Pile of Dross

So this CD has been sitting at the end of my Amazon wishlist for a while now, and I finally got round to buying last week to fill out an order to free P&P. For the most part its pretty reasonable, some of the sharper edges have been smoothed over and tracks perhaps flow more than the originals did though perhaps some of the energy and vibrancy has been diluted, but it does emphasis what the lyrics bring to the tracks.
But there’s one track that’s just a travesty - Everybody Hurts. Without the lyrics its lost a huge amount of its power, but the whole track seems to have been done in a sort of jazz/swing style that seems wildly inappropriate and makes the whole thing seem like the soundtrack to some sort of eighties romantic comedy. Ick ick ick.

I think I’m going to make a playlist: R.E.M. plays the music of R.E.M. and play the two back to back, to compare better, though I do think I have a tendency towards “imprinting” - the first version I hear of a track, original or cover, becomes the definitive version to me, and any variance from that first heard version makes me cringe, which may make me partial to the R.E.M originals more than I should be.

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