The National - Boxer

Picture this.

You just get back home from buying a new record. You hurry to your home stereo, quickly put it on and get ready for it. As the first notes begin you hear a little bit of where the song is going. You instantly begin filling the rest out with your mind before you even hear it. As a drummer, you hear the drum parts before they are even played. Once they do kick in, they are exactly as you imagined, or at least a slight variation of it, giving you a sense of self satisfaction that he is playing generally what you would have played in the same situation. It brings you closer to the music, you feel a kinship with musicians you don't know, and will probably never meet.

This doesn't happen with The National's Boxer.

Ever.

Every song with drums on this album has really creative, original drum parts. The first time I heard it, I kept getting ideas on how the drums were going to sound, but when they came in they were anything but what I was expecting. For that, Bryan Devendorf deserves mention.

He plays fast tom/snare beats over slow lines (Brainy), he plays reserved, patient snare lines over repeating pianos (Fake Empire), even songs that have simple patterns feel slightly out of place but it works (Apartment Story). The drums really save this record from sounding contrived and take it into another realm completely.

I like it when albums have drums that aren't necessarily difficult to play, it makes them accessible for everyone, whatever their skill level. I am pretty sure I could play everything on this record, but that's not the appeal of it. The appeal is that playing something is completely different than thinking it up out of nowhere. There are so many places where Bryan could have said "fuck it" and played the obvious, and they probably would have sold the same amount of copies. Instead, I feel as if he painstakingly thought about every little thing he played, making sure it was creative but that it fit.

Bryan used a part of his brain that some drummers neglect, too much time is spent on impressing people with skill instead of style. You might listen to this record and think, this isn't impressive at all, I could do way better. That's fine, I would rather that a certain type of drummer doesn't get what I am saying anyway.

It leaves more work for those of us who get it.

Audio/Video Evidence: Brainy, Mistaken For Strangers, Squalor Victoria