Gavin B.

I was suprised at how much I like Live at the Olympia. The last R.E.M. album I enjoyed this much was Document which goes way back to 1987. My motives for liking this album are largely selfish. I only like the album because 20 of the 38 songs are well done rearrangements songs from R.E.M.'s first IRS five albums between 1983 and 1987 when R.E.M. grew from an underground phenomenon to become the first indie band to acheive a measure of mainstream success on their own terms.

Just two years ago Warner released R.E.M. Live another live album recorded in Dublin. That album made a point of ingoring any selections from their five albums on IRS. Only 2 of the 22 songs on that album were from the IRS era.

I will concede that R.E.M. recorded some great music after 1987 but each and every one of their Warner's album have flaws and the Warner years are a patchwork of hits and misses. There isn't a single one of R.E.M.'s nine albums on Warner that match up to the brilliance of R.E.M.'s first five IRS albums.

Toward the end of the 90's the band was in the grip of a mid-life crisis because they were all nearly 40 years of age and no longer were the darlings of the 18-30 years alt-rock fans, that same age demographic brought them multi-platinum mainstream success in the early 90s. Michael Stipe's oddball response to the againg process was wearing darker eyeliner, using bolder face paint and wearing funnier stage costumes but his beloved alt-rock audience had moved on to younger and hipper rock bands.

I think Stipe is still uncomfortable with his status as a senior statesman of rock and roll at age 49. Hint to M. Stipe: Only a few rock and rollers like Neil Young, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and David Bowie have mastered the art of aging gracefully and that's why they remain relevant as artists. Dylan was the jokerman when he sang Forever Young.

From my perspective, R.E.M.'s Warner albums lack the immediacy or the vision of their IRS releases. None albums in their triolgy of bestselling multi-platinum albums on Warner's ; Green, Out of Time and Automatic for the People measure up to consistent quality of their IRS years. While on IRS, R.E.M. was a band with a rich, eccletic vision. From their first Warner recording Green, the band fell into a pattern of making incoherent half brilliant albums with a monolithic arena ready sound.

The reason why Live at the Olympia works so much better than REM Live is R.E.M. gets back to the basics of their own quirky and uniquely gothic Southern roots which made them such an interesting band in the first place. R.E.M. built a massive mainstream audience and sold millions of albums when they moved over to Warner's but they lost most of the loyal core of their earliest IRS fans. I should have opted out after Green but I was a true believer who finally lost his religion with Monster an album that was so crass in it's arena band pretensions I refused to listen to anything by R.E.M. for the next 10 years, not even Fables of the Reconstruction an album I love more than my wife or my dog.

After five wildly successful albums on Warner, the base of more fickle "middle period" fans began jumping ship and Monster (1994) was R.E.M.'s last album with monster sales figures. Since 1998 R.E.M. has been on a slippery slope of a downward spiral in album sales and maybe that's why a good portion of Live at the Olympia is drawn from their early IRS albums.

Call me a cynic, but I think R.E.M. is attempting to reclaim their earliest core group of IRS loyalists and Live at the Olympia panders to those earliest fans who first heard R.E.M. in the underground clubs in the early 80s when the band members were still hungry road warriors with a sense of mission.

20 of their song selections are from their first five albums on IRS. Only 5 songs on Live at the Olympia are from their 1988-1997 "middle period" albums on Warner and that was the golden age of mega-platinum album sales for R.E.M. Live at the Olympia places R.E.M.'s most important work in it's proper perspective.

I'd take a single album of the 20 IRS songs because the 18 remaining songs from their Warner years aren't even their best songs and sound like filler to me. 9 of the Warner songs are from Accelerate, 2 are previously unreleased songs, 1 is from a soundtrack, and only 6 songs are from their five blockbuster albums released between 1988 and 1994.

The excessive reliance on songs from Accelerate undermines the overall musicial integrity of Live at Olympia. The 9 songs from R.E.M.s most recent studio release Accelerate are a drag on the album. Accelerate is the worst selling album in R.E.M.'s catalog...the people have spoken. Apparently R.E.M. feels that Accelerate should be heard by more than the 200,000 or so people that purchased the album. Accelerate was a musical comeback of sorts for R.E.M. But if you look at the uneven quality of their work on Warner, Accelerate doesn't even approach the high benchmarks of high quality R.E.M. set as a standard on their first five IRS albums.

R.E.M. would have done better by tossing out all but one or two of the Accelerate songs and replacing them with 7 of their most beloved Warner's songs like Orange Crush, Losing My Religion, Shiney Happy People, The One I Love, The End of the World As We Know It, Everybody Hurts and Stand. With those songs Live at the Olympia would have been a great live album but instead it's another half-brilliant effort that ends up being a source of frustration to those earliest R.E.M. loyalists who will see Live at the Olympia as yet another half empty glass of vintage R.E.M. wine. My own stubborn faith is that one day R.E.M. will come to their senses and terminate their Warner contract and start making great music again.