Customer Reviews

Chronic Town [Vinyl]

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R.E.M.'s first published alboum, Chronic Town, is one of their best creations ever published. Although it contains only 5 songs, the greatness of Carnival Os Sorts (Box Cars), and Gardening At Night, make up for it. If you liked Green and Life's Rich Pagent, then you will probably love this alboum, which is included on the Dead Letter Office CD as tracks 16-21 with an acoustic version of Gardening At Night. I hope you'll enjoy this alboum as much as I did.

This litle 5 song EP was the high-water mark for an college/alternative-rock band from Athens, Georgia. Murmur, the first LP, was nearly as good. But everything after that, when lead singer Michael Stipe actually started using coherent lyrics as a concession to "audience accessibility, constituted moves down the ladder in direct correspondence to chronological order. This is not to saw that REM didn't produce some good Southern Pop-Rock through the Out of Time LP, but rather that the quality steadily declined and washed out completely after that.

Gardening at Night and 1,000,000 are simply infectious, and who cares about understanding the "lyrics." Indeed, I believe that Stipe is listed as "lead vocal instrument" on the cover. And this fairly characterizes what he was doing with his voice and the ocassional distinguishable word. In any event, if you want to know WHY the band called REM became so big, go back to Chronic Town and Murmur. If you don't like these, you'll probably realize that you don't really like REM nearly as much as you thought you did -- if at all.