By: Alfredo Tellez / Edith Morales

The National played the Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre at SDSU on October 12th in support of their latest album “Sleep Well Beast” out now on 4ad.

It was their first visit to San Diego since they played Street Scene in ’08 and the Casbah in ’07 with St. Vincent.

Trying to write about the National live has its difficulties. Those are due to the fact that you can only try and pay attention to one member of the band at a time. The Dessner twins are just amazing at the guitars and layers of noise that they produce at each show. The Davendorf brothers, Scott at bass and Bryan’s impeccable drumming, are worth the price of admission alone.

Which now brings us to Matt Berninger. There’s something about the lyrics and the self depricating humour behind them, about the seriousness about them, about the goofiness in them. And then you have the delivery and voice which makes you (me) feel.

Here’s the setlist:

Nobody Else Will Be There / The System Only Sleeps In Total Darkness / Walk It Back / Guilty Party / Don’t Swallow The Cap / Afraid Of Everyone / Bloodbuzz Ohio / Dark Side Of The Gym / I’ll Still Destroy You / Turtleneck / I Need My Girl / This Is The Last Time / Wasp Nest / Conversation 16 / Apartment Story / Carin At The Liquor Store / Day I Die / Fake Empire

ENCORE

Start A War / Lemonworld / Mr. November / Terrible Love.

And for a second there it almost looked like they were going to play “Lose yourself”, well maybe not even if they teased the intro. But either way at the end of the show the PA played the song and Matt came out to “dance” or rap or sing, but mostly to just parade the stage and say hivto the fans while the song played.

Here’s to hoping that it doesn’t take 10 years and/or 3 albums for the band to come back.

Edit; The National played the Spreckels Theatre back on May 23rd 2010. It still took them too damn long to come back to San Diego.