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- Summary: The surprise release from The National was mostly written at the same time as April's First Two Pages Of Frankenstein and features guest appearances by Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers, and Rosanne Cash.
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- Record Label: 4AD
- Genre(s): Pop/Rock
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 12
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Mixed: 1 out of 12
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Negative: 0 out of 12
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Sep 18, 2023The National are closer than ever, the type of closeness that allows individual growth, and this organic coming together is reflected in the collection of songs on ‘Laugh Track.’ Music that will no doubt stand the test of time.
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Sep 20, 2023Laugh Track is a companion piece to the band’s other 2023 album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, sure, but it stands on its own.
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Sep 18, 2023If all of the National's albums were placed in a Venn diagram, Laugh Track would sit at the direct centre — neither expanding the sound à la the sweeping expanse of 2019's I Am Easy to Find, nor fully retreating to the straight-up indie rock of 2007's The Boxer. Crucially, it re-establishes them as a group of long-time collaborators in line with one another, none of them standing out from the others.
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Sep 29, 2023A clear and consistent exercise in true class from a band who clearly haven’t lost a step, they just took a few stray ones.
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Sep 21, 2023The rest of Laugh Track simmers at a precisely modulated temperature, bringing the songs to warmth slowly and steadily, which makes the ragged drone of the closing "Smoke Detector" so welcome: its insistent pulse and maze of guitars feel full-blooded and messy in a way the National has avoided for a long, long time.
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Sep 18, 2023Berninger’s vocal delivery is largely muted; the mercurial and even passive-aggressive eruptions of the 00s are all but gone; rather, there’s a downcast directness here, which at times is compelling in the way that self-revelation and truth-telling can be; at other times, such singularity seems glaringly reductive, a listener wishing for the metaphors, tortuous narratives, and volatile phrasing of earlier work.
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Sep 19, 2023Laugh Track makes several welcome adjustments to their present-day formula, but it’s hardly a wholesale reorientation – and make no mistake, the National are still very much in need of one.