I’ve been listening to a fair bit of The National‘s newie Boxer of late, which I highly recommend to pretty much everyone. I’ve found it upon repeated listening to be a beautifully presented – if understated – album, combining great arrangements with Matt Berninger’s weighty baritone acting as the key ingredient pushing their sound to something remarkable.

Seems I’m not the only one either - Metacritic lists it as being in the top 10 of 2007′s albums. Given that’s an aggregate of ratings given by most of the high profile music critics out there, it’s a pretty impressive achievement.

The rumour mill is running hot that they’ll be in Australia early next year, so that’s something you should most definitely be looking out for.

Interestingly, I decided the other day to see how much attention they’ve been getting here in Australia. I’m not a particularly keen fan of the radio, but it certainly still determines what sort of general public interest there’ll be in a band to a certain degree. Probably the most reliable cultural barometer on a national (excuse the pun) level is Triple J, so I fired up JPlay.com.au. Here’s what I was presented with:

Two plays. Ever.

Looks like The National have what will herewith be known as the curse of The Basics (that whole saga got followed up again by Syms with this article if you didn’t see it)