As hard as it is to believe, America’s best live band, The National, made their first appearance on SNL last night (they have been leading indie-rock and have lived for a decade just across the river in Brooklyn ferheavensake).  Check out their standard, scintillating performances below on Graceless and I Need My Girl from our Best Album of 2013, Trouble Will Find Me.  In addition to some of the best lyrics written in the past year, Graceless features the Dessner twins’ ferocious wall-of-guitar attack to go with Matt Berninger’s emotional, graceless vocal.  In contrast I Need My Girl is appropriately sedate (following Aaron Dessner’s opening headstock-smash guitar effects).  The song is driven by the magnificent, mesmerizingly-metronomic drumming of Bryan Devendorf, which perfectly frames Berninger’s vocals and allows the song’s lyrics to rightly take center stage.

The National play the Santa Barbara Bowl on April 25th and tickets are still available HERE.

As a bonus, check out a particularly-affecting and effective acoustic (with horns) version of the latter song that we featured last October.

Graceless:

I Need My Girl: