Hearing the newly reengineered songs opened my ears to them all over again. I think the slightly flat mix of the original release was partly responsible for my muted reaction. Up has now regained its place for me among R.E.M.’s top albums. More emotionally naked than just about any other release, and more sonically adventurous than any of their other later albums, this is a band confronting massive change head on and doing it with refreshing honesty and maturity.

A word about the reissue: fans looking for bonus songs will be disappointed, but that’s not to say there’s nothing new. The package contains a CD that is essentially identical to the original CD version, a booklet with excellent liner notes, and a DVD containing the 5.1 mix of the songs, a bonus video shot during the studio sessions with live-in-studio versions of “Daysleeper,” “Lotus,” and “At My Most Beautiful,” lyrics, and photos. There’s nothing revelatory in the video, unless it’s that the group was clearly thinking hard about live performances of this material even while the record was being made.

This reissue is one in a series of R.E.M.’s Warner Brothers albums to be re-released in CD+DVD format. Also available are Green, Out of Time, Automatic for the People, Monster, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Reveal, In Time: the Best of R.E.M. 1989–2003, and Around the Sun. (Linked titles point to BlogCritics reviews of the reissued albums.)

Article Author: Timothy Jarrett

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