Who needs another exegesis on what's gone wrong with R.E.M., how they're not the band they used to be, how they've grown from local to global and lost so much in the process? Whether the ongoing string of lackluster albums is the long, sad fade-out of a favorite band or merely a trough between creative crests will be apparent only with time, and past triumphs have earned the band enough good will to let them play out either trajectory. Until then, Live, like last year's And I Feel Fine and 2003's In Time, proves that they are still a good band almost despite themselves, able to retrace their last 25 years of steps while holding an arena's rapt attention. As you might expect, the new release is heavy on new tracks, rehabbing songs from DOA albums Around the Sun and Reveal while only occasionally digging deeper into their rich catalog.
Recorded during a two-night gig in Dublin in 2005, Live splits the show unevenly and perhaps unnecessarily. The first disc contains 17 tracks, the second only five-- ostensibly the full show on one and the encore on the other. On the whole, Live doesn't rewrite their recent history or argue a case for newer, maligned tracks. Instead, the set just presents rote run-throughs of "Boy in the Well", "Electron Blue", and "The Ascent of Man" that sound slightly more lively for having a crowd singing along. Granted, it's not simply a case of old = good, new = bad. Nothing is ever that simple. Sporting blue facepaint that looks like an approximation of protective eyewear, Stipe testifies persuasively on "Imitation of Life", one of their best late-period pieces, and the band ratchet up the tension on "Walk Unafraid" so that it sounds positively Green. "Bad Day", from 2003, sounds particularly energized as the band graft Bush-era dissension onto Peter Buck's Reagan-era riffs, creating one of the show's best and most effortlessly crowd-pleasing moments.
Still, the best tracks on Live predate Bill Berry's departure-- as you might expect. Early in the show, they speed up "Cuyahoga" from 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant, making the original's balladic lament about corporate pollution sound more pointed and angrier, even outright hostile. Here is the first glimpse of frustration in the show, the first and strongest hint at a creative dilemma that extends beyond the reach of lyrics and melodies, as if R.E.M. realize that yesterday's change-the-world anthems have actually changed nothing. You want them to hold on to that disillusionment, to keep pushing themselves and their audience, but instead they settle for the easy answers of "Everybody Hurts". Later, Stipe introduces "I Wanted to Be Wrong" and "Final Straw" as "songs that we wrote as protests to the actions of our government and the current administration. This is our state-of-the-union address." When the crowd explodes in cheers, you realize the band is only preaching to the converted, not challenging them.
Fortunately, "Orange Crush" returns briefly to that uncomfortable headspace, as Stipe, playing the part of the bureaucratic enemy, leads the crowd in militaristic chants through a distorting megaphone. "The One I Love" abstracts that dilemma, emphasizing the tense dynamic between the sung half-verses and the hollered half-chorus, which echoes the abrupt start-stop rhythms of "Drive". Neither song settles into anything expected, but constantly changes shape, easily filling the arena space with non-arena sounds. "I'm Gonna DJ", the set's only new song, manages to repeat the trick, but as a curious celebration of annihilation rather than an ominous warning. The song isn't all that great-- it's a Monster-era glam track, terrain well trod-- but it is fascinating as an inversion of the album's previous highs.
But "I'm Gonna DJ" also points to the band's troubling complacency: The major difference between the new material and the old is that they have become content-- no, desperate-- to be understood, never pushing themselves or their audience with shades of ambiguity. It's no small point that the release of Live means their output in the last decade is split evenly between weak new material and legacy-shaping reissues. R.E.M. may be growing complacent with age, to the extent that they are now putting out a pointless double live album during the holiday season-- the ultimate corporate product. What makes Live so disappointing isn't that it offers too few shots of the band they were, but so many glimpses of the band they could be, if they were more adventurous in hi-fi.
