, maybe susceptible. Or primed.

Still, over a slow dance of bass and drums on minimal, piano and guitar on intermittent, and space left open (a dance that suddenly breaks into a heavy rapture of organ, propulsion and chants of “get drunk, get sunk, forget, get wet”, like a fever, only to collapse just as suddenly), Berninger’s just dragged from the lounge voice makes everything grey just that shade or two darker in Times Of Difficulty.

“In times of loneliness stay home/People make you feel even more alone/When you look at the stars do you see anything/Is it anything like what you thought it would be?” he sings like some prophet of Zoom for the WFH crowd or the disillusioned worker of a certain age. Not entirely alone, sure, but in search of something, someone to sand down that edge. Something to ease that ache of the adult feeling ever more like a child while watching his mother slip away in front of him, or one half of a partnership wondering who let this slip away, or someone not really steady in a rickety world.

“When will you call me in for supper?/I’ve been so high up in the trees/When can we vanish for the winter?/When will you kiss me in my sleep?” And the solution isn’t some get in touch with your inner warrior palaver, or whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger bullshit. Instead he offers “In times of heartache get drunk/In times of tears get sunk/In times of shame forget/In times of weather get wet.”

Damn, yeah.

Then comes the slow kicker. “Feels like we missed another summer/If we’re not dying, then what are we?/Already dead or under the weather/How can we tell in times like these?”

Damn. Someone channelling Virginia Woolf’s “oh to be private, alone, submerged”? Get out of my head Berninger.

That Berninger is tapping into the mood if not actual minds of the middle-aged but not entirely comfortable, the experienced but still fumbling, the loved but not always (self) loving, is hardly a revelation if you have listened to his previous solo album, Serpentine Prison, or most of the albums of The National. But he sure has done it well, not least because he also has regularly snuck in a wry, sometimes outright amusing, element to it whether self-directed or just observational.

And while this time around there are more obvious and vivid descriptions of nature – tangible, visceral – alongside detailed references to the minutia of each moment (Styrofoam cups of coffee and brown paper straws; good drugs and goldfish; red, dry eyeballs and kisses off the cheek), he has done it again.

He takes us into the dance of two people who think they have the manoeuvres to touch enough but not connect too much, follows the circuitous thinking of a man looking to get lost in full view, parallels the blank page of the blocked writer with the empty hands of the emotional visitor, lets certainty trickle away little by little in one song and become hope in another, and allows abject acceptance to morph into a plea worth a second hearing.

Where Get Sunk differs from Serpentine Prison – an album made in the atmosphere and closeness of a real or imagined city like Paris – is its escape from such a contained environment. I don’t mean that he and producer/co-writer Sean O’Brien have gone rustic, sonically or instrumentally, rather that the flow of energy is less anxious and the press, be it of bodies or ideas, is noted but not defining. And sometimes, as in the mix of murmured under-thought, softened voices and a rippling rhythm of quick-stepping drift in Nowhere Special, bringing a musical playfulness to match that of some lyrics.

Bonnet Of Pins builds through its upbeat Johnny Marr setting and wet-street-slick driving momentum, the guitar progression and clubland brass peaking with energy, and No Love rolls inexorably through a buoyant escalation, a reminder of late-period Roxy Music in its blend of sensuality and just enough muscularity. But those two neighbouring songs are more the exceptions than the rule here, and the band most likely to earn a comparison is not the Smiths or Roxy but R.E.M. in their more mood piece albums Automatic For The People and New Adventures In Hi-Fi, or even contemporary LA’s Mt. Joy.

Breaking Into Acting, where Berninger is shadowed by Hands Habits, aka Meg Duffy, sways in the breeze that barely ruffles a shirt when the strings arrive; Little By Little is a country song dangling its feet in the stream as the piano and organ alternate; and Junk, where oboe and harp are the colour commentators, and Silver Jeep, with its blend of brass and Julia Laws/Ronboy’s light-touch vocals quite diverting, lean into a sophisticated adult pop act of the late ‘60s.

So, yes, don’t come looking Matt Berninger to rouse your energy levels. But on a grey, wet day like today, if you are inside by imposition and internal by inclination, it might just sit very well inside your head.

READ MORE:

Matt Berninger – Serpentine Prison: album review 

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