Monday, July 14, 2008

Podunkian Music Club July 13, 2008

REM-- Losing My Religion



We track back a few years for tonight's selection to the music club, featuring those wandering minstrels from Athens, Georgia, REM.

We're not sure what it is about Athens, but some of the best in last centuries pop and rock music seemed to radiate from that Georgian city.

With the group back on the road with a new album Accelerate and currently rolling through Europe, the edgy and always ahead of the curve sound is back for a new century.

Mainstays of the college radio environment in the early eighties, they move on from alt rock status to more mainstream rockers after they rattled off a number of album oriented radio hits through the start of that decade and into the early nineties.

They're infectious sounds and intriguing lyrical content began to take on the more established of music's order, making with a declaration that meaningful music was back and ready for the listening.

One of the more contentious of those songs is tonight's selection, Losing My Religion, which gained the band no shortage of critics from the bible belt, but secured just as many fans for their infectious sound and desire to keep their music on the front burner.

It will be interesting to watch and see if they can connect with a new era of fans, or just bring the old time REM fans back into the tent as the tour in support of Accelerate continues.

While we wait for that to play through, we go back to 1991 and perhaps one of their most popular of songs.

Recording-- Out of Time
Artist-- REM

No comments: