Review: Matt Berninger’s Serpentine Prison Is an Easily Digestible Solo Debut

The album is an enjoyable, if predictable, outing from an effortlessly reliable songwriter.

Matt Berninger, Serpentine Prison
Photo: Chantal Anderson

The National spent the 2010s pushing the boundaries of their music, allowing for nervier, more impressionistic sounds and experimentations with song structure. Many of these evolutions are indebted to the far-reaching influence of members Aaron and Bryce Dessner on the stalwart indie band’s songwriting. But something about the National’s subtle brand of rock, lead singer Matt Berninger’s buttoned-up baritone, and the band’s sardonic lyrical ennui has prompted certain critics to label their music as “boring.”

Serpentine Prison, Berninger’s solo debut, is likely to spark a similar debate. The album distills the singer-songwriter’s work with the National down to its barest form, as it mostly revolves around an acoustic guitar or piano and Berninger’s signature vocal style. The result is a pleasant, if undemanding, album that diverges from the National’s more experimental recent releases, 2017’s Sleep Well Beast and last year’s I Am Easy to Find. But while nothing here is as exciting or memorable as anything the National has released in the last 15 years, Serpentine Prison is an enjoyable outing from an effortlessly reliable songwriter.

Berninger seems to thrive under these lower stakes, as many of the album’s songs evoke a wistfulness missing from his work with the National. The sentimental “Distant Axis” finds his usually biting lyrical deadpan replaced with a certain kind of longing: “I feel like I’m as far as I can get from you,” he sleepily sings on the track. And on “Oh Dearie,” Berninger shows off his penchant for richly drawn downtrodden narrators. His hushed final lines—“I don’t see no brightness, kinda starting to like this”—stand in contrast to the song’s acoustic lullaby quality, an understated but welcome variation of his standard form.

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Booker T. Jones’s production brings ornate dimensions to these songs. This isn’t a particularly orchestral album, but the way that judicially placed drums and softly struck keys ring against Berninger’s deep vocals makes it sound like the songs are reverberating throughout a theater full of rapt listeners. When the songs take on added flourishes, like the lush brass arrangement that appears halfway through “Take Me Out of Town” or the string solos that punctuate key moments in “Collar of Your Shirt,” they swell organically with the rest of the arrangements.

These moments of indulgence are helpful in diversifying Serpentine Prison’s tracklisting, which often falls into a monochromatic haze of slow, easily digestible sounds. Another such indulgence comes in the form of a duet on the album’s best track, the bluesy “Silver Springs,” featuring Gail Ann Dorsey in a beautiful back-and-forth with Berninger. Dorsey, who was previously featured in the National’s triumphant “You Had Your Soul With You,” steps in to interrupt what otherwise would have been the album’s loneliest song, the track’s chanting hook enlightening a straightforward, almost juvenile kind of isolation: “They’ll never understand you anyway in Silver Springs,” Berninger and Dorsey sing in unison.

Much of the rest of Serpentine Prison fails to engage the listener as effectively as “Silver Springs” does. These songs easily fade into the background, not unlike those found on so many adult contemporary-influenced singer-songwriter albums. But while Serpentine Prison may invoke familiar accusations of dullness, it’s refreshing to hear Berninger’s disaffected songwriting style take on a more grown-up perspective.

Score: 
 Label: Concord  Release Date: October 16, 2020  Buy: Amazon

Jordan Walsh

Jordan Walsh is a music writer based in Philadelphia. His writing has also appeared in The Alternative and Magnet magazine.

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