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R.E.M. - "Live From Austin, Tx"
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Written by Mark Reed
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Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Not all that and a bag of chips..
To somewhat of a yawn, and not even an Amazon listing, REM mine their recent history with yet another live release, this time taken from a short 72 minute live set filmed in a TV studio in Austin, Texas. Shorn of any of the staging of their inventive subsequent tour, “Live In Austin, TX” is as imaginative as it’s prosaic title, a bare and spartan hour and a quarter of the band performing mostly new songs on a small stage, recorded by a handful of cameras. Whilst there is plenty good in this disc and performance, the overwhelming air is one of being shortchanged – it’s half the length of the gargantuan, passionate, and career-high sets of the full tour later on the year (at least four of which were filmed and broadcast on television), and captures none of the staging of that tour – the band are informal, with between song gaps of indeterminate length. The informality works out nicely when Stipe begins a conversation with two very young fans in REM t-shirts ; but also provides a fair chunk of ‘dead air space’ where nothing of anything consequence happens. Perhaps then, I question the wisdom of an unedited performance : it’s a little dull to see the band scratching their wrists for thirty seconds or a full minute as one of them has a glass of water.
Whilst all this sounds negative, it isn’t. REM maintain their sparkle, and the album this show was promoting – “Accelerate” was a fine collection of songs (poorly mastered, mind you) – and a vibrant return to form. The record is well represented here, with many songs making their first visual appearance as well as a sprinkling of the better known older material. Somewhat tellingly, only a handful of the ‘classic’ era songs are represented with Losing My Religion, Man On The Moon, Drive, Fall On Me, and So Central Rain. REM are a band that doesn’t look back much, and whilst there is nothing wrong with this release, it is a spartan document that is short on length and contains no extra material at all, overall, being the sound of a goal being missed : there were far better, longer, more passionate, and visually exciting shows from this era that better capture the spirit of the band.Only registered users can write comments.
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