R.E.M. Live - Anticipation, 25 Years in the Making
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I was first introduced to R.E.M. by my middle school buddy Joe. We were accompanying my mom to the grocery store when we heard We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel. Joe bemoaned that song as a cheap rip off of It's The End of The World As We Know It, a song I had never heard by a band of which I was vaguely aware.
That simple car ride began a long love affair with that little college-radio band from Athens, GA. We listened to Out of Time and Green almost ad naseum and I was hooked.
I seemed to explore R.E.M. outward from that point forward. Go forward one album and backward one. Automatic for the People and Document. Monster and Life's Rich Pageant.
Back in high school, I remember the first album release I ever anticipated and absolutely had to have that first day was New Adventures in Hifi. My friend Emily actually ditched class early to "beat the rush" at the mall and picked up a copy for me.
Around that same time my parents were finally buying CDs for themselves and my mom picked up MTV Unplugged, Vol 2. R.E.M. had done an episode of "MTV Unplugged" and Half a World Away was part of this compilation. It's an incredible live acoustic track with sweeping violins and that distinctly melodious mandolin often featured on Out of Time. Upon savoring that track for the first time, I was on a mission to find more live R.E.M. tracks and buy any live albums I could find. Unfortunately, my efforts were made in vain - no such officially published album existed.
The closest I came was to live R.E.M. recording was a bootleg cassette my 5th grade teacher had recorded at some bar in the early 80s. The quality wasn't that great, but you could still feel the energy and the vibe over the din of the crowd. That tiny morsel left me yearning for more, a desire that went unfulfilled for the years since.
Until tonight.
R.E.M. Live is the realization of all that eagerness and hope. Recorded from their February 2th, 2005 concert at the Point Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. It was quite worth the wait.
There's so much to go over here and I've only listened to the CDs; I haven't watch the DVD that comes with the set.
First off, the song selection. All too often theses days, concerts are merely a re-ordering of the band's most recent release, with a few "fan favorites" (meaning radio singles) sprinkled in to keep folks on the hook. This album is the complete opposite.
The set opens with cult-fan favorites Took Your Name and So Fast, So Numb - our first indication that this would be no "normal" show. You don't get to the first "hit" until the fifth song, Everybody Hurts a good eighteen and a half minutes into the experience.
Michael and crew walk a tremendously fine line throughout the show, balancing spontaneous, energetic out-pourings woven within the finer subtleties of their original compositions. Stipe's vocal improvisations in one song offer a stark contrast to the almost corporate studio rendition of the next.
After 25 years of studio only productions and fans foaming at the mouth for that energy, that lightning-in-a-bottle inertia which only happens in front of a crowd, we can finally Walk Unafraid to the cashier with Live in hand.
--Torch
That simple car ride began a long love affair with that little college-radio band from Athens, GA. We listened to Out of Time and Green almost ad naseum and I was hooked.
I seemed to explore R.E.M. outward from that point forward. Go forward one album and backward one. Automatic for the People and Document. Monster and Life's Rich Pageant.
Back in high school, I remember the first album release I ever anticipated and absolutely had to have that first day was New Adventures in Hifi. My friend Emily actually ditched class early to "beat the rush" at the mall and picked up a copy for me.
Around that same time my parents were finally buying CDs for themselves and my mom picked up MTV Unplugged, Vol 2. R.E.M. had done an episode of "MTV Unplugged" and Half a World Away was part of this compilation. It's an incredible live acoustic track with sweeping violins and that distinctly melodious mandolin often featured on Out of Time. Upon savoring that track for the first time, I was on a mission to find more live R.E.M. tracks and buy any live albums I could find. Unfortunately, my efforts were made in vain - no such officially published album existed.
The closest I came was to live R.E.M. recording was a bootleg cassette my 5th grade teacher had recorded at some bar in the early 80s. The quality wasn't that great, but you could still feel the energy and the vibe over the din of the crowd. That tiny morsel left me yearning for more, a desire that went unfulfilled for the years since.
Until tonight.
R.E.M. Live is the realization of all that eagerness and hope. Recorded from their February 2th, 2005 concert at the Point Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. It was quite worth the wait.
There's so much to go over here and I've only listened to the CDs; I haven't watch the DVD that comes with the set.
First off, the song selection. All too often theses days, concerts are merely a re-ordering of the band's most recent release, with a few "fan favorites" (meaning radio singles) sprinkled in to keep folks on the hook. This album is the complete opposite.
The set opens with cult-fan favorites Took Your Name and So Fast, So Numb - our first indication that this would be no "normal" show. You don't get to the first "hit" until the fifth song, Everybody Hurts a good eighteen and a half minutes into the experience.
Michael and crew walk a tremendously fine line throughout the show, balancing spontaneous, energetic out-pourings woven within the finer subtleties of their original compositions. Stipe's vocal improvisations in one song offer a stark contrast to the almost corporate studio rendition of the next.
After 25 years of studio only productions and fans foaming at the mouth for that energy, that lightning-in-a-bottle inertia which only happens in front of a crowd, we can finally Walk Unafraid to the cashier with Live in hand.
--Torch
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