The National Acrobat - The Complete Recordings

To start off there are a lot of songs on this album. 30 songs to be exact, but then again it’s The National Acrobat’s Complete Recordings, so you kind of have to put them all on there or it would become The National Acrobat’s Semi-Complete Recordings and few things in this world sound less impressive then a semi-complete recordings collection. It’s the rough equivalent to reading an abridged book. You’re not really reading it, you’re just looking at someone else’s notes. So now that the need for the 76 minutes of the 30 songs has been established, I feel that I can continue. The National Acrobat took their influences from DC punk, hardcore, noisecore, and other different cores of varying extremity. The tracks are harsh and abrasive and very, very intense. Stylistically, TNA’s songs jumped from hardcore to emo to metal to punk. However, throughout their career TNA was able to keep an edge that helped to ward off the short comings that traditionally come with the aforementioned genres. This edge was probably due to the fact that they were only together for 2 years, but in those 2 years they managed to achieve what other artists’ decades of trying and public torture never could; it’s youthful and it’s real. It’s not a particularly artistic album. I don’t listen to it to get inspired to create abstract art. It’s an emo album, but not in the sense that we’ve come to know emo. This is an album based on real thoughts and emotions sung in a brutal and straight forward manner, not through a whiney campfire sing-a-long. They weren’t trying to get us to identify with them to push units. They were just making the music that it made sense for them to make. [www.initialrecords.com]