EP // Bartees Strange – Say Goodbye To Pretty Boy
Post by Misha
Covering songs really well is an imprecise science. There’s so many ways to do it and, if I’m being honest, I love almost all of them. I love the acoustic strummed renditions of pop-punk songs posted in the Instagram stories of some girl I vaguely remember from high school. I love them when they’re the last song in a set because the band is too new to have enough original material to fill out their 30-minute slot. I love them when they’re instantly recognizable and I love them when you have to work hard to make out a familiar melody underneath the self-conscious layers of someone trying perhaps a little too hard to convince us that they have something different to say. I love them when they’re sped up or slowed down, filled out or stripped bare.
Then there are rare times when someone covering a song does more than any of that. Through some magic alchemy, the song in their hands becomes greater than the sum of its parts. More than its past or present. When Bartees Strange sings The National I often forget what I’m listening to, though I’ve probably heard these songs a hundred times a piece. It’s like being transported to an alternate universe where I am hearing them for the first time, as they always were and alway will be, but at the same time experiencing a mysterious tug of spiritual nostalgia for a sound I can’t quite remember.
In this EP, parts of The National’s early canon are gently tugged into the here and now. Unanswered questions are revisited, and apathy and powerlessness are stripped away for a level of critical introspection that lends the songs new meaning. Bartees Strange has said Say Goodbye To Pretty Boy was in part a way to discuss black erasure in the indie rock scene. He remembers feeling like an outsider at shows when he went to see his favorite band, The National.
Through his lens, old lyrics are imbued with new stories. At the heart of The National’s ‘Lemonworld’ is a languid scene that is almost Gatsbyan in its opulence and isolation. It is a grim, sexy tableau, littered with chandeliers and ennui and long-stemmed martini glasses out by the pool. In its chorus, ‘Lemonworld’ is anchored by a resignation to death. (“You and your sister live in a Lemonworld / I want to sit in and die”). Most National songs teeter somewhere on the brink between fatalism and total defeat, but this one is especially dark. There is a vague sense of discomfort – disgust, even – with the world being built in the song, but an inability to change it, or even leave.
Bartees Strange introduces a simmering urgency to ‘Lemonworld’. He makes even the grimness of the chorus into a bid for escape rather than resignation. Catharsis, rather than powerlessness, is the fuel that propels the story forward, building in heat and power with each verse. The scene ends in chaos, with the chorus being hurled screaming through the air, smashing the glasses and setting fire to the hedge maze.
Other renditions on the EP are gentler, more restrained, like the somber opener, ‘About Today,’ which replaces the sauntering drums and crisp acoustic melody of the original with rainfall over muted synths and a deep, soft rhythm that pounds like a skipping heartbeat. Or his reading of “All The Wine,” which peels back the song’s layers of defiance and cheekiness to its lonesome core. On these songs, the despair and self-flagellation of the lyrics have never felt more human, more deeply forgivable.
This EP deals with a central character in The National universe which I will call The Pretty Boy – comfortable, privileged, hopeless. You get the sense that National frontman Matt Berninger puts all the parts of himself that he dislikes into this character and then isn’t quite sure what to do with him. You can find him lounging by the pool, lost in deep melancholy and self loathing.
Say Goodbye To Pretty Boy resketches this character and his world – the lemonworld, the new blue bloods of ‘Mr. November’ – with a new tautness, but also with the empathy of separation. Though it bids goodbye to the titular Pretty Boy, it also allows us to see him more clearly than we ever have before.
A debut of covers is a bold and unusual move, and this one is a true gift. Part critique, part origin story, it is impossible to listen to without gleaning a deeper understanding of both the artist and his source material.
Buy Say Goodbye To Pretty Boy here.