“Maybe after once in a lifetime, we’ll figure out what we lost,” Matt Berninger sings on “No Love,” a reflective, lachrymose highlight from his second solo album. The National frontman sounds like he could spend several lifetimes pondering that question. On Get Sunk, he continues to work the same tastefully tortured alt-rock his main band has always done so well, channeling his most microscopically observed thoughts, pains, hopes, desires, and worries into lovely, lonely tunes like the gentle rocker “Bonnet of Pins,” the orchestral folk tune “Breaking Into Acting,” and the jazz-inflected “Silver Jeep.” The music is more subdued than the National's, created with collaborators like soul great Booker T. Jones and Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, who help give Berninger the right backdrop to draw every scintilla of high-end malaise from lines like “God loves the inland ocean/Lost cause, I have no emotion.”
Sung in his calling-card forlorn baritone, these forensic emotional appraisals could sound overly gloomy or just plain boring, but he offers them up with a conversational matter-of-factness that makes them feel less grimly burdened and more welcomingly open-ended. He recently relocated from Los Angeles to Connecticut with his family, and you can often hear a mix of comfort and dislocation in the music. On "Silver Jeep" he goes from existential panic ("All I want is my soul to keep working/I see the sunlight creep around the curtain") to everyday household whatever ("If the guy comes to do the garden/I'll leave an envelope by the faucet"), implying that both can either break you or, in a weird way, sustain you.
The stretched-out languorousness of the music, its burnished texture and detail, heighten the sense of midlife slowy lolling by, of a Midwest indie-rock dad doing what he can to process the Henry James levels of refined leisure his career success and wise life choices have gifted him. Rather than pity the fool, you can't help but envy him. In a just society, we would all be afforded the space and free time to be this politely self-indulgent. The album-ending “Times of Difficulty” turns the emo marching order “Get drunk/Get sunk” into an inwardly spelunking cri de coeur, but the overall effect is generous and angst-ridden — a Nabokov cocktail for literate Gen X bros lurching through the suburban blues one slow-motion epiphany at a time.
