A Skin, A Night

I got this a while back- a double disc of a documentary DVD about The National making "Boxer" called "A Skin, A Night" and an audio CD of B-sides, demos, and live tracks called "The Virginia EP". It is an unusual package showing a cover for the film on one side and a cover for the CD on the other. I saved the movie until I could watch it with some friends who were also interested, which I did a couple nights ago.

The DVD:

This is hardly a documentary. Just some footage of the National recording their masterpiece, but in the most mundane way (which is how recording is done), showing things like the bassist recording his plunk plunk plunk bass line to a tick tick tick clicktrack. This might be interesting to someone who's never seen recording done, but this kind of stuff is supper boring to me. This is supplemented by arty subway footage and psychedelic color swirls and photoshop tricks. The problems with this movie: 1. No narration. 2.During the arty 5-minute subway scenes, there would be no sound (?) , which left me and my four friends sitting in awkward silence watching the screen basically change colors like sunspots.... without any sound. If you're going to put sort of a visual art abstract piece for 10 excruciating minutes in the middle of a music documentary, play some music for corn sake!

The EP:

Not sure why they're calling this an EP, it has 12 songs on it. But they're brilliant. Well worth the price, even iff the movie is a toss-away. As a fan, I love the idea of collecting "lost songs" on hard copy (long live the CD!). Love this collection ending with the song "About Today", which asks the question, "How close am I... to losing you?" and contains the universally familiar dialog:

Hey, are you awake?
Yeah I'm right here.
Well, can I ask you about today?

Love that. Love the National's honesty. It kind of crescendos and the audience claps along and it's great. Great. Great. Great.