An awfully long night for a band without any bangers: The National, at Alexandra Palace, reviewed

Over the past few years, the National have become the most important band in modern rock music. The strange thing is that this has happened at a point when their own work has perhaps lost a little of its earlier intensity. They’ve become important because they have come to represent something to other artists: a kind of adventurous but accessible integrity. The brothers who are the musical core of the band – guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner – have been so in demand that they have worked with, between them, (deep breath) Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Michael Stipe, Sharon Van Etten, Bon Iver, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Jonny Greenwood, Bruce Springsteen and Ryuichi Sakamato. And those are just the ones you might have heard of. Then there are the three festivals that Aaron helps run. Their tentacles are everywhere.

It’s easy to see why everyone fancies a piece of them. At Ally Pally – hands down the worst major concert venue in London: terrible sightlines, awful sound – they showed their gift for music that manages to be as accessible and unspecifically emotional as Coldplay, without ever feeling as though they are scrambling around for the lowest common denominator. The band – the Dessners, plus singer Matt Berninger and sibling rhythm section Bryan and Scott Devendorf, supplemented by a couple of horn players – showed their mastery of tone and texture, and on the set-closing trio of ‘Pink Rabbits’, ‘England’ and ‘Fake Empire’ they were breathtakingly good.

But I’ve never been able to buy into them completely. I’ve seen them a lot over the years, and like a group I truly love, Yo La Tengo, I never know which way I might turn when I see them live: will I be bored rigid, yearning for songs that actually go somewhere rather than churning intensely on the spot, or will I be hypnotised by the mood and luxuriant sound of it all? At Ally Pally, I was halfway between the two: they played for just shy of two-and-a-half hours, which is an awfully long time for a band short on copper-bottomed, undeniable bangers.