New Live (Rehearsal) R.E.M. Double Album

[SunkenKamera]

This should be pretty good. Lots of videos from this have been floating around online. It will be nice to have a high quality copy.

 

Details at http://www.remdublin.com/

 

 

 

 

On October 26th, R.E.M. will release R.E.M. LIVE AT THE OLYMPIA, a two-CD set featuring 39 songs from the band's acclaimed 2007 working rehearsals in Dublin, Ireland.

 

"Live At The Olympia" ventures back to the first week in July 2007, when R.E.M. set up camp at the venerable Olympia Theatre in Ireland's capital city and tested new material over five nights before fired-up, capacity crowds comprised of fan club members, friends, family, and fans from all over the world who were party to R.E.M.'s so-called "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 music on "Live At The Olympia" was produced by Dublin native Jacknife Lee who, along with R.E.M., co-produced the band's 14th studio album, ACCELERATE, which subsequently shot straight to number one in nine countries. Many of the eleven songs on ACCELERATE appeared in some form or fashion at the Dublin rehearsals, and R.E.M. LIVE AT THE OLYMPIA is an opportunity for fans to hear and experience those songs at one of the earliest stages in the developmental process.

 

In addition to the new material, the band also served up twenty-nine other songs, many of them rarely if ever played, culled mainly from the band's storied IRS years, ranging from the 1982 e.p. Chronic Town to 1983's Murmur up through 1988's Document.

 

A special edition 2 CD & DVD set will contain a film of the Dublin shows 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, fans should be sure to visit remdublin.com where audio for "Driver 8" is currently streaming.

[Analogman]

R.E.M. Spins 'Accelerate' Rehersal Gigs Into New Live Release

 

R.E.M.'s 2007 "working rehearsals" in Ireland for its latest studio album, 2008's "Accelerate," are the subject of the group's new live album, "R.E.M. Live at the Olympia," which comes out Oct. 27.

 

The two-disc set was recorded during July 2007 at the Olympia club in Dublin, where the group played five shows while in the midst of recording "Accelerate" with producer Jacknife Lee, who also helmed the "Olympia" set. It's R.E.M.'s second concert souvenir in three years, following 2007's "R.E.M. Live."

 

Bassist-keyboardist Mike Mills told Billboard.com that the Olympia stand "did the things we wanted it to do in terms of not only generating excitement for the record, but it also helped us, I think, to make a better record." R.E.M. had already gone into "Accelerate" with a desire to make a more rocking, live-on-the-floor kind of album than its more labored-over predecessors, "Up" and "Around the Sun." The live dates, Mills said, were a test for the new songs.

 

"So often when you make a record you haven't played the songs live," he explained, "and then you start taking them out on tour and they get faster or you change parts and think, 'Man, I wish we had done that on the album. I didn't want to have that this time. I wanted to play them live so we could get all that out of way and really know what we wanted to do with the songs in the studio."

 

Guitarist Peter Buck concurred that the Olympia shows "really helped us focus on what the record was all about. It was really nice to play the songs in a kind of adrenalized setting in front of people. It helped to show us that, 'Yeah, we're on the right path' and then we did go back in the studio and re-record a couple things and clean a couple of other things up. And there was one song in particular we played and figured out that, 'Eh, we don't need to have that on the record.' "

 

"Olympia" features pre-release versions of "Accelerate" tracks such as "Living Well is the Best Revenge," "Mr. Richards," "Man-Sized Wreath," "Horse to Water," "I'm Gonna DJ" and the title track, as well as "Supernatural Superstitious" under its original title, "Disguise," and two songs -- "Staring Down The Barrel Of The Middle Distance" and "On the Fly" -- that ultimately didn't make the album. The set also includes as R.E.M. rarities such as "Second Guessing," "Disturbance at the Heron House," West of the Fields" and "Wolves Lover."