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- Summary: The 21-track live recording from the June 2024 performance by Brooklyn-based rock band The National at Rome's Cavea at Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone was mixed by Peter Katis.
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- Record Label: 4AD
- Genre(s): Pop/Rock
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 5 out of 6
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Mixed: 1 out of 6
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Negative: 0 out of 6
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Dec 16, 2024While the band have undergone many metamorphoses in this time, you’d be hard pressed to find any slippage in quality across a setlist like this. Most of the older songs have only become more prescient and powerful in the years since their creation.
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UncutDec 12, 2024Drummer Bryan Devendorf’s rippling, muscular runs provide a racing human pulse over the programmed drums on “Tropic Morning News” and “New Order T-Shirt”, enliven the laidback “I Need My Girl” and supercharge “Lit Up” and the conjoined “Humiliation”/“Murder Me Rachael” during a torrid late-set run. He’s The National’s secret weapon, and Rome is his showcase. [Review of the Year 2024, p.34]
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Record CollectorDec 12, 2024Its 21 affectingly overdub-free songs reveal an essential truth of The National in the 202s, that they're a band at the absolute height of their live powers. [Christmas 2024, p.133]
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Dec 13, 2024The band’s blend of baroque and alternative rock, sounds immense live and this show has rightly been selected as a testament to that. This is also a perfect bridge to whenever the group release their next material and with 21 tracks is somewhat of an early Christmas present for the band’s legion of fans.
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Dec 12, 2024Rome shows how precise the National’s alchemy is: If Devendorf is replaced with a drum machine, if Dessner confines himself to the piano or quiet noodling, if Berninger rambles too far afield, the whole thing falls apart. It’s Alligator deep cut “The Geese of Beverly Road” where Rome best demonstrates the band’s collective power. On record, it’s patient but stiff, held back by a lo-fi drum recording; live, it’s the massive, sweeping anthem early believers always hoped it would become.
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MojoDec 12, 2024Matt Berninger walks a distinguished line between control and catharsis, with only occasional collapses (Graceless, for example), but when the music falls away during Bloodbuzz Ohio, you hear a band carried on by both the roar of the crowd and the structural might of their songwriting. [Jan 2025, p.83]