Thursday, July 7, 2011

Stream R.E.M.'s "Life's Rich Pageant" 25th Anniversary Edition


Athens, GA rock stalwarts / probably immortals R.E.M. have left an indelible mark on music for the past 30 years with 15 albums under their belt, including this year's Collapse Into Now. But even though they're still going strong, we have a great opportunity to look back at their storied history with next week's 25th anniversary reissue (wow) of their third album, Life's Rich Pageant, which is now available to stream exclusively at Spin.com.

As our friends at Slicing Up Eyeballs report, the reissue comes with a remastered version of the 1986 album along with a 19-track bonus disc entitled The Athens Demos. As that name implies, that disc has early cuts of all of the tracks off of Life's Rich Pageant, plus early versions of songs that would appear on later albums - for example, "March Song (King of Birds)," which would appear in its final form as "King of Birds" on Life's followup Document the next year. R.E.M. superfans will be especially happy with the inclusion of the demo for the heavily-bootlegged track "Wait."

Check it out in full over at Spin, and enjoy the video for "Fall on Me" below!

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