Life's Rich Pageant

A 25th anniversary minibox stuffs poster and postcards in with a mother lode second disc of 19 "Athens Demos," from punky ("Bad Day") to finished ("All the Right Friends").

Released in the summer of 1986, the grammatically challenged Lifes Rich Pageant was their fourth long-player and, with hindsight, a watershed album residing on the cusp between the group's initial chiming-but-oblique garage-rock signature and the stadium-tailored sound of the albums with which they would seduce the world later in the decade.

Time has only been kind to Life's Rich Pageant, and, hopefully, not much more time will be required to it to take its place in the rock and roll canon as the practically perfect album that it is.

Taken as a whole, the two-CD incarnation of Life's Rich Pageant makes a case for the album taking its rightful place alongside such obvious classics as Murmur and Out of Time.

Even without the bonus disc full of rare goodies, this remastered version of Lifes Rich Pageant is required listening.

The momentum and joie de vivre is intoxicating, and unlike many a transitional record, it's a genuine hoot, an unexpected blast of sunshine between the darkness of Fables… and the fires of Document.

The whole package is a head-snapping reminder that when R.E.M. was on fire, you couldn't put them out with all the water in the world.

It's still considered the band's last album as an underground presence, so it holds importance as something monumental in the band's development. As an album, Lifes Rich Pageant is enjoyable and clean.

Although it shines a giant and unmistakable signal toward the direct and poppy approach the band would undertake on their next few albums, Pageant still retains the mumbles of Murmur, the jangles of Reckoning, and the rustic tones of Fables of the Reconstruction.

It's both epilogue and prologue, yet these songs retain their own specific flavor, as R.E.M. map the borders between small clubs and large venues, between underground and mainstream, between rhythm and melody, between outrage and hope. That in-between quality still sounds invigorating so many years later.

Commemorative repackage or not, Lifes Rich Pageant is a must-listen rock record that is too often overshadowed by more chatted-about releases.

Before stardom, they stopped off to reinvent guitar rock. [Aug. 2011, p. 128]

R.E.M. were already college-radio heroes by the time they made Lifes Rich Pageant in 1986. They could've kept making mumbly, jangly tunes for their core audience, but they went bigger and bolder, stepping toward radio-friendliness while retaining their iconoclastic spirit.

Life's Rich Pageant serves as both a guidepost for how R.E.M. moved in an arena-sized direction and as another extraordinary album in the band's uninterrupted run of true greatness that spanned between Murmur and Automatic for the People.

There's a theory that REM were never the same after their lyrics became audible, but Lifes Rich Pageant is packed with songs on which the new clarity of Stipe's vocals bears dividends.

Twenty-five years ago, Lifes Rich Pageant found R.E.M. metamorphosing from what was effectively a turbo-charged folk-rock cult indie outfit into a proper rock band capable of filling stadia.

Life's Rich Pageant rather sweetly gathers the emotions and carries them back to the time.

R.E.M. were already walking head and shoulders taller than most by now, but Life's Rich Pageant was nevertheless a startlingly great leap forward. [Aug 2011, p.102]