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.
But that’s all taken care of in the first seven minutes and in all likelihood, the Brussels crowd is not here to reassess Boxer as a document of slow, steady American decline. It then falls to the individual to scavenge Live in Brussels for any new wrinkle: horn sections are a luxury for bands playing a hometown gig or a festival, and the National is big enough to mandate one at just about any show. These horns were on Boxer too, and when the coda on “Fake Empire” catches the beat differently than it does on the album, it's a papercut-subtle change that drives me nuts. “Mistaken for Strangers” runs a little breathless and ragged, Berninger occupying the space of the beleaguered desk jockey rather than an omnipotent narrator whose judgment feels comforting—this adult life is unmagnificent, it’s not just you. The studio version of “Squalor Victoria” is the shortest song on Boxer and it’s the longest one on Live in Brussels, whipping up a turbulent outro, the only time Berninger screams on something written after 2005. And if you’ve seen the National at any point in the past 10 years, this is the exact version of “Squalor Victoria” you’ve heard every single time.
As avowed Grateful Dead fans, it’s not surprising that the National would eventually leverage their live reputation into a burgeoning cottage industry—you wonder why it took them this long. But there’s nothing cynical about Boxer (Live in Brussels), and it’s being released on Record Store Day, where 98% of the available goods are clearly “collector’s only” artifacts. Sure, it’s Boxer’s time to celebrate its birthday, and yet it’s the National album that’s the least revelatory in a live setting. Alligator will forever be the National’s enduring document as underdogs and the way some people will always want to see them—there’s no way we’re ever getting back the guys who made “Mr. November” and “Abel.” The claustrophobic, dense production that made High Violet such a convincingly difficult comedown record was off-putting to some and seeing “Terrible Love” once will make you understand why it managed to replace “Mr. November” as their perennial set closer. Trouble Will Find Me is still kind of a grab bag, but loose—the most “live” National record, and even if Sleep Well Beast isn’t as energetic as their past work, it’s worthwhile to see how they get to play with their new toys.
And then there’s Boxer—the one with the tightest songs, the most exacting arrangements, a muted Side B. Yeah, “Gospel” and “Guest Room” are the kind of fan-favorite deep cuts that likely got retired from setlists once High Violet dropped and that deflated horn outro of “Mistaken for Strangers” will always take me right back to those days of eating another lonely dinner in my cubicle at 7:30 PM during a 14-hour day that hasn’t ended yet. But more than any National album, Boxer needs the things that make these guys such compelling live theatre—listening to a record, you can’t see Berninger take mighty pulls from a bottle of wine and lose himself in the din during the instrumentals, nervously pacing, head-down like so many of his narrators. There are no covers, no possibilities of “Cherry Tree” or “Cardinal Song,” no way to fully appreciate the intense physicality of the Devendorf and Dessner brothers’ instrumental compositions. None of which is to detract from the National’s live reputation, mind you. Live in Brussels does the opposite, reminding you of all the fun you’re not having.
