Friday, October 24, 2008

The National comes to Rice

Apparently, as part of Rice's Homecoming Weekend festivities, Brooklyn-by-way-of-Cincinnati-based The National is playing a free concert on the Rice campus on Friday, November 7 from 11:30am to 1:00pm (in the west quad behind Brochstein Pavilion, for those who are interested). I've seen The National play at the 2007 ACL Festival, and they were pretty good. In addition to ACL, The National has made the rounds of various other festivals--including Coachella, Lollapalooza, and Glastonbury--and they recently opened for R.E.M. (on its tour promoting Accelerate). No question, this is a pretty cool treat for the Rice community and for National fans in Houston.

Here is the band performing "Mistaken for Strangers" (from its most recent release, Boxer (2007)) at the 2008 Glastonbury festival:

And here they are performing "Fake Empire" (also from Boxer) on Letterman:

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Did you see REM on The Colbert Report back in April when Accelerate came out? Pretty hilarious:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/164877/april-02-2008/r-e-m-
I like how Peter Buck rates the album "negative three" on the mandolin scale.