R.E.M. - Dead Letter Office (1987) WMA320

... which is not to say I was hitting the Athens club scene in the mid-late-80s, I was a disgruntled high schooler in a hick town with a few cool-nerdy friends and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out ways to obtain beer and places to sit around and drink it. That's when we began to stain our pink lungs with cigarettes and sit on the hoods of cars in fields, playing music on a one-speaker boom box: Elvis Costello's "Trust" and "Armed Forces," Warren Zevon, They Might Be Giants, "Nebraska," the Violent Femmes and, especially, REM's "Dead Letter Office."

I completely respect a band's right to make the music they want to make, but at the same time I'm firmly a fan of REM's pre-"Losing My Religion" stuff (so fans of latter albums should take my 5-star rave with several grains of salt). And I love "Reckoning" and "Fables" and "Murmur" and most of all "Life's Rich Pageant." They're great, hand-tooled classics.

But "Dead Letter" is loose, banged-out, sloppy music by a surly young band for surly young people growing up in the waning days of the Reagan era.

"Ages of You" and "Voice of Harold" and "Rotary Ten" and "King of the Road" just kind of sum up winter, 87, for me and I can't listen to them without thinking about warm cans of Milwaukee's Best, Lucky Strikes and cottonmouth. And the covers of "There She Goes Again" and "Femme Fatale" led me directly to the Velvet Underground. Let me say that again: This Album Led Me to The Velvet Underground. Can an album, or anything, do more for a listener than that? I don't think so.

by Clare Quilty

TRACKLIST:

01 - Crazy.wma
02 - There She Goes Again.wma
03 - Burning Down.wma
04 - Voice Of Herold.wma
05 - Burning Hell.wma
06 - White Tornado.wma
07 - Toys In The Attic.wma
08 - Windout.wma
09 - Ages Of You.wma
10 - Pale Blue Eyes.wma
11 - Rotary Ten.wma
12 - Bandwagon.wma
13 - Femme Fatale.wma
14 - Walters Theme.wma
15 - King Of The Road.wma
16 - Wolves, Lower.wma
17 - Gardening At Night.wma
18 - Carnival Of Sorts (Box Cars).wma
19 - 1,000,000.wma
20 - Stumble.wma

WMA 320Kbps 44100Hz STEREO

DEDICATED TO azza1969