REM, Murmur and Carnival of Sorts, Live 1 983 (USA)
Absolument (le son du live 1 est moins bon que celui du 2).
Ca fait toujours bizarre de voir Stipe avec ses superbes cheveux...
Murmur est très particulier dans la discographie du groupe, production extrêmement nette et sans fioritures, avec une basse qui sonne magnifiquement et est très audible, quasiment comme dans Violent Femmes.
Mike Mills est probablement un des meilleurs bassistes des 80's, sinon plus. Son jeu au médiator est ce qui donne ce son, en plus de la marque de sa basse.
Comme le dit ce remarquable texte anglais de Decade 7787, l'histoire de la production du disque est intéressante puisque le groupe a cessé la collaboration avec le 1er producteur, jugé trop perfectionniste.
Basile Pesso, 13 avril 2 024 avec le double live (Fb)
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"On this date in 1983, R.E.M. released their debut studio album MURMUR, (April 12, 1983).
NOTE: The video here features RADIO FREE EUROPE from MURMUR and CARNIVAL OF SORTS (the third song on the band's 1982 debut EP Chronic Town)
40 years after its original release, MURMUR is still fascinating in its eerie sense of musical space.
Back in 1983, REM were most often compared to the Byrds, and thanks to Peter Buck's ringing guitar on songs like ‘Talk About The Passion’, ‘Catapult’, or ‘Sitting Still’, along with Michael Stipes' lead vocals over soaring harmonies, it was easy to see why.
But that was merely one influence, and a misleading one at that, because with no one source dominating, R.E.M. faintly recalled a host of mid-'60s L.A. bands from The Leaves to "underground” faves like Kaleidoscope, David Lindley's first band. R.E.M. might have thoroughly transformed their influences but the result sounded both familiar and wholly original.
Murmur's oddness was affecting because it wove itself around structures and riffs that sounded familiar – a strange system hum, for instance, winds itself up into the catchiest opener, RADIO FREE EUROPE.
In these efforts, Buck's guitar solos were capable of breaking through the mix and soaring, and any band that could come up with melodies this rich knew a thing or two about pop music.
The lyrics, however, were a flight of ideas from the mind of a meditative 23-year-old. Trying to unravel them, it still feels as though you're divining the deepest of riddles for meaning.
“Early sessions for the album with Stephen Hague, the synth-pop producer who later worked on New Order's True Faith, were quickly rejected, and American producers Mitch Easter and Don Dixon were brought in instead,” wrote Jude Rogers for Word in 2009.
“They seemed to understand that although REM had the rhythms of rock, the jangle of the Byrds and the raw grit of Gang Of Four in their belly, they also needed to create a sound-world of their own. Easter and Dixon brought in strange noises – bangs and bells — and recorded instruments at varying distances from the microphone, so you couldn't place where the ghostly figures were coming from.”
“At the album's centre point, like a pearl in an oyster, is a song that tells us as much about REM today as the REM that existed a quarter of a century ago. This is 'Perfect Circle', a masterpiece of simple melody and melancholy, and one of the few REM songs to be attributed mainly to the band's former drummer, Bill Berry, who also wrote most of 'Everybody Hurts'.”