REM: Classic or dud?

hey now
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/5e/ac/a1/5eaca146f1fdb428d3b8aaee718b886a.jpg
xp

lol I might invert Turrican's peak-period order

Green (especially "Stand") and Talking Heads' Little Creatures (especially "And She Was") were this kind of bizarre moment of mixing art school and VH-1 positivity. Pretty bold choice in a way, if they weren't wincing through it.

Overall, it'd probably look something like...

New Adventures In Hi-Fi > Automatic For The People > Reckoning > Murmur > Green > Lifes Rich Pageant > Accelerate > Fables of the Reconstruction > Document > Up > Monster > Out of Time > Reveal > Collapse Into Now > Around The Sun.

wouldn't invert that but I'll take Reveal over New Adventures for sure

"moment of mixing art school and VH-1 positivity" wouldn't be a bad description of REM's modus operandi !

I like "Shiny Happy People," and I don't even like Out Of Time.

Reckoning > Murmur > Chronic Town > Fables > Lifes Rich Pageant > Document > New Adventures > Green > Out Of Time

(never heard Automatic; disliked the singles so much that I never bothered with the rest of it)

"Shiny Happy People" is better than "Stand," I guess

more of a dull grumpy person myself

mills backing vocals REALLY started to bug me around shiny happy people for some reason. like in a peter brady voice cracking way. and i never really noticed them as much on the earlier stuff.

I could never embrace "Near Wild Heaven". Too much down the power pop road for my taste.

Ha, that's the other Out Of Time song I like; easily my favorite on the record.

yeah i love "near wild heaven"

My favorites from OOT are easily "Half A World Away" and "Country Feedback", though I love most of the stuff there with the exception of "Near Wild Heaven" and "Radio Song".

Great: 'Losing My Religion', 'New Wild Heaven', 'Shiny Happy People', 'Half a World Away', 'Country Feedback'
Alright: 'Endgame', 'Belong', 'Texarkana'
Ugh: 'Radio Song', 'Low', 'Me In Honey'

I love everything on Out of Time, my favorite REM album

string arrangement on "Low" = A+

song itself = F

Talking about string arrangements, I think it's easy to not pay attention to the string arrangements on Automatic For The People because the material itself is so strong, but the last time I listened to the album I found myself listening closely to the strings and other assorted stuff happening "below the surface", as it were. John Paul Jones did some great work on that record.

I don't think Me in Honey is bad. And I also like SHP but i'm not sure it's great. otherwise, you OTM

missed this from mark richardson at the top of this thread:

"No band is good forever, so based on my favorite REM material I'd have to say classic. But it feels odd giving that designation to a band that's about as interesting as Matchbox 20 to me now (I'm sure Matchbox 20 is actually great to all you wannabe Chuck Eddys, but you know what I mean ;-)"

ouch. all you future chuck eddy matchbox 20 defenders out there...wait, maybe he IS talking about you guys. you guys can defend almost anything. it's a marvel really.

this thread is old.

I love "Me in Honey."

here's another vote for Me in honey.

Loved the original album art:
https://finestvinylalbumcovers.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/honey-top.jpg?w=980&h=870&crop=1

i would totally listen to Automatic before i ever listened to Green or Out Of Time. or anything after Automatic. if someone put a gun to my head. and made me choose. Automatic has some pretty stuff on it. had a girlfriend who played it constantly after it came out and i still don't hate it.

Ugh:... 'Low', 'Me In Honey'

booooooooooooo

yeah those are both great.
if someone put a gun to my head. and made me choose. Automatic has some pretty stuff on it.
made me think of this classic
if someone held a gun to your head and said "Sing Pavement's 'Gold Soundz'" could you do it?

monster and new adventures are my favorite r.e.m. albums at this point

"Me In Honey" is one of their very best songs imo! Always love just how many ways people relate to this band, though - feel like they maybe have one of the more diverse fandoms in this sense. I guess lots of long-running acts must have similar kinds of divisions over which is the classic period, best albums and so on, but even within individual albums there's such a strong one-person's-junk-is-another's-treasure kinda effect.

The thing with Automatic For The People is that it seems so underrated now for a record that was totally inescapable in '92-'93. For me, personally, it's become one of those records in their discography that I often look because I'm so preoccupied talking about other R.E.M. records, and I often think to myself that I shouldn't bother putting it on because surely, SURELY I must be sick of hearing it at this stage... but then I listen to it, and find that tracks like 'Try Not To Breathe', 'Nightswimming', 'Find The River', 'Sweetness Follows', 'Monty Got A Raw Deal', 'Ignoreland' etc. have exactly the same effect on me as they ever did, and I become bowled over again at how complete and of-a-piece it sounds. Also, that a record that is so low-key in places that I'm amazed it sold the way it did.

"Me In Honey" is one of their very best songs imo! Always love just how many ways people relate to this band, though - feel like they maybe have one of the more diverse fandoms in this sense. I guess lots of long-running acts must have similar kinds of divisions over which is the classic period, best albums and so on, but even within individual albums there's such a strong one-person's-junk-is-another's-treasure kinda effect.

― the thirteenth floorior (Doctor Casino), Friday, February 5, 2016 6:53 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have the same kind of reaction whenever I come across anyone that says they don't like New Adventures In Hi-Fi, or certain tracks off it that aren't 'Binky The Doormat' (which is my least favourite song on there)

I like 2 songs on New Adventures, Leave & Binky

.... :O

NAIHF was my first experience of rushing to buy the new album my one of my favorite bands and getting home and listening to the album and being, like . . ."huh"

That was Automatic for me! (I mean Automatic For the People, or at least I thought I did, but then I realized that Automatic by the Jesus and Mary Chain may ACTUALLY have been my first experience of this...!)

There are songs from Murmur that are under 300,000 plays on Spotify, but that's true of a New Order record like Low-Life, too. There are songs from Power, Corruption and Lies that are under 400,000 plays.

I tend to think that the '80s were a time of diffuse enough taste that there are not going to be huge legacies for any bands, U2 included. They will have audiences, but I think they'll be more select than the big '60s and '70s bands had decades into the future.

And '90s, too - obviously, R.E.M. were very big early '90s.

Songs with under 400,000 plays on U2's War. Smallest number on Unforgettable Fire is "Elvis Presley and America" with about 426,000.

And I mean real fan-based legacies, too. Catalog legacy and not the legacy of their short list of songs with millions of plays. Looking at those is interesting, though, too.

If the popular song results that come up at the top of an artist's catalog on Spotify include everything, New Order have three songs over eight million plays and then it drops way down. R.E.M. have six songs over eight million, but five of those six are over seventeen million, including "Losing My Religion," which has over seventy-one million plays.

U2 has one song with more plays than LMR and one other with just about the same. They have three other songs, though, that are over thirty million.

In my mind "Half A World Away" is what REM were pushing for wrt the entire album

It's perfect post-You Are The Everything early 90s mandolin REM

^^So OTM

I don't know if this was intentional or just a coincidence, but looking at R.E.M.'s discography, aside from being able to divide their discography into three distinct periods (IRS/peak WB/post-Berry WB) with five albums in each period, the albums usually go in a pattern of 3 albums in a particular style, followed by "R.E.M. being a rock band" albums:

Early "jangle" era: Murmur, Reckoning, Fables
First "rock" period: Lifes Rich Pageant, Document
Mandolin and waistcoats era: Green, Out of Time, Automatic For The People
Second "rock" period: Monster, New Adventures In Hi-Fi
Electronic, Pro-Tools slickness era: Up, Reveal, Around The Sun
Third "rock" period: Accelerate, Collapse Into Now

mm interesting.

It's almost like they had this itch they had to scratch every three albums, before heading off into a different direction again.

not sure i buy the breakdown to be honest - the last two sets definitely are "trios" in my mind, yeah, but Document and Green have always been much closer in my mind than Green and Out of Time, and to me the IRS records are all pretty diverse anyway - like, there's "rock" before Lifes Rich Pageant, and steps towards the 'mandolin period' on Document, especially "King of Birds."

I do buy the idea of them as a band that tended to get restless and tired of their current (recorded) sound periodically. Might be interesting to think about big tours as part of that process, though.

Yeah, I definitely think the tours (or lack of in the case of Out of Time/Automatic For The People) had a hand in influencing the style of the music at times... particularly on Monster, which was deliberately made for the stage.

I was struck a couple nights ago, listening to Automatic, how much of its material really could have slotted onto Out of Time. In my mind, they've always been two very distinct albums - OOT bright, sunny, a little silly; AFTP moody, classicist, evening music. There's definitely some big differences (notably the string arrangements noted above) and I think the theme and mood of AFTP hang together clearly as their own thing. But just like how you could swap a few Sgt. Pepper's songs onto Revolver and have them fit right in, there's stuff on AFTP - "Sidewinder" and "Man on the Moon" in particular - that would sit just fine alongside "Shiny Happy People" and "Me In Honey." Maybe this is really obvious to everybody but me though!

there's "rock" before Lifes Rich Pageant

Indeed, the pre-Chronic Town "party band" period is almost all rock numbers, and pretty great ones, too -- "Just a Touch" I think dates back to that era in some form.

from the pitchfork interview with the author of the new book on the replacements:

I think it was partly out of pride. Maybe they [the replacements] were too proud in some instances to do the whole major label, dog and pony show that you had to do then to be successful. Also, it comes down to communication. That wasn’t in their nature—they were a very uncommunicative band among themselves. Paul and Tommy and Bob never really sat down and said, "okay, here’s what we’re doing," "here’s our one-year plan and our five-year plan," or "here are the lines that we are willing to cross or not cross." That conversation just never happened.

I talked to Peter Buck and he sort of talked about a similar moment—a crossroads in R.E.M.’s career where they had to make that decision. And they did have that conversation about how they were gonna move forward with their career, and what they were willing to do, and if they were just gonna be this kind of band or were they gonna really go for it? I think articulating that certainly helped [R.E.M.] and not articulating that in the case of the Replacements hurt them in some ways.

anyone know about the REM meeting thing, when it was, any details?

My impression from reading the book was that REM were very much committed to communicating with one another and making decisions democratically (in obvious contrast to the Replacements). There must have been a lot of meetings like that throughout the life of the band.

I would probably guess that meeting happened after Document and before Green.