Back in June, R.E.M.’s Mike Mills and Peter Buck traveled to Norway for the Sun Station Vadsø festival, featuring performances by a series of intertwined bands including The Dream Syndicate, Filthy Friends, The Minus 5 and The Baseball Project. Watch footage of them playing R.E.M. songs.

Police in Athens, Ga., this week arrested a former contractor accused of stealing $20,000 in audio gear from the 40 Watt Club, a burglary that had drawn offers of more than $15,000 in rewards from members of R.E.M., Camper Van Beethoven and others. The gear has been recovered, police said.

Today we unveil the results of Round 3 of our latest Slicing Up Eyeballs readers poll series, a 1-to-282 ranking of R.E.M.’s entire catalog of songs recorded between 1981 — the original Hib-Tone release of “Radio Free Europe” — and the band’s eventual break-up in 2011. Check out the full list right here.

Now that we’ve unveiled the results of our latest Slicing Up Eyeballs readers poll — one that ranks 282 songs recorded by R.E.M. — it seems like a good excuse to put that data to good use. Namely, we’ve thrown together a Spotify playlist of that ranked countdown. Well, minus the 38 songs that aren’t on the streaming service.

The legendary 40 Watt Club in Athens, Ga. — an early home base for college-rock mainstays R.E.M., The B-52s, Pylon, Love Tractor, Guadalcanal Diary and more — was burglarized Friday, with dozens of pieces of equipment stolen related to the venue’s PA system. Members of R.E.M. and Cracker have offered rewards.

We’ve been on something of an R.E.M. kick of late here at Slicing Up Eyeballs HQ, which made it easy to choose the third subject of our new readers poll series that seeks to rank the full recorded output of a given band. After putting The Cure and The Smiths up for votes, we now turn to R.E.M.

For this week’s installment of Vintage Video, we present what is believed to be the earliest pro-shot video footage of R.E.M. in concert: a 50-minute live set filmed on Oct. 10, 1982, for broadcast on TV by a South Carolina station about six months before the release of the band’s debut, Murmur. Watch it here.

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The second album from Pylon — beloved early-’80s Athens, Ga., post-punk contemporaries of R.E.M. and the The B-52’s — will be reissued next week in […]