News

REM Re Issue Reckoning

• 6th Jul 2009

“‘Reckoning’ confirms R.E.M. as one of the most beautifully exciting groups on the planet,” wrote NME in 1984. Twenty-five years later, ‘Reckoning’ remains a fan favourite for capturing R.E.M. during the youthful freshness of a new, fiercely independent music scene.

The two-CD ‘Reckoning – Deluxe Edition’, released July 6th, features the original album remastered plus a bonus disc of a previously unreleased concert recorded during the band’s Little America tour at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom on July 7, 1984.

Inclusion of the live concert is particularly appropriate for the ‘Reckoning’ – Deluxe Edition’. Where ‘Murmur’ had been complex and deliberate, the band’s Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe, along with producers Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, saw ‘Reckoning’ as a “chance to turn up the volume, tear up the rule book, and capture instead R.E.M.’s on-stage mojo,” according to the Deluxe Edition liner notes by author Tony Fletcher.

In addition, ‘Reckoning’ and R.E.M’s 1983 debut album ‘Murmur’ will be simultaneously reissued on audiophile quality 180 gram vinyl in their complete original packaging.

On the Deluxe Edition’s bonus disc, the group not only performs eight of ‘Reckoning’s’ ten songs, ‘Gardening At Night’ from 1982’s Chronic Town EP, ‘Radio Free Europe’, ‘9-9’ and ‘Sitting Still’ from ‘Murmur’ but also new songs that had yet to make it onto tape: ‘Driver 8’ would later debut on R.E.M.’s third album and ‘Hyena’ on its fourth.

Even as Stipe lyrically delved into darker subject matter and the album included the band’s first true ballads, the melancholic ‘Time After Time (Annelise)’ and ‘Camera’- other tracks revealed a band steeped in the immediacy of playing gigs in a college town. From the pulsating ‘7 Chinese Bros’, hard-rocking ‘Little America’ and anthemic ‘(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville’.

Reckoning peaked on the charts at No.19 in the UK and No. 27 in the US, nine spots higher than Murmur (Rolling Stone’s 1983 Album of the Year) and was eventually certified gold. R.E.M. would go on to score #1-charting quadruple platinum albums and win worldwide adoration. In 2007, in its first year of eligibility, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.