Reissue CDs Weekly: REM

Good grief, was Out of Time really 25 years ago? This was the seventh studio album from the li'l ole band from Athens, Georgia, and the one with which they finally cracked open the mainstream international market. This was when people still used to buy CDs, and a time when it was still possible for bands to sustain slow-growing careers which built steadily from the ground upwards.  

Having been one of the trailblazers of America's mid-Eighties alternative rock movement, growing a faithful following through college radio and endless touring, REM had had it moderately large with their previous album, Green (1988), their first for Warner Bros. Supercharged with a dose of corporate steroids, Green delivered a couple of big hit singles with "Orange Crush" and "Stand" and went on to sell four million copies. However, that was peanuts indeed alongside Out of Time, which has now racked up a gargantuan 18 million units. The great thing about it is that it did this without lapsing into bombast or over-production. Quite the opposite in fact, since much of Out of Time is acoustic, introspective and low-key, though subtly arranged and able to deliver a killer melody or sublime chorus at strategic moments.

Several of its songs became trademark pieces for the band. Vocalist/songwriter Michael Stipe has felt moved to apologise for the grinning, upbeat poppiness of "Shiny Happy People" (rarely has a song so accurately mirrored its title), but it gave them a Top 10 hit in Britain and America, while "Losing My Religion" went Top 30 in the UK and reached Number 4 in the US. A remarkable effort for a slightly mournful anthem whose primary instrument was a mandolin.

Also indelible, despite not being quite so chart-friendly, were the gorgeous "Near Wild Heaven", with its shimmering Beach Boys-ish harmonies and canon-like overlapping melody lines, and the opening track "Radio Song", a caustic reflection on the state of pop given a hefty kick up the rear by guest rapper KRS-One. Then they rang the changes with the slow and eerie "Country Feedback", featuring some unusually menacing pedal steel guitar, the funk-with-a-choral-arrangement of "Belong", and the thrumming folk-rock "Me in Honey", which carried the disc through the finishing tape. Enhanced by Mark Bingham's skilful string arrangements, canny deployment of non-rock instruments like the flugelhorn or the bass melodica, and some characterful vocal additions by Kate Pierson from fellow Athenians the B52s, Out of Time created its own private audio bubble in which repeated listenings kept revealing more hidden layers.

This anniversary reissue comes in several flavours. There's a two-CD set which gives you the original album (remastered), plus a disc of demos of songs from the album plus a couple of b-sides and an unreleased track. You can also get all that material as a set of three vinyl LPs. Then there's the 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition,which gives you all the aforementioned stuff plus live recordings from the band's performance at Mountain Stage in Charleston, West Virginia, from a batch of dates they performed in March and April 1991 as the Out of Time Promo Tour. As an added bonus, the Deluxe version lobs in a Blu-ray disc containing the Out of Time album in both Hi-Resolution Audio and 5.1 Surround Sound, all the video clips the band made for the album, and a promotional mini-documentary called Time Piece.

The value of all this will depend on how much of an REM fanatic you are. The Mountain Stage live material is in a rough, semi-unplugged format and is comically ramshackle in places, especially a version of Butch Hancock's "Dallas" with guest stars Billy Bragg, Robyn Hitchcock, Clive Gregson and Christine Collister which might have benefited from a rehearsal. Still, it does include other songs from the REM catalogue – "Fall On Me", "The End of the World As We Know It", "Disturbance at the Heron House" – which gives some context for the Out of Time material.

As for the demo recordings, several of them are just the instrumental tracks without vocals, and serve only to emphasise the crucial importance of Stipe's evocative lyrics and voice (warmer and grainier here than on earlier albums). It's interesting, up to a point, to compare acoustic and electric prototypes of "Radio Song", or to note that Stipe sings the demo of "Country Feedback" with noticeably more venom than he did on the finished version. Much more intriguing is Stipe singing a completely different set of lyrics on "Texarkana" than appeared on the album version (which was sung by bassist Mike Mills). None of this makes Out of Time a greater album than it already was, but it offers a window into the collective mind of REM in that long-ago year of 1991. 

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