Review: R.E.M. lives on via Hollywood actor and other familiar faces at First Avenue

He’s performed Samuel Beckett on Broadway and memorized scripts for Oscar-nominated movies and Emmy-winning TV shows. So it shouldn’t be surprising Michael Shannon remembered lyrics to a bunch of rock songs at First Avenue on Wednesday night.

These weren’t Ramones or AC/DC tunes or other rock classics you can find on every karaoke machine, though. These were R.E.M. songs — wordy, poetic, esoteric and often hard to decipher because the original singer famously mumbled through a lot of them.

What’s more, they weren’t the R.E.M. songs most people know. They were mostly deep album cuts, B-sides and tracks recorded before the band broke big. There were a lot of them, too.

Such was the wonky, possibly nerdy but resoundingly lovelorn scene Wednesday at First Ave, where Shannon — without the help of a lyric screen — sang 30-some R.E.M. songs for the second year in a row with a crew of indie-rock vets who’ve played First Ave more times than they can count.

The ensemble was led by Jason Narducy of Bob Mould’s band, who served as guitarist and co-vocalist. He brought along his fellow Mould and Superchunk backer Jon Wurster on drums, John Stirratt of Wilco on bass and another Chicagoan also on guitar, Poi Dog Pondering’s Dag Juhlin.

Like Shannon — who could probably make more money in one day as an actor than he does in his month on tour with this band — most of these musicians didn’t really need the extra gig. They wanted it, a quality that quickly became obvious.

“There’s something strange going on tonight,” Shannon fittingly sang midway through the nearly 2½-hour performance.

Actually a Wire song that R.E.M. recorded — one of several such vicarious cover songs offered Wednesday, also including a Prince hit — “Strange” set the tone for the wide and weird array of tunes in the second part of the show. Even the most diehard fans didn’t see songs like “Bandwagon,” “New Test Leper” and “1,000,000” coming.

The first third of the concert featured a full performance of R.E.M.’s third album, “Fables of the Reconstruction,” to celebrate its 40th anniversary. That meant live interpretations of haunted-sounding, Southern-Gothic-y songs that R.E.M. themselves hadn’t performed for many years before permanently calling it quits in 2011, starting with the opener “Feeling Gravity’s Pull.”

Shannon sang in a deeper tone than R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, but he still managed to channel the elegance and tenderness of the album’s prettier fare, such as “Green Grow the Rushes” and “Wendell Gee.” Meanwhile, rockier “Fables” songs like “Driver 8” and especially “Can’t Get There From Here” sounded sped-up and slightly punkified; not surprising, coming from guys who play with Mould and Superchunk.

Shannon said he was “mind-blown and discombobulated” getting to perform at First Ave last year, when they played all of R.E.M.’s debut LP, “Murmur.” This time, he seemed right at home.

During the second set, the actor apologized to Twin Cities comedy hero Lizz Winstead, whose nonprofit Abortion Access Front was a beneficiary of the concert — and whose favorite R.E.M. album is apparently the one they skipped in the tour rotation, 1984’s sophomore effort “Reckoning.”

“We’ll try to make up for it tonight,” Shannon said.

That was his cue for the band to launch into “Reckoning’s” opening track “Harborcoat.” Three more cuts from the record came later: “7 Chinese Brothers,” “Little America” and the pre-encore finale “Second Guessing.”

The one and only hit on the setlist was the “Murmur” single “Radio Free Europe,” saved for the encore. All of the band’s MTV-era hits were ignored, including “Losing My Religion” and (thank God) “Shiny Happy People.” Other songs from R.E.M.’s platinum-selling records were offered, though, such as “Find the River” (same album as “Everybody Hurts”) and “Disturbance at the Heron House” (same as “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”).

A sign of how cultish and insider-y things got Wednesday: Shannon and Co. covered Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” exclusively for Minnesota fans, justifying it as part of the R.E.M. canon because members of the band re-recorded it with late rock legend Warren Zevon on their 1990 collaborative album as the Hindu Love Gods. Shannon knew all the words to that one, too.