Pitchfork

The first thing you need to know is that neither of the two sets-- the one disc set of previously released material nor the collector's edition with an extra disc of live tracks, rarities, and demos-- has "Romance" on it. So you'll want to hang on to the now out-of-time Eponymous, or at least burn the song before you sell the disc. The second thing you need to know is that the second disc contains a favorite track from each member, and Stipe chooses "Time After Time (AnnElise)", quite possibly to piss off Stephen Malkmus (how's that for a little bit of indie arcana?).

After that, you probably know everything you need to know: how the band was started by four UGA students; how their enigmatic frontman occasionally sang in a mumble; how he wrote impressionistic lyrics that made obfuscation a virtue; how the drummer played close to the chest to give the songs their tightly wound tension; how the guitarist updated Roger McGuinn's Americana strum; how they released a five-song EP and then a near-perfect full-length debut in 1983, followed by four more excellent albums, a rarities comp, and the aforementioned Eponymous on I.R.S. Records, before signing to Warner Brothers; how during those years they embodied Southern locality, effectively pinpointing Athens, Georgia, as a hotbed of indie music; how they eventually traded that locality for national and then global generality, the music suffering as their scope widened; how you and me and maybe every one else who heard Around the Sun wished the band would either pack it all in or take $500 and whatever equipment they could carry and record their next album in some kudzu-covered barn in the middle of rural Georgia.

As disappointing as their Warner Brothers trajectory has proved, R.E.M.'s I.R.S. years were a period of sustained and boundless creativity, which makes And I Feel Fine inevitably enthralling, and hearing these songs in the context of a late-career retrospective feels undeniably rewarding. In short, there's not a bad song on this tracklist. Hell, there's not even a single merely good song on here. And I Feel Fine is 42 mind-blowing tracks from a band that helped to define and codify indie rock.

With startling obviousness, Disc 1 begins with "Begin the Begin", the Lifes Rich Pageant opener, and spirals outward with no regard for chronology. "Begin" is one of R.E.M.'s rock songs (the kind they tried to replicate on Monster), and it immediately showcases their elemental sound, each instrument carrying democratic weight and creating a surprisingly aggressive whole, topped by Stipe's alternately precise enunciations and Weird Harold growls and barks. R.E.M. were an intuitively tight unit, a fact that often gets lost in the legend: Bill Berry, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills were a power trio, all rhythm section but all lead, and their expansive musical vocabulary-- encompassing power pop, folk, soul, classic rock, and even punk-- proved surprisingly malleable over time. The group was as dynamic on an early track like "Radio Free Europe" and the gentle "Perfect Circle" as on the countrified "Can't Get There From Here" and deceptive rock songs like "Life and How to Live It" and "The One I Love", with its contradictory declarations of romantic devotion and manipulation.

If the band was a traditional, yet inventive, three-piece, who knows what Stipe was? Possessed of a roomy, plainspoken tenor that could rise into a plaintive keen, he adopted new approaches for each song, sounding withdrawn on "Perfect Circle" or mimicking a hick accent on "Can't Get There from Here". His fragile falsetto sounds like it could break on "Feeling Gravitys Pull", the perfect compliment to Buck's question-mark guitar chords. Stipe liked to adopt the posture of Southern enigma, but it was less a stance than an elusive ploy. He turned regional vernacular into lyrical puzzles, reading rural Georgia culture as poetry and philosophy, incorporating colloquialisms like "I will rearrange your scales" and "can't get there from here" (and later, more famously, "losing my religion") into lyrics that prized vexing obscurity and absorbing complexity, settling for no set meanings but only open-ended impressions. Remarkably, he sounded like he belonged to this marginal culture, writing and singing his songs with absolutely no class or intellectual condescension or any trace of irony, which seems sadly impossible today.

What's missing from Disc 1 are the album tracks that comprise the darker corners of the R.E.M. catalog, which, it could be argued, are the true essence of the band's legend. For this reason, the second disc of And I Feel Fine, heavy with less canonical songs but compiled with obvious care, proves just as revelatory and representative as the first: The tracklist presents a subterranean history of the band to complement the popular legend. Disc 2 has a palindromic symmetry, beginning and ending with band members' personal picks. "Pilgrimage" (Mills), "These Days" (Berry), and "Disturbance at the Heron House" (Buck) could just as easily have been first-disc hits, but "Time After Time" remains a strange avenue (although Stipe's affection for it seems understandable, like a mother's love for the runt of the litter). The second and penultimate sets of songs include alternate takes, demos, and unreleased rarities, including Hib-tone versions of two Murmur tracks, a wonderful slowed-down version of "Gardening at Night", and early demos of later tracks "All the Right Friends" and "Bad Day".

But it's the center of Disc 2 that's the true prize of the set: four live tracks that amount to a concert of sorts. These songs, three from 1983 and one from 87, show the band as a fierce and tight live act, Stipe commanding the stage (his lengthy spoken-word intro to "Life and How to Live It" is a beaut) and the band muscling (yes, muscling) up behind him with celebratory bravado. At so few tracks this section is just a tease, but it raises two important questions: First, in their storied two-decade-plus career, why the hell haven't R.E.M. released a live album? And second, when they do, can it be a double?