The National Stays Local, Scraps Fancy Video For Bare Bones

With the recent release of 'High Violet,' The National have been peppered into all the weekly rags, with interviews and album reviews, all praising their newest piece of aural poetry, epic sounds that seem to make all the Brooklyn bearded-boys swoon. However, the limelight has far from poisoned them.

For instance, they chose to take the reigns for their newest video “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” crudely filmed all within the modest grid of Prospect Heights. I recently went to one of the chosen hubs, Milk Bar (620 Vanderbilt Avenue), to ask a few questions of Nathan Oertel, who makes a candid appearance in the video on his laptop in Milk Bar's window next to singer Matt Berninger. At our meeting time of 11am, he was nowhere to be found. Instead there sat Berninger himself, settling his check at an outside table. At the risk of an off-handed rejection, or plainly irritating the man, I approached him and timidly asked if he might spare a few minutes to talk about 'Bloodbuzz' and shed some light on his local choices, one of which we were currently blocking the doorway. He pleasantly abided, bid adieu to his lovely wife who disappeared down Vanderbilt Avenue, and we sat back down at his table where he re-acquainted himself with the ice-coffee he had seconds before abandoned. Only in Brooklyn.

BrooklynTheBorough: First off, why did you decide [Milk Bar] of all places?

Matt Berninger: Well, because I'm here a lot. We made a video for the same song- it was kind of a high budget video, that we had a fancy director do, this guy from London. It looked good, it just wasn't us, so we killed it. That was like a $20,000 video that we realized was kind of too serious, it just didn't work for us. The guy that made it is really great, but we buried it at the last minute. It just wasn't what we needed, it was kind of overly melodramatic, and we're already melodramatic, and we need to counter that a little bit.

So we decided just to make a really cheap quick video that was inspired by these old Serge Gainsbourg videos, specifically there's this song 'La Javanaise'- I don't even know what that means in French- that Bryce [Dessner] sent to me a long time ago. I think it's before they had any idea what to do, or how to make a video, it was just film and music together, so they basically had [Gainsbourg] in various locations singing this song. It's very silly and awkward, but kind of charming, so we sort of tried to channel those Serge Gainsbourg things, with the hope that in the context of today's music world it would be funny.

As far as picking these locations, these are places I go to a lot, so just easy locations. In the Serge Gainsbourg stuff, we actually copied many of the exact shots, not this one [nods toward Milk Bar], this one was just a random thing, but we tried to copy some camera angles and lighting. The inside shots against a black wall- there's rehearsal studio where we practice called Complete Music [points down the street]. And Flatbush Farm is the other location- and Prospect Park. So basically all four locations are five minutes from each other, walking. So that's kind of why we did it.

BrooklynTheBorough: Did you spontaneously set up in all these places?

Matt Berninger: I just talked to Alex [Hall, Milk Bar Owner], and he said just come whenever. So Nate was just sitting here working, and he seemed to have no problem. He was great, there was a camera on him at all time, but he wasn't phased at all, he just kept working away.

We just shot a bunch of me singing along to the song in a very sincere and earnest way, and we were hoping it would come across as being silly. And I think it does; it kind of walks the line. We've gotten the reaction that people think it's a very serious and cool video, which is not what we intended it to be. I figured me in the trench coat in the park would be a giveaway that it was supposed to be silly, but not everybody knows it was intended to be silly. Which is why I think it's a good video, because humor is when it's uncomfortable and not funny sometimes. It's kind of like the show 'The Office', the British Office; you don't know whether it's supposed to be funny sometimes, it's kind of hard to watch. So we were trying to get some of that in the video. It was my brother, my wife, a filmmaker named Hope Hall, a filmmaker named Andreas Burgess, and we all just threw together. Did it in one afternoon in a few quick hours. I mean, it doesn't look like it took too long, I hope.

BrooklynTheBorough: You guys have been getting a ton of press lately, is it getting harder to walk through the neighborhood without people, like me, flagging you down?

Matt Berninger: No, I mean, our faces are showing up more places so that might be changing a little bit, but I don't think it's that kind of level of exposure where people will recognize us. Brooklyn's also the kind of thing where you see people you recognize every 15 minutes walking down the sidewalk, from TV shows or whatever. Recognizable faces just kind of goes with the territory of living in Brooklyn or New York I guess. We probably welcome more celebrity sitings, because for 10 years nobody ever cared about us, so it's kind of fun to be on the Village Voice and stuff like that.

BrooklynTheBorough: Congratulations on being on the cover [of the Village Voice].

Matt Berninger: Thanks, most of that article, much like the video, I was desperately trying to make the case for the fact that we're not miserable and depressed.

BrooklynTheBorough: Do you feel like you're really pigeonholed into that idea?

Matt Berninger: A little bit, and it makes sense. On sort of cursory listens to our music you would say 'oh this is a very dark band,' specifically the lyrics, of course. There is a great deal of gloomy content. But I've always thought the songs have as much silliness in them as they do melancholy, and I've always thought of it in a way that there's this embrace of the wallowing in the dark things. The obsession over romance or sex or responsibility- those things have always been the fun stuff to sing songs about. So I've never really thought of us as being a depressing band at all; that stuff is a joy, and it's a really pleasurable feeling to dig into stuff that's gloomy or dark or melodramatic, but also make light of it and be self-aware of how melodramatic you can be sometimes. Writers like Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen and Morrissey, those guys dig into the dark sides of our brains, those are kind of lyrical heroes of mine. We've definitely gotten painted as these unbelievably miserable sad-sack bastards.

BrooklynTheBorough: Unbelievably miserable?

Matt Berninger: Yea, and I understand why, but that's only one side of the coin I think for us. So ,the video was trying to show a little that we know what we're doing, and there's some humor in it.

-Robin Bacior