R.E.M. New Old Coming, Old Album Returns

R.E.M. has just completed the second phase of recording their new record, the follow-up to Accelerate, in New Orleans with Jacknife Lee and his team. The band will be hitting the studio again this American Summer to continue work on the record, which is tentatively expected to be released sometime in 2011.

In the meantime, on July 13, 2010, R.E.M. will release of an expanded 25th Anniversary 2CD and digital edition of the band’s 1985 album, Fables Of The Reconstruction.

The new edition features the digitally remastered original album, plus 14 previously unreleased demo recordings, cut prior to the album’s studio sessions, including one long-sought track that has never been released.

The commemorative release also contains liner notes by Peter Buck, with the 2CD package presented in a lift-top box with a poster and four postcards. On the same date, the remastered original album will be released on 180-gram vinyl.

Produced by Joe Boyd (also known for his work with British folk and folk-rock musicians, including Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, and Fairport Convention), Fables marked the beginning of a more narrative, storytelling lyrical style in R.E.M.’s songwriting, with its songs spinning vivid tales of everyday life in the American South.

Before going to London to record, R.E.M. huddled in Jim Hawkins’ Athens, Georgia studio for a few weeks, woodshedding and building new songs from fragments, including many which had emerged during soundchecks along the band’s 1984 tour.

In his liner notes, Peter Buck recalls, “The last day of rehearsal, I think with Joe Boyd in attendance, Jim Hawkins recorded what we had come up with. We spent about four hours recording all the new songs live, with minimal overdubs. I hadn’t listened to this stuff since we recorded it, and I’m kind of stunned at how good it is. My memory of the rehearsals is us scrambling to finish songs. The songs on both Murmur and Reckoning had been performed for months if not years by the time they were committed to tape. I remember feeling dangerously unprepared when we flew to London, but on the evidence of this recording we must have known what we were doing.”

“The Athens Demos,” comprise the new edition’s second disc of 14 previously unreleased recordings, including drafts of Fables’ 11 songs and three additional tracks that didn’t make the album. The three non-album demos include two early versions of songs that were later revisited by the band and recorded for other releases and one song, “Throw Those Trolls Away,” making its release debut on this new edition.

What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? – REM

1994’s What’s The Frequency, Kenneth was somewhat of an anomaly for REM. It was the first single and opening track from the Monster album and while it has some of the sonic qualities of that album it also stands a little apart from it.

The song was actually inspired by the New York mugging of NBC news anchor Dan Rather. While beating him Rather’s attacker apparently kept repeating “Kenneth, What’s The Frequency?”

It turns out that the attacker later (after the song was written) explained that his repeated statement was prompted by his belief that the news media was beaming signals into his head.

Michael Stipe has been quoted as explaining the song this way “It remains the premier unsolved American surrealist act of the 20th century. It’s a misunderstanding that was scarily random, media hyped and just plain bizarre.”

It’s almost as if the explanation of the attacker came to fit the song as you could easily imagine Stipe at least sympathising with that viewpoint. (It might also explain why I named the news pages of InPress “What’s The Frequency”)

The other element of interest about this song is it apparently grew from another song called Yes, I Am Fucking With You. Late in the song Stipe substitutes the words “the frequency” with “don’t fuck with me”.

This song contains some of Michaels Stipe’s best quoted and most resonant lines. “you say that irony was the shackles of youth”, “to withdraw in disgust is not the same as apathy”.

The theme of media duplicity and the various references to being “fucked with” make this one of REM’s nastiest and most untrusting songs and when Peter Buck delivers his guitar solo backwards it all adds up to an extremely spiky piece of music.

REM – Live Box Set Available

REM are excited to announce that you can now pre-order your copy of the Special Edition Box Set of R.E.M.’s Live At The Olympia here:
http://links.lists.warnerbrosrecords.com/ctt?kn=9&m=34305574&r=MjUzMDE4MDM4NgS2&b=2&j=NTk4MzQ1OTcS1&mt=1&rt=0

Ready for release on October 27th, the Special Edition Box Set includes a double-CD with 39 songs featuring rarities and fan favorites from the band’s I.R.S. days, unreleased tracks, and early versions of songs that eventually made the cut for R.E.M.’s 14th studio album, Accelerate.  Tracks include So. Central Rain, Sitting Still, Driver 8, Pretty Persuasion, Cuyahoga, Gardening at Night, Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars), and Living Well Is The Best Revenge.

The Box Set also contains:

1. This Is Not A Show DVD (region free): 59-minute concert-documentary by Vincent Moon and Jeremiah.  This Is Not A Show chronicles R.E.M.’s five nights of live rehearsals in Dublin, Ireland, and features Until The Day Is Done, Houston, Drive, Horse To Water and more.

2. 4LPs on 180 gram vinyl in gatefold sleeves

3. Olympia 24″ x 36″ tour poster

4. Song-by-song liner notes by Peter Buck

R.E.M. Live Album in October

R.E.M. will be releasing a live album on October 26 entitled R.E.M. Live At The Olympia. The title refers to the Olympia Theatre in Ireland where the band played a one week residency in 2007. The album is a two-CD set on Warner Bros Records, featuring a massive 39 songs.

“Live At The Olympia” captures R.E.M. in uncharted territory. Over the course of their one week residency at the stately Olympia Theatre in Ireland’s capital city, the band tested new material in front of audiences prior to releasing the songs on record. The capacity crowds in attendance, including fan club members, friends, family, and fans from all over the globe, were party to R.E.M.’s aptly dubbed “experiment in terror.”

“We were just trying to do something we hadn’t done before,” said guitarist Peter Buck, “which meant there was no relaxing during the set. Every second we were playing something we didn’t know all that well. Which was kind of good… there were all kinds of terror elements going on during that show.”

The live album was produced by Dublin native Jacknife Lee who, along with R.E.M., co-produced Accelerate, the album which emerged from these shows. Most of the eleven songs on Accelerate appeared in some form or fashion at the Dublin rehearsals.

In addition to the new material, R.E.M. reached into their back catalogue and played twenty-nine other songs, some of them rarely if ever performed. The lion’s share of these songs came from the band’s IRS years, ranging from Chronic Town to Document.

A special edition 2 CD & DVD set will contain a film of the Dublin rehearsals by Vincent Moon and Jeremiah, who previously worked with R.E.M. on Ninetynights, Six Days, and the video for Supernatural Superserious.

For more on the forthcoming release, please be sure to visit remdublin.com where, in addition to a full tracklisting, you’ll find audio for “Driver 8″  and a video for “Living Well Is The Best Revenge.”

Let’s Active – Cypress

This 1984 album probably gained most of its attention due to the fact that Let’s Active main man Mitch Easter was notable for being the co-producer of the first two REM albums Murmur and Reckoning.

Lets Active was Easter’s personal project and in its time produced an EP (Afoot) prior to this album and two albums subsequent – Big Plans For Everybody and Every Dog Has Its Day. While the latter was probably the most commercially successful, Cypress is the record that interests me the most.

Cypress was a really interesting album at the time of its release. It introduced a quirky pop sound and was a definitive example of the chiming Rickenbacker guitar sound that Easter sought to master both as a producer and a recording artist.

There’s a couple of great songs on this album including Ring True, Easy Does and the urgent and deeply grooved Blue Line but the crowning glory moment is the wonderful Waters Part, a song that somehow manages to  allow ‘epic’ and ‘pop’ to be used in the same sentence. This is a song that deserves to be seen for what it is – one the high watermark moments of the whole sub genre of American indie music that included the likes of early REM, Game Theory, the dB’s, Turning Curious and Dream Syndicate.

Not every song works on Cypress – a couple of them are all sparkle and no substance and there are times when Easter’s wafer thin vocals can get annoying. Even allowing for these limitations this album is still a keeper.

It is very much of its time – a time when quirky little southern guitar bands threatened to take over indie rock. As it turns out (with the exception of REM) few of these bands ever evolved into anything more that an underground/college rock phenomenon. There’s still something charming and innocent about them though and Cypress is still worth the occasional listen today.

Mitch Easter continues to produce and perform in the Carolinas area and released a solo album Dynamico in 2008 to a good critical reaction.

R.E.M. To Release Special Edition of Murmur

Time flies huh? Believe it or not it is 25 years since the release of  R.E.M.’s  debut album, Murmur. Can you recall the first time you heard Radio Free Europe? The first time you heard R.E.M? The first time you wondered what the hell the singer was saying?

For me Murmur was the beginning of a long odyssey that continues today and I’ll be jumping onto Amazon to purchase a special deluxe anniversary edition of the album that is released today in the US.

The deluxe edition of Murmur features two discs: the first, a re-mastered
version of the original 12 songs including Radio Free Europe, Sitting Still, Talk About the Passion, and Pilgrimage, each one important in the early R.E.M. lexicon Disc Two is a live-recording of a 1983 show at a venue called Larry’s Hideaway  in Toronto, long considered a must-have performance in the vast R.E.M. bootleg canon.

The live disc includes at total of sixteen tracks, among which are 9 songs from Murmur, two songs which would eventually be included on 1984′s “Reckoning,” three tracks from the first EP Chronic Town, a Velvet Underground cover, and “Just A Touch,” later released on the band’s fourth album, 1986′s “Lifes Rich Pageant.”

The package’s liner notes are written by Mitch Easter and Don Dixon,
who produced and engineered “Murmur”. I.R.S. employees Michael Plen, Jay Boberg, Carlos Grasso, and Sig Sigworth each contribute their thoughts on and memories of working on the record in the liner notes as well.

There’s no news yet about whether there will be an Australian release of the deluxe Murmur but the R.E.M official website is touting it as a limited edition, so it might be worth getting in quick.

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