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R.E.M - Live at the Olympia
| Pitchfork |
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Unlike most canonical, highly celebrated artists with a large catalog of albums, there is no generally accepted entry point to the R.E.M. discography. They don't have a Daydream Nation, a Bee Thousand, an Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), or a Thriller. The band has a large number of classic albums, and each is distinct enough to have its own passionate partisans and detractors. Except for the most hardcore fans, most anyone with a love for R.E.M. seems to have some cut-off point where their interest falls off dramatically. For older fans, it's often the bombastic arena fodder of Lifes Rich Pageant and Document. If you fell for the group at the height of "college rock" in the late 1980s, there is a good chance that you either tuned out during that strange cultural moment when they achieved their greatest commercial success as a morbid chamber pop outfit, or the even weirder abrasive day-glo glam-rock phase that came immediately afterward. More obviously, the departure of the band's original drummer and co-songwriter Bill Berry practically gave a large chunk of their audience permission to jump ship and/or casually dismiss their post-Berry material. Part of the problem in how people understand the band's catalog is that there is no adequate career-spanning retrospective for R.E.M., and, almost as if by design, their body of work does not fit comfortably into a tidy narrative spanning from 1982's Chronic Town on through the present day. The three existing collections that focus on their IRS Records albums service that period well, but at this point those releases amount to only the first act of the band's story. The only hits collection focused on their Warner Bros. output is an unfortunate mess that omits songs like "Shiny Happy People", "Drive", and "Bang and Blame" in favor of less popular singles and lackluster bonus tracks that needlessly distort chronology....full text |
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| Bbc |
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Two years ago REM released REM Live, featuring recordings from their performance at Dublin’s Point Theatre in 2005. It was a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin affair: REM, live, on CD (and DVD). Live at the Olympia is more of the same, essentially, even down to the country in question: like its predecessor, this was recorded in Ireland, albeit at the capital’s Olympia Theatre. Again: it’s exactly what it promises to be. So why bother with another live album, released so soon after the last, and most likely captured before the same crowd? The reason here is purely down to the tracklisting – while REM Live focused on the Athens, Georgia band’s hit singles and best-selling albums, this collection is a partial exhumation of early material, the band delving back as far as their 1982 EP Chronic Town. As such this will serve as an entry point into REM’s expansive pre-Automatic for the People catalogue for many fans – there is only one song from Automatic…, out of 39, but an intentions-signalling five from both second album Reckoning and third Fables of the Reconstruction. There’s even a brace from 83’s debut long-player, Murmur....full text |
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| Independent |
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Most live albums are fairly disposable artefacts, intended primarily as souvenirs for those who attended the shows, and usually consisting of an act's most recent album along with a few of their greatest hits from which the life has been gradually worn away through repetition. Not so R.E.M.'s Live At The Olympia, a 2-CD compilation culled from their five-night residency at the Dublin theatre in the summer of 2007, which each night they went to great pains to explain was "not a show". "We're R.E.M., and this is what we do when you're not looking," is how Michael Stipe introduced performances which, instead of showcasing their most recent album, featured selections from their next album, half-formed works-in-progress – a risky exercise which Stipe later describes as "this experiment in terror". Some of the songs would turn up in slightly different form on Accelerate, others – notably the aptly-titled "On The Fly" and "Staring Down The Barrel Of The Middle Distance" – would never make the cut. Interspersed among these musical foetuses is material mostly drawn from the earlier stages of their career, songs so old they rarely make the set-lists for R.E.M. shows these days. In particular, there are surging, euphoric versions of tracks from their second album Reckoning and debut EP "Chronic Town" which somehow still retain the bloom of youth. Age has clearly not withered songs like "Wolves, Lower", "Carnival Of Sorts (Box Cars)", "Harborcoat" and "Pretty Persuasion", thanks to the band's prolific early output shunting them fairly swiftly from their repertoire....full text |
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