The National - "Bloodbuzz Ohio" (official video) from The National on Vimeo. Their new album, High Violet, is reviewed below.

Prediction: this song will (deservedly) end up on many year end lists, in part because it captures the financial confusion of the present. Matt Berninger's best line, "I still owe money to the money to the money I owe," sums it up pretty well.

Also, I can't resist posting the opening paragraph of Alex Denney's review of High Violet for The Quietus. It's one of the best descriptions of The National that I've come across:

Empathy isn't a virtue readily associated with rock's emotionally-charged climes, trafficking as they usually do in excess and ego-driven chicanery of every description. The National honed their art to a supremely nuanced stadium rock over the course of four albums culminating in 2007's fantastic Boxer, tilling the poorly nourished soil of modern urban existence to unearth tales of weary self-forgetting, ideals run aground and those bone-chilling moments where the mask of autonomy slips and we see ourselves as we really are in the technocratic, ontologically-unsound west: frightened and alone. Theirs was a world of compromise; a bitter coffee ground comprised of telling defeats and the dreams that linger on, strange and small and sexy as week-old cologne. And if all that sounds like a tough sell, then frontman Matt Berninger's dry-as-dust humour and suave baritone went a long way to sugaring the pill.

Full review here.