Alternative rock did not begin with a bang but with a Murmur. In 1983, a band from Athens, Georgia made its full-length album debut. The band was R.E.M.; the album was Murmur, Rolling Stone’s Album of the Year and one of the first alternative rock albums to gain mainstream notice. The two-CD 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of Murmur (I.R.S./UMe), released November 25, 2008, features that original landmark album remastered plus an additional disc with a previously unreleased concert recorded at Larry’s Hideaway in Toronto three months after Murmur’s April release.
The 16-song live performance boasts nine of Murmur’s 12 songs, including “Radio Free Europe”; three songs first heard on 1982’s Chronic Town EP; early renditions of two songs that would subsequently appear on the band’s second album, 1984’s Reckoning; “Just A Touch,” later heard on R.E.M.’s fourth album, 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant; and a cover of Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again,” which the group recorded in the studio for the b-side of “Radio Free Europe.”
Assembled in conjunction with R.E.M., Murmur – Deluxe Edition, the package also includes exclusive essays providing insight into the recording of the album by producers Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, as well as former I.R.S. executives Jay Boberg, Sig Sigworth, Carlos Grasso, Michael Plen.
