auctioneer69

Their new material is pretty great, actually.

As was the Buzzcocks' when they re-formed. So yeah, there are exceptions, and new material seems to help.

Have seen Dinosuar Jr twice. After "Farm" came out was great. The first tour with no new material was crap

Let's face it reunions suck for the most part. When the Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. (before they released any new material) reformed I was so excited only to have my hopes dashed by the reality of seeing teenage idols as middle-aged adults going through the motion in exchange for the mullah. I didn't bother with Pavement which seems like a good choice from the reviews.

Funnily enough the Police were the only band worth the money. They were really good.

First album is one of the best debuts of all time but Ian Brown is a terrible singer live. For me this is one reunion that didn't need to happen.

Let's face it reunions suck for the most part. When the Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. reformed I was so excited only to have my hopes dashed by the reality of seeing teenage idols as middle-aged adults going through the motion in exchange for the mullah. I didn't bother with Pavement which seems like a good choice from the reviews.

Funnily enough the Police were the only band worth the money. They were really good.

This is great and new - Neil Young and REM doing "Country Feedback" from the Bridge Benefit Show in 1988

http://www.spin.com/articles/exclusive-watch-rems-country-feedback-neil-young-1998-bridge-school-benefit

No prob. I guess just up to 97? I will try and zip them up tonight but no guuarantees. Ill post the link here so anyone else who wants them can grab them.

 

Edit, not sure how this posted twice.

Would love to see an R.E.M. box-set. Don't know if there's that much good unreleased material but fan-club singles and soundboard recordings of some of their covers would be great.

The run from "Chronic Town" in 1982 through "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" in 1996 is peerless. Even if Bill Berry hadn't quit there's a good possibility that what came after wouldn't be considered as favourably.

I was listening to "Up" again this week. What a great record and unlike anything else R.E.M. did.

I found a REM concert from 10/10/82 from the Pier in Raleigh in its entirety on youtube! Great, fun, early in their career show. I love how everything has such a fast tempo!

 

Yes, it's a fantastic show. It's sort of amazing in a way how good they were so quickly.

Analogman set up a page that provides all kinds of info on this: http://viachicago.or...-related-links/

Thanks!

That blog (http://thepowerofindependenttrucking.blogspot.com/) that PopTodd linked to has a bunch of that stuff for download, including a 22 song set of Mumur outtakes and different mixes.

Do you know I can convert FLAC files for I-Tunes?

Some cool stuff has popped up on youtube since news of their demise. Namely:

the Stephen Hague demo of "Catapult" with a bunch of synths (that seemingly the band hated) and an alternative version of "Sitting Still" from the "Murmur" sessions which has some additional guitar overdubs and backing harmonies.

Surprised these didn't come out with the re-issue of "Murmur". Wonder if the masters are missing.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/blogs/alternate-take/exclusive-why-r-e-m-are-calling-it-quits-20110926

Short interview with Mike Mills.

This PopMatters review absolutely nails it, I think.

Totally agree.

Wilco: The Whole Love

By Matthew Fiander 26 September 2011

If you Google “American Radiohead”, you’re going to get a lot of results involving Wilco. Plenty are in reference to a Chuck Klosterman article, but most just mention it as a way to praise the band. But no one seems to be able to illuminate exactly what that means. As a matter of explaining Wilco’s approach to music, or its sound, it explains very little. In fact, comparing them with Radiohead says a good deal more about how our view of these bands has narrowed over time. In some ways, the comparisons are uncanny. Both have debut albums that are largely forgotten, and those who stand by them are considered contrarian. Both have their game-changing “classic”—OK Computer and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, respectively—that have left us struggling to define the bands ever since.

Our definition often relies on increasingly unreasonable expectations. We expect their ability to innovate to be exponential.A Ghost Is Born just had Yankee Hotel Foxtrot‘s success to build on/overcome, but Sky Blue Sky had to shoulder the weight of both albums, and so on. With this in mind, we’re quick to define each album as what it’s not—i.e., not Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—and pigeonhole it under some other title. A Ghost is Born was the guitar-solo record. Sky Blue Sky was mellow soft rock. Wilco (the album) was some sort of summation of their sound.

This is all reductive and arbitrary, and built too heavily on first impressions. Most of the dismissal of Sky Blue Sky as a tame record—ignoring, for now, the pretensions inherent in terms like “dad-rock”—centers on the languid opener “Either Way” and the uniform production sheen, and ignores the record’s twists and turns. Wilco (the album) seems like a light affair because it starts with the jokey “Wilco (the song)”. In fact, evenYankee Hotel Foxtrot‘s untouchable reputation as dissonant and disconnected is set heavily (though not entirely) in its opener “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”.

This view of the records, though, makes them seem far more sonically unified than they are. If Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is disconnected and fractured, that’s because most of what Wilco does deals in these breaks. Even the straight alt-country of A.M. is broken by the darkness of “Dash 7”. The far-flung yet consistently great Being There—which you could argue as their defining record over YHF—is a constant clash of the sweet and the cracked. Wilco is exciting because the band seeks to redefine our expectations for it with each record. And their new album, The Whole Love, continues that cycle to often brilliant effect.

The reason it’s constricting to pin Wilco down with definitions is because they are at their best when they pull the rug out from under themselves (and, by extension, us). Opener “Art of Almost” is as jarring as “Misunderstood” or “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”, but it sounds like no Wilco song you’ve ever heard. It’s a clean break, a move to establish a wholly new landscape for this record, and it works. Orchestral flourishes at the start could recall their lush sound on Summerteeth if they weren’t so shadowy and alien. The song blips and squawks behind the bleary-eyed plea of Tweedy’s voice. But if it feels lost, it finds its footing in the fits and freak-outs of guitar that come in crashing squalls at the end. It’s a distinct shift from other dissonant tunes in the Wilco catalog. This doesn’t devolve; it comes together, searching for its shards and knitting them together into one sharp entity. If The Whole Lovemarks a change in perspective, it’s in this. Tweedy acknowledges the lonesome feeling that’s followed him around his entire musical career, but here he often debunks it. The excellent “Born Alone”, for example, may rest on the line “I was born to die alone,” but the triumphant roll of guitars that follows it belies that sentiment. This is the sound of unification, not isolation.

So if his lyrics feel occasionally nonsensical—what is a “low blow slo mo” or a “rising red lung glisten[ing] under the sun”?—Tweedy is still very much making representational art here. The feelings the words evoke are backed perfectly by these dark arrangements. “I Might” seems charged with bright energy, but a brittle acoustic and the distorted rumble of bass grind against the sunburst organs, so it’s no wonder Tweedy warns with a grin, “You won’t set the kids on fire, but I might.” “Sunloathe” starts with harmless, dreamy guitar chords, but the rhythm section drags it down into a perfect exhaustion of as Tweedy admits, “I don’t want to lose this fight, I don’t want to end this fight, goodbye.” It’s a subtle moment of clarity for Tweedy, highlighting that moment where we fight just to keep the fight going, because it’s a passionate (if destructive) connection, but the way the song cuts off reminds us of the folly in that play.

The songs in the middle of the record are compact tunes, but the arrangements make them feel much larger. The dusty “Open Mind” seems to have little to do with the Bobby Charles-stomp of “Capitol City”, or the crunching rock of “Standing O”, yet the three run together well late in the record. They all have layers drifting loosely around them, a light bed of strings or a cool keyboard that blurs their edges. So while these songs at first seem like separate islands, you realize there are sandbars between them, slight connections to keep things propelling forward. Song for song, the album plays to the band members’ strengths in subtle ways so that you have to really hear the details to appreciate the whole they become. Nels Cline doesn’t shred on the guitar; instead, he uses his knack for texture and atmosphere so that just one note resonates for nearly an entire verse. His work doesn’t call attention to itself here, but it’s some of his best recorded work for the band to date. The ever inventive Glenn Kotche takes a similar path to equally great effect. In the end, though, this record may be bass player John Stirratt’s show. His lines are high in the mix, and offer a playful rise and fall in the gaps and gouges of these songs. While Tweedy keens over the fray, Stirratt digs into it and adds a striking depth to the album.

All the band’s strengths come together in the 12-minute closer, “One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)”. Despite being a somber tune built around a finger-picked acoustic, it’s still a distant kin to “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” since it is similarly built on insistent repetition—in this way, it also recalls Neil Young’s “Ambulance Blues”. But it’s also an utterly unique song, both in this album and it Wilco’s discography. It’s doesn’t build to fitful squalls, doesn’t crumble into static. It sets its course and travels it, rising and falling between hushed melancholy and faint hope. “This is how I’ll tell it,” Tweedy softly sings at the start. “Oh, but it’s long.” In one way it’s an apology, but in another it’s an insistence on the importance of storytelling. Because the details here are hard to follow, there’s familial strife and spiritual disconnection, and the story circles back around to its start on “one Sunday morning”. But as you follow the song, you absolutely feel the story, both the heartache of its facts and the relief that comes in merely telling it out loud. This record can be dark, sometimes cutting and bleakly funny, other times bittersweet, but in the end it speaks of pain not to feed it, but to leave it behind.

So while some had started talking like the story of Wilco has been written, like its best days are behind it, The Whole Love proves the band is still moving forward, still changing, even if it’s not in the lofty ways we expect it to. This isn’t a return to form, nor is it an out-and-out reinvention. It’s just the new Wilco album, and like all new Wilco albums, it doesn’t sound much like what came before it. This is what makes them one of the most fascinating bands working, and The Whole Love is a new, vital shard in their splintered discography."

Absolutely brilliant - the new stuff sounds fantastic too. The band sound amazing. Maybe the best Wilco live performance I have seen on TV. Definitely up there with something that was shown on Spanish TV in 2007.

Can't wait to see them in the Northwest next year. Hopefully they'll play Coachella for the first time in ages too. Have my tickets for the first weekend.

"As a HUGE R.E.M. fan, I have zero interest in the new greatest hits discs. I'll likely pay $3 on iTunes for the new songs."

Agreed too. I can understand why the record company is doing it but it seems like a completely worthless exercise. I am hoping that we get a limited edition with a free live CD. Would love a "Pageantry" show or something from the tour in 2008.

As a complete aside I just got the Soft Boys "Underwater Moonlight". Absolutely brilliant. As a 25 year-long REM fan album I'm amazed didn't get this years ago.

What chance that Wilco might play a REM cover on this tour?

As a fan since the mid-eighties I am one part sad, two parts happy.

Like other have noted discovering them in the mid-eighties meant the opening of a gateway to so many great bands from the Velvets, the Byrds, Big Star, Husker Du and the Replacements too.

Am really glad I saw them again in 2008 when they put on a brilliant show. Would have loved to see them tour "Collapse Into Now" but it sounds like Michael Stipe wasn't into the idea.

With the exception of "Around The Sun" they didn't release a truly duff album in three decades. I expect to be regularly playing the first four albums and others till I croak.

Just watched the trailer. It's a shame that an album and period for U2 that was characterised by playfulness and irreverence looks like it will be covered in a documentary that is characterised by pompousness and self-reverence.

My love/hate relationship with them continues.

Hope a recording of the shows up. Love Neil Finn. Split Enz's "I Got You" was a great choice to do especially right after Wilco's "I Got You (At The End of The Century)"

http://freegotham.com/2011/05/01/my-morning-jacket-goes-metal/

Holdin Onto Black Metal

Anyone else heard this from the new album? Anyone else hear echoes of "Owner of A Lonely Heart" by Yes in this?

Even Better Than The Real Thing just opened up U2's 360 Tour in Argentina. Not only is it the 1st time that it has been played on this tour, but it's also been 10 years. I was actually at that last show in Boston on June 9th.

 

Edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X032Su4URhQ

Sounds pretty good. It helps that it's from the news broadcast.

Bono's voice is even weaker thsn his hair piece Sure it will sound better going forward.

Good luck with that. It's called "the free market," and not only is such pricing perfectly acceptable and legal in this economy, it's actively encouraged under the free market system. The law of supply and demand, yadda yadda yadda.

Tell me i I am wrong but aren't there well-established anti-trust laws in place to protect against monopolistic behavior and to protect against restraint of free-trade? I could be wrong but I think this was the basis of Pearl Jam's legal actions back in the 1990's.

I think the more flagrant abuse now is how massive amounts of tickets immediately end up in the hands of resellers. I'd be surprised if Ticketmaster aren't getting a massive cut on this business.

I'd love to see a Congressional Inquiry into 1. ticket prices and 2. how so many end-up with ticket resellers immediately. Tickets touts now have websites called Stubhub and the like. Just an awful, awful fucking rip-off.

That said I did pay about $80 to see Neil for the second-time about three years ago. Absolutely amazing and maybe more so because he played with an intensity and passion that would have put people a third-of-his-age to shame.

I decided to incorporate Coachella into vacation time this year based on the fact that at $100 a day it's still great value over what individual tickets cost. Guaranteed warmth and sunshine In April coming from Seattle add tremendous value to the equation too. Bit luke-warm on the headliners apart from Arcade Fire. Whom despite their wanna-be street-cred still cost me $70 (including fees) last year. Other than that I am only doing club shows.

The bummer is that a number of our friends aren't coming because tickets sold out within 6 days. That didn't happen because Led Zeppelin had reunited to play or David Bowie was doing his first live show in a decade. Rather an enormous amount immediately ended up with re-sellers. My guess is that Ticketmaster have increased sales to resellers and are taking kick-backs to compensate for the lower revenues they are experiencing overall because of the recessions. MOTHERFUCKERS! It makes me mad that we the consumer have no recourse. Imagine if the same thing happened with plane-tickets? It would be banned.

Greg Kot's review is lazy, plain and simple. Also a cheap headline. He's taken familiarity and extrapolated it into the album being a carbon copy of previous stuff. "Uberlin" has the most passing resemblance to "Drive" and "Alligator..." similarity to "It's The End Of The World...." is non-existent. I could easily make the case that "It Happened Today" shares a lot with "New Test Leper" and that "Blue" is "Country Feedback" part two. But so what? My guess is that REM have always thrown a lot of ideas away over the years because they sound too familiar. Ironic he references U2's "All That You Can't Leave Behind" as a similar record. A more accurate review might have made that point that while that was released in 1999, REM have repeated themselves slightly for the first time ever 12 years later and on their 15th album.

Anyways, a great if not ground-breaking album for me. KEXP in Seattle has played Elbow's new album in its entirety today. Sounds really good on first listen. But boy I haven't seen one critic slaughter them for making exactly the same type of songs they have their whole career. On what? - their 5th album.

I had to give this one quite a few listens and I really do like it. But I liked Accelerate as well. It's so hard not to carry the baggage of those great early albums. I love those albums so much that even something like Automatic for the people really does not compare for me. But trying to be subjective as possible, I do really like this album. Some absolutely great songs, some OK songs. The album seems to lose a little momentum towards the end. But overall a good album from a great band.

First R.E.M. I owned when it came out was "Life's Rich Pageant". Pored over the sleeve for weeks. Did a factory job during summer whilst at University. Me and my mate Chris would spend hours trying to crack the lyrics on the first four albums to kill time. I'd pour over old NME's and Melody Makers at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow when I should have been studying to find any interview, live review or nugget on R.E.M.. Would go to record fairs every three months looking for the latest bootleg tapes. Buying "Succumbs" on video and spending hours watching the different video's. It is indeed hard to conjure up the mystery and romance of early REM looking back now.

I've been listening to Rollingstone.com's stream and enjoying Collapse Into Now a lot. Overall it has a very positive and, more importantly, confident vibe. Probably their most confident-sounding record since Hi-Fi. Stipe, Mills and Buck all seem unafraid to let it loose. The rockers rock, the pop is very poppy, and the slower songs have real emotion. I can't name any song that I consider a clunker. (maybe "Walk it Back", but not really). "Everyday Is Yours to Win" is a beautiful creation by all the band. "That Someone Is You" is 2 minutes of pop bliss.

 

R.E.M. could never match the mystery and perfection of some of their early great records. And maybe it's not on the level of Out of Time or Automatic, but that's a high level. Since Berry's departure, the band has never really seemed sure of what they wanted an album to be. "Up" came the closest perhaps, but was probably a few songs too long. "Reveal" mostly succeeded at making a summer record, but was inconsistent. "Around the Sun" sounded like R.E.M. was lost. "Accelerate" tried too hard to sound like there old selves. Considering their age and history, I think R.E.M. nailed it this time.

[/quote.

 

Ditto. Not to shabby at all for their 15th album.