R.E.M.

Out of Time [25th Anniversary Edition][3 CD/Blu~ray]

 ^{R.E.M. — Out of Time [25th Anniversary Edition][3 CD/Blu~ray]}
Grammy Awards:
★   1991 T  Losing My Religion  Best Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal
★   1991 A  Out of Time  Best Alternative Music Performance 
★   £44.99 or $59.92!
Editorial Reviews
★   Alt~rock legends prep CD, vinyl, Blu~ray versions with new liner notes featuring interviews with band.
★   1991’s Out of Time catapulted R.E.M. from an indie favorite to one of the biggest bands in the world, with hit singles ‘Losing My Religion’ and ‘Shiny Happy People.’ In a case~bound book, this deluxe, 25th anniversary edition features the remastered album, with a treasure trove of bonus material, including new liner notes, 19 never~before~heard demos, an unreleased 1991 live show, plus eight music videos, a 1991 EPK video, and the album in hi~res and 5.1 Surround Sound formats on a Blu~ray disc.
★   The four~disc set, meanwhile, also boasts a rare 1991 recording of the band playing at Mountain Stage in Charleston, West Virginia, a rare artifact since R.E.M. did not tour in support of Out of Time. Lastly, the Blu~ray will include hi–resolution and 5.1 surround sound versions of Out of Time, as well as the eight music videos the band made for the LP. The disc will also feature Time Piece, the 1991 electronic press kit with in~studio footage and exclusive performances.Location: Athens, Georgia, U.S.
Album release: March 12, 1991 / 18/11/2016
Recorded: September~October 1990
Studio: Bearsville Studios, Woodstock, New York, United States; John Keane Studios, Athens, Georgia, United States (recording); Soundscape Studios, Atlanta, Georgia, United States (strings); Prince’s Paisley Park Studios, Chanhassen, Minnesota, United States (mixing)
Number of Discs: 4
Record Label: Concord Records
Duration:
Tracks:
CD 1:
01. Radio Song      4:15
02. Losing My Religion      4:28
03. Low      4:56
04. Near Wild Heaven      3:19
05. Endgame      3:50
06. Shiny Happy People      3:45
07. Belong      4:06
08. Half a World Away      3:27
09. Texarkana      3:39
10. Country Feedback      4:09
11. Me in Honey      4:08
CD 2:
12. Losing My Religion 1 (Demo)      4:00
13. Near Wild Heaven 1 (Demo)      4:04
14. Shiny Happy People 1 (Demo)      3:13
15. Texarkana 1 (Demo)      3:47
16. Untitled Demo 2      3:31
17. Radio — Acoustic (Radio Song 1) (Demo)      4:12
18. Near Wild Heaven 2 (Demo)      3:36
19. Shiny Happy People 2 (Demo)      3:55
20. Slow Sad Rocker (Endgame) (Demo)      4:29
21. Radio – Band (Radio Song 3) (Demo)      4:21
22. Losing My Religion 2 (Demo)      4:33
23. Belong (Demo)      4:15
24. Blackbirds (Half a World Away) (Demo)      3:24
25. Texarkana (Demo)      4:02
26. Country Feedback (Demo)      4:09
27. Me On Keyboard (Me in Honey) (Demo)      3:43
28. Low (Demo)      4:52
29. 40 Sec. (40 Second Song) (Demo)      1:22
30. Fretless 1 (Demo)      4:51
CD 3:
01. Introduction
02. World Leader Pretend
03. Radio Song
04. Fall on Me
05. Its the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
06. Half a World Away
07. Belong
08. Love Is All Around
09. Losing My Religion
10. Dallas (featuring Billy Bragg, Robyn Hitchcock, Clive Gregson & Christine Collister)
11. Radio Song
12. Disturbance at the Heron House
13. Low
14. Swan Swan H
15. Pop Song 89
Blue~ray, Disc: 4
01. Out of Time Hi~Resolution Audio
02. Out of Time 5.1 Surround Sound
03. Radio Song (music video)
04. Losing My Religion (music video)
05. Low (music video)
06. Near Wild Heaven (music video)
07. Shiny Happy People (music video)
08. Belong (music video)
09. Half a World Away (music video)
10. Country Feedback (music video)
11. Time Piece
♣   All songs written by Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe.      © NEW YORK — APRIL 01:  (L~R) Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, and Peter Buck of R.E.M. perform during the NBC ‘Today’ show concert series at Rockefeller Center on April 1, 2008 in New York City.  (Photo credit: Scott Gries/Getty Images)
Personnel:
R.E.M.:
√   Bill Berry — drums, percussion, congas on "Low", bass on "Half a World Away" and "Country Feedback", piano on "Near Wild Heaven", backing vocals on Near Wild Heaven", "Belong", and "Country Feedback"; production
√   Peter Buck — electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin on "Losing My Religion" and "Half a World Away"; production
√   Mike Mills — bass; backing vocals; organ on "Radio Song", "Low", "Shiny Happy People", "Half a World Away", and "Country Feedback"; piano on "Belong"; harpsichord on "Half a World Away"; percussion on "Half a World Away"; lead vocals on "Near Wild Heaven" and "Texarkana"; keyboards and arrangement on "Losing My Religion" and "Texarkana"; production
√   Michael Stipe — lead vocals, melodica and arrangement on "Endgame", backing vocals on "Near Wild Heaven" and Texarkana"; production; packaging; photography
Additional musicians:
√   David Arenz — violin on "Radio Song", "Low", "Near Wild Heaven", "Endgame", "Shiny Happy People", "Half a World Away", and "Texarkana"
√   Ellie Arenz — violin on "Radio Song", "Low", "Near Wild Heaven", "Endgame", "Shiny Happy People", "Half a World Away", and "Texarkana"
√   Mark Bingham — string arrangements on "Radio Song", "Low", "Near Wild Heaven", "Endgame", "Shiny Happy People", "Half a World Away", and "Texarkana"
√   David Braitberg — violin on "Radio Song", "Low", "Near Wild Heaven", "Endgame", "Shiny Happy People", "Half a World Away", and "Texarkana"
√   Andrew Cox — cello on "Radio Song", "Low", "Near Wild Heaven", "Endgame", "Shiny Happy People", "Half a World Away", and "Texarkana"
√   Reid Harris — viola on "Radio Song", "Low", "Near Wild Heaven", "Endgame", "Shiny Happy People", "Half a World Away", and "Texarkana"
√   Peter Holsapple — bass guitar on "Radio Song" and "Low"; acoustic guitar on "Losing My Religion", "Shiny Happy People", and "Texarkana"; electric guitar on "Belong"
√   Ralph Jones — double bass on "Radio Song", "Low", "Near Wild Heaven", "Endgame", "Shiny Happy People", "Half a World Away", and "Texarkana"
√   Kidd Jordan — baritone saxophone on "Radio Song" and "Near Wild Heaven", tenor saxophone on "Radio Song" and "Endgame", alto saxophone on "Radio Song", bass clarinet on "Low" and "Endgame"
√   John Keane — pedal steel guitar on "Texarkana" and "Country Feedback"
√   Dave Kempers — violin on "Radio Song", "Low", "Near Wild Heaven", "Endgame", "Shiny Happy People", "Half a World Away", and "Texarkana"
√   KRS≈One — rapping on "Radio Song"
√   Scott Litt — echo~loop feed on "Radio Song"
√   Elizabeth Murphy — cello on "Radio Song", "Low", "Near Wild Heaven", "Endgame", "Shiny Happy People", "Half a World Away", and "Texarkana"
√   Paul Murphy — lead viola on "Radio Song", "Low", "Near Wild Heaven", "Endgame", "Shiny Happy People", "Half a World Away", and "Texarkana"
√   Kate Pierson — vocals on "Near Wild Heaven", and duet on "Shiny Happy People", "Me in Honey"
√   Jay Weigel — orchestral liaison on "Radio Song", "Low", "Near Wild Heaven", "Endgame", "Shiny Happy People", "Half a World Away", and "Texarkana"
√   Cecil Welch — flugelhorn on "Endgame"
Production:
•   Dave Friedlander — engineering
•   Tom Garneau — engineering
•   Ben Katchor — illustrations
•   John Keane — engineering
•   Scott Litt — production, engineering
•   Ted Malia — engineering
•   Stephen Marcussen — mastering, at Precision Mastering, Los Angeles, California, United States
•   Frank Ockenfels — photography
•   Tom Recchion — packaging
•   Mike Reiter — engineering
•   Ed Rogers — illustrations
•   Karina Santo — photography
•   Doug Starn — photography
•   Mike Starn — photography      © Mike Mills (centre) and Michael Stipe of R.E.M take part in a Q&A session at The Borderline in Soho, London, as they celebrate the 25th anniversary of their landmark album ‘Out of Time’. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday November 18, 2016. See PA story SHOWBIZ REM. Photo credit should read: Victoria Jones/PA Wire
Review
by Andrzej Lukowski November 17th, 2016; Score: 9
★   After an ‘80s spent as the most critically revered band on the planet, R.E.M. finally became global superstars with 1991’s Out of Time and its extraordinary lead single ‘Losing My Religion’.
★   It wouldn’t last: the following year’s Automatic for the People would push them further into the critical and commercial stratosphere. But their huge new audience — and much of their old one — would be flummoxed by the uncompromising, experimental follow~up records Monster, New Adventures in Hi~Fi and Up, and while the band remained popular, the duration of their actual superstardom was probably only really four or so years, from the release of ‘Losing My Religion’ to the end of the troubled Monster tour.
★   None of this could be guessed at in March 1991, when Out of Time‘s success seemed strangely logical, the next obvious step on the band’s steadily upwards journey.
★   R.E.M.’s seventh full~length gets stranger the harder you think about, its superficial radio~friendly pleasantness belying a record that’s by turns brooding, goofy, anthemic, atonal and as eclectic as anything the band ever put out. It’s a record laden with guest musicians, spoken word numbers, songs where Mike Mills sings lead instead of Michael Stipe, silly songs, serious songs, love songs and more. It’s all things to all people: for the R.E.M. hardcore, the burning, cathartic, stream~of~consciousness expulsion of ‘Country Feedback’ tends to be ‘the one’; to buskers and shaggy haired berks around festival campfires in the Nineties, it’s ‘Half A World Away’; to mistrustful grungers, the cheerily preposterous ‘Shiny Happy People’ was a stick to unfairly beat the band with.
★   And then there’s ‘Losing My Religion’. It is, by any measure, one of the greatest pop songs of the twentieth century. It is an enormous, global hit that sounds like little else ever written; it has no legacy apart from its own success. There are no R.E.M. songs that really sound like it, let alone songs by anyone else. It did not herald a new age of mandolin rock.
★   Discussing its appeal could fill up this entire review, and probably not really get anywhere. But 25 years in it feels both timeless and inevitable — it has a driving, propulsive power, something about the Möbius strip cascade of Peter Buck’s mandolin twirling around Bill Berry’s massive drums, in turn impacting with Stipe’s snarled/yelped “I thought that I heard you laughing’. I There’s so much more to the song than that, but beneath its sleek folky darkness there is a seething nuclear energy.
★   Out of Time received rapturous reviews upon release, but doesn’t often seems to get mentioned as anyone’s favourite R.E.M. record. There’s any number of reasons why that might be: its eclecticism, for starters: it’s not an inconsistent listen, but it’s difficult to characterise (at the time Stipe called it a set of ‘love songs’, which people clung on to but he’s admitted wasn’t a very good description). It is inevitably overshadowed by the following year’s monumental Automatic for the People. And of course, some people — bad people — just really hate ‘Shiny Happy People’ (they’re wrong).
★   If it does have any through thread it’s maybe a certain sense of the pastoral. Politics and heavy guitars are shelved. A yearning for the bucolic carries the likes of ‘Low’, ‘Texarkana’ and ‘Endgame’. There is something of the innocent, primary school singalong to ‘Radio Song’ and ‘Shining Happy People’ (emphasised on the latter by the chipper tones of guest Kate Pierson). And the dark ‘Losing My Religion’ and ‘Country Feedback’ feel primal and shamanic — wilderness songs, not city songs.
★   In many respects the band remained as cryptic on Out of Time as on Murmur, but the mood is lighter — open and innocent. It is R.E.M.’s most welcoming record, the band framing themselves as a virtual collective as Stipe repeatedly makes way for Mills or guests Pierson and KRS~One.
★   Is it a work of genius? Of course, but it’s also an album so devoid of rock star posturing and self~importance, so informal that ‘genius’ feels like an odd word to apply to it next to the band’s conspicuously grander records.
★   Does it need a reissue? No, but R.E.M. have hardly milked their back catalogue and I think the band’s decision to dutifully return to their quarter century campaign is entirely reasonable, even if there’s nothing overtly revelatory here.
★   Disc one is the original album, and though apparently remastered, it basically sounds the same — Scott Litt’s crisp, clean production always had a plangent directness that suited Out of Time perfectly, and any remastering tweaks are pretty imperceptible.
★   Disc two here is entirely comprised of demos, many of them instrumental, and certainly not something to repeatedly listen to in a single sitting. There’s some worthwhile stuff here though — the demo of ‘Texarkana’ reveals a completely different, Stipe~led country number with a completely different set of lyrics; the demo of ‘Country Feedback’ confirms the oft~cited fact that the album version is in fact the demo (there’s just a couple of extraneous backing vocals); and really hardcore nerds may be interested in an untitled, unused demo that sounds rather a lot like NAIHF’s ‘Low Desert’.
★   R.E.M. were now superstars. But in many ways they didn’t seem so far removed from the wry indie leading lights who’d put out Green in 1988. The next year they would put out the autumnal masterpiece that would define their brief, dignified stint as the biggest band in the world.  ★   http://drownedinsound.com/
★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★    

R.E.M.

Out of Time [25th Anniversary Edition][3 CD/Blu~ray]

---

NEWS

archiv

ALBUM COVERS X.