Search - Rem :: Dead Letter Office

Jill B. (jillh) from ATLANTA, GA
Reviewed on 10/23/2009...

One of R.E.M.'s best albums from their prime years. Some really good covers too, especially Pale Blue Eyes.

You kind of had to be there....

Clare Quilty | a little pad in hawaii | 11/13/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"... which is not to say I was hitting the Athens club scene in the mid-late-80s, I was a disgruntled high schooler in a hick town with a few cool-nerdy friends and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out ways to obtain beer and places to sit around and drink it. That's when we began to stain our pink lungs with cigarettes and sit on the hoods of cars in fields, playing music on a one-speaker boom box: Elvis Costello's "Trust" and "Armed Forces," Warren Zevon, They Might Be Giants, "Nebraska," the Violent Femmes and, especially, REM's "Dead Letter Office."



I completely respect a band's right to make the music they want to make, but at the same time I'm firmly a fan of REM's pre-"Losing My Religion" stuff (so fans of latter albums should take my 5-star rave with several grains of salt). And I love "Reckoning" and "Fables" and "Murmur" and most of all "Life's Rich Pageant." They're great, hand-tooled classics.



But "Dead Letter" is loose, banged-out, sloppy music by a surly young band for surly young people growing up in the waning days of the Reagan era.



"Ages of You" and "Voice of Harold" and "Rotary Ten" and "King of the Road" just kind of sum up winter, 87, for me and I can't listen to them without thinking about warm cans of Milwaukee's Best, Lucky Strikes and cottonmouth. And the covers of "There She Goes Again" and "Femme Fatale" led me directly to the Velvet Underground. Let me say that again: This Album Led Me to The Velvet Underground. Can an album, or anything, do more for a listener than that? I don't think so."

Best of the Rest

Brian D. Rubendall | Oakton, VA | 07/13/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

""Dead Letter Office" is a housecleaning effort from R.E.M.'s days on IRS records (1981-1987). As such it provides an interesting alternative view of the band. Several of the tracks reveal a goofy sense of humor that doesn't show itself on their "proper" albums. Two examples are "Voice of Harold," which features the backing track from "7 Chinese Brothers" as singer Michael Stipe reads a studio promotional flyer, and a cover of the Roger Miller country staple "King of the Road." The band acknowledges its considerable debt to the Velvet Underground by covering no less than three songs ("There She Goes Again," "Pale Blue Eyes" and "Femme Fatle") that are among the best performances here. Aerosmith's "Toys in the Attic" even gets a workout. The CD includes the contents of the band's 1981 EP "Chronic Town" as a (very considerable) bonus.Overall, rarities albums don't get much better than "Dead Letter Office.""