Albums of 2015 (1/3)

El Vy - Return to the Moon

The inside of Matt Berninger’s head must be a very strange place to be, at times. If this 11-chapter insight is anything to go by, therein exists a hazy maelstrom of social awkwardness, bittersweet nostalgia and near-constant anxiety. But the fog is occasionally punctured by moments of shocking clarity – precise self-analysis, crystalline wit, and a rare appreciation for the finer details that are easily missed, but nonetheless contribute to how we experience events. 

Not just evident across Return to the Moon as a whole, this switching from the confused to the lucid, from the vague to the explicit, occurs throughout the individual tracks themselves. So, the title track veers from the ambiguous hook of ‘Return to the moon/I’m dying’, to more concrete references to Cincinnati landmarks, and then back into the mist with bizarre couplets about saltwater fish and colour-blind witches. The music follows suit – in this song, the spiky post-punk guitar line melting into uplifting synth chords and string samples, as Berninger’s voice soars in uncharacteristically lofty direction. 

Similarly, Paul is Alive meanders from campfire acoustic balladry to a dreamy, seasick meditation on mortality and memory – using the central location of the Jockey Club, a local nightclub where a young Berninger heard stories of appearances by ‘Hüsker Dü and The Smiths’, to relay the hopefulness and odd, half-heard mythology that comes with adolescence. 

Brent Knopf’s chameleonic instrumentation and production telegraph his lyrical steps. Motifs and melodies skip freely from one instrument to another, which lends most songs an odd, off-kilter, swaying rhythm. This is most noticeable on Silent Ivy Hotel, with its vaguely Vaudevillian keys and haunting backing vocals. But it also characterises the record’s up-tempo tracks, such as Need a Friend, a slinky, piano-led excursion that finds a drunk and disorientated Berninger getting increasingly agitated with a friend for not being there to ‘walk [him] home from the river, man’, eventually erupting in a withering, hopeless scream reminiscent of his earlier National days, as the music morphs into clattering new wave. 

Knopf is a brilliant musician, with a distinct ear for textures and melodies - but you get the impression that, in much the same way as REM couldn't complete a song without Michael Stipe digging it, Berninger is the driving force here, using the ideas and snippets sent to him by Knopf throughout their friendship as foundations for his own artistic pursuits. Perhaps because they are friends, this arrangement works without sounding unbalanced or fraught.

The singer's drawn-out evolution from awkward skinny white guy to indie rock poet laureate lends itself well to self-examination, and Return to the Moon, in its heavy sense of nostalgia and highly personal running references to places, people and influences, serves as something of a retrospective of his career up until this point. Berninger's early influences, bands like The Replacements and Minutemen, find a place here, more prominently than anywhere in his previous output. The central characters that pop up throughout the album are named after Minutemen's D. Boon and Mike Watt (recast as Didi and Michael in a Grease-flavoured love story), and the band themselves are namechecked in the chorus of It's a Game. The closest Return... gets to a direct musical homage, however, is in the staccato groove of Sad Case, and its more frenetic part-two, Happiness, Missouri. 

Berninger's voice and moodiness always colour songs a certain way, and El Vy's more downbeat, atmospheric songs - namely Careless and No Time to Crank the Sun - feel like National compositions with a little less polish. Occasionally, in lines like 'I had a sugar-coated childhood, the stars were in my soup', he can feel like he's trying to out-Berninger himself - being intentionally obtuse for the sake of some off-the-wall symbolism, verging on self-parody. This, coupled with the personal subject matter, could alienate, but it doesn't thanks to the singer's prevailing self-awareness. He 'ain't no Leonard Cohen', as he admits on the Portland soul-infused Sleeping Light, but he does share the man's sensitivity for offsetting the intensely idiosyncratic, with the nous to take a lateral step away from his own perspective when necessary.  

His ability to analyse his own quirks and ego comes to the fore in album highlight I'm the Man to Be, a raucous, lopsided, and crucially funny self-assassination, with undoubtedly the daftest, most bizarrely singalong chorus of the year - 'I'm peaceful 'cos my-yyy dick's in sunli-iiight, held up by kites'. Return to the Moon is by no means a perfect record, but no other collaboration could've quite produced the same results - in equal parts charming, cryptic, and often, genuinely affecting. For a fan of The National (which I unashamedly am), it presents an inviting world to get lost in on the road to that band's next release - and an indication, for what it's worth, of what might currently be going on inside Matt Berninger's head.