REMtrospective, 6: Dead Letter Office
Title: Dead Letter Office
Released on: April 28, 1987
Favorite tracks: “Voice of Harold”
My “REMtrospective” project, a chronological, album-by-album review of the work of R.E.M. from the band’s first EP Chronic Town through its latest release Accelerate, seems to have experienced a “Can’t Get There From Here” episode. Despite having been derailed in late May (thanks in part to a couple of family vacations), it’s ready to start up again, bearing in mind that I’m more of an interested amateur than a pro rock critic or musicologist. If you missed them the first time, here are the entries for Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction and Lifes Rich Pageant. As Stipe sings on the latter, “Let’s begin again.”
The evolution of R.E.M.’s sound from murmured jangle to hammering clarity was well underway with 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant. Dead Letter Office, a collection of rarities and B-sides, nevertheless serves as a fitting transitional album, winding up REM’s early period. (The timing seems particularly appropriate to me personally, since I got my undergrad diploma a few weeks after Dead Letter Office came out.)
For me, most odds-and-sods song collections serve as appendices or supplements to a musical artist’s work, but they don’t stand on their own as well; I’m thinking of XTC’s Rag and Bone Buffet and Bruce Springsteen’s 18 Tracks, which have some songs I like and a lot of songs I can’t remember. Dead Letter Office is much the same. For many of these albums, it’s kind of interesting to hear them cover artists they clearly admire, or chew on a musical idea that came to fruition more successfully elsewhere. A lot of times “rarities” tracks remind me of deleted scenes from DVDs: there’s a reason why they didn’t make the final cut. But there are exceptions.