One night after their excellent gig at Lollapalooza in Chicago, and one day before they will fly to Norway to begin a tour of Europe, The National made a pit stop in the middle of New York City and performed an outstanding set at Central Park Summerstage tonight. Despite all the travel, the show was quite energetic from the start, as “Brainy” and “Secret Meeting” set the tone for a 90-minute set of The National at full power. The middle of the set featured some rare nuggets, including “The Geese Of Beverly Road”, and the set closing was top notch. Matt Berninger was so over the top during “Mr. November” that he pulled his microphone cord out of the jack more than once. The band seemed to be enjoying themselves and expressed disappointment that the set was over at the curfew.
We recorded from the perfect location at Summerstage with our best mobile rig. We thought we had captured an outstanding sound quality performance of The National at BAM in February, but frankly this recording is a significant improvement even over that excellent recording. We “nailed it” tonight. Enjoy!
This Recording is now available for Download in FLAC and MP3 at Archive.org [HERE].
The National
2008-08-04
Rumsey Playfield
Central Park
New York, NY USA
Digital Master Recording
Recorded from Front of Board Center
30 Feet From Stage (“Sweet Spot”)
DPA 4021’s > Marantz PMD-660 (Oade BCM) > 16bit 44.1 wav > Soundforge (set fades, level adjustment, slight eq) > CDWave 1.95 (tracking) > Flac Frontend (level 7, align sector boundaries) > flac
Recorded and Produced by
nyctaper 2008-08-04
Setlist:
[total time 1:31:11]
01 [Flume introduction]
02 Brainy
03 Secret Meeting
04 Baby We’ll Be Fine
05 Slow Show
06 Squalor Victoria
07 You’ve Done It Again, Virginia
08 Abel
09 The Geese Of Beverly Road
10 Ada
11 All The Wine
12 Daughters Of The SoHo Riots
13 Apartment Story
14 Green Gloves
15 Mistaken For Strangers
16 Fake Empire
17 [encore break]
18 Start A War
19 Karen
20 Mr. November
21 [band introductions]
22 About Today
If you email nyctaper for access to this recording, we expect that you will PLEASE SUPPORT The National, visit their website, and purchase their official releases from The National’s Merch store directly.
how about yeasayer?
Nice.
Can’t wait to hear this; those horns were a bit tough to discern most of the time so I’m hoping this pull brings them out a bit.
Thank you!
Horns are definitely on the recording, mixed pretty well. Just finished listening to Squalor Victoria and at the end of the song they are prominent.
I really was in the sweet spot, so everything is pretty well balanced. Matt still has some issues with microphone modulation, so at times he’s quiet and other times he’s blasting — not the sound guy’s fault, its just the nature of the performer’s style.
I missed the show last night, but can’t wait to listen to this. Thanks!
Sorry to hijack this thread but did you happen to record the Old 97’s last week?
About Old 97s. Sorry, I got to the show late as I was pretty wiped out from Springsteen the night before. I set up to record from about the 3rd song onward but never was able to negotiate a decent position to record. It was packed. I broke down after about 15 minutes.
THANK YOU! I was at the show and looking forward to hearing this… Thank you so much for what you do!
Great review of this concert from our friends over at Ear Farm:
http://earfarm.com/live-music/ef-was-there/1042