Sales Pitch

Endless summers of high street sales, eh? HMV have been at it again for a good week and a half now, but these things are self-perpetuating anyway. There's plenty of very decent albums trading at £3.99 or £4.99, but for our purposes a lot of them are just too...



...blatantly...



...obvious...



...to particularly count as special recommendations. Admittedly one band hardly struggling for credibility, cash or sales is...



...but listening back to the IRS compilation does remind us, especially in light of Around The Sun, that there was a time when REM didn't make records specifically to be sung along to in stadiums, but recordings that were interesting, arranged with precision and brimming over with ideas and mystique. Imagine if the only thing you'd heard by them was Radio Free Europe...