Best of the platinum R.E.M. albums

And which itself has Nightswimming as an antecedent

Good point upthread about Mills' backing vocals taking a backseat for quite a long time. I do lament that a bit.

Does it ever happen when you’re driving and listening to music that you think about what would happen if you were to crash, and spend the final 20 minutes of your life gored in an upended car while the stereo plays out the rest of the album you’re currently listening to?

Anyway I have also been listening to everything Jim O’Rourke has ever recorded and when the endless back half of “Happy Days” was playing out and I was forcing myself to endure it I was driving so so fastidiously

I know this is the wrong thread for this post but anyway

i love "sidewinder" but it can't dethrone "harborcoat" as #1. it's probably top 5 though at the very least. "everybody hurts" is absolutely in the too corny basket for me. i think i'd be more sympathetic to it if it didn't just revolve around that guitar arpeggio, that's just too simple.

i love the weird stilted piano on "nightswimming", i wonder if the intention was to make it sound like a player piano? it fits well with how circular the part is

xp

I do think about that!

I believe the Tang version of Spacemen 3's Perfect Prescription had liner notes that mentioned a car wreck and getting the cassette out of the car in an impound lot later? I don't have it anymore, so I could be remembering that wrong. But I think that's what put it in my head.

I usually think about it when I'm listening to something goofy and how I would feel stupid pinned in a car with They Might Be Giants or Tiny Tim blaring.

I wrote off our 18-yo Ford Focus a few weeks ago in an incredibly minor no-other-vehicle-involved accident with Sun Ra's Sea Of Sounds off Space Is The Place on the stereo. It made a very stressful situation much, much worse.

The most obvious example being "Electrolite," a good song that got used more than once.

when did they recycle that?

Ufo I am pretty certain that the music for "Electrolite" was used for a different set of lyrics hut can't recall right now, and my bass player who told me that is currently still asleep so I can't ask him.

Anyway Re Nightswimming can I just say that I feel like there is a dearth of dope-ass oboe solos?

Sure, Mozart and Correlli wrote some sick AF oboe riffs, but for pop/rock/indie/alt music, you get... "Nightswimming." "Crazy for You." What else?

(And before anybody says "Life in a Northern Town," pretty sure that is a cor anglais, fool.)

"Twist in My Sobriety"

dreams they complicate my life

momentary sound collage of twelve music boxes playing at once

Oh -- I thought it was a clarinet or oboe xpost

I can’t think of any really. There’s an oboe moment on Siberry’s “Temple” (performed by Eno, apparently) but it’s kinda buried and I always wondered if it was real or synth

Big REM ballads ranked:

"You Are the Everything" >>>>>> "Strange Currencies" > "Everybody Hurts"

there's a bunch of go-betweens songs with oboe aren't there?

Oboe's? 'Fallen Angel' by King Crimson springs to mind and er.... 'War Dance' by XTC lol

Go-Betweens employed an oboe.

War Dance is a synth clarinet or rather what Andy calls a "singing penis"

Apparently "I Got You Babe" has oboe. I thought it was a clarinet. I am learning things today

I wanted to make a Pere Ubu joke here but decided not to

everyone knows the best oboe song is "ladytron" by roxy music

"War Dance" is one of the worst songs ever recorded.

imo 'one of the worst songs to be sandwiched between two of the best songs ever recorded' is much closer

(Daft lyrics but good music, Crocodile is for me the only sorta maybe kinda weakish link on Nonsuch)

by the time I get to “The Wrong Child” another feeling overtakes me, a similar feeling to listening to The Shaggs, that I’m compelled to listen to such a car crash, lyrical clunker after clunker piling up.

I think the lyrics of "The Wrong Child" are remarkable... I don't know another song quite like it:

I sit and watch those children
Jump in the tall grass
Leap the sprinkler
Walk in the ground
Bicycle clothespin spokes
The sound, the smell of swingset hands

The slower songs on Green (and OOT) are notable for how ponderous they are. Earlier albums were more inscrutable, and later albums became melancholy, but parts of Green and OOT have a real lost-in-the-ether element to them.

I feel like with Green, Stipe perfected his move toward making his lyrics "declarative" and comprehensible; while also retaining an aura of mystery and "evocativeness" (if that's a word... I guess not). It slips for me somewhat with the next two albums – his lyrics either lose their mystery ("Man in the Moon"), or the attempts to be evocative thru wordplay fall flat or feel forced ("Country Feedback"). Not that there aren't some great songs with very "direct" lyrics, like "Nightswiming."

Monster actually gets it back somewhat, I think his lyrics are particularly good on that one.

"Losing My Religion" sounds forced and lacking in mystery?

"Try Not to Breathe" is another very effective "character" song (I'm listening to it right now)... but I can't see liking these lyrics and not "The Wrong Child"'s, it's the same general approach (and I think the earlier song is even more poetic & interesting).

xp I'll have to think about "LMR"... it's somewhat hard to consider the lyrics in isolation, after hearing the song a zillion times; it's just so ingrained in my head.

I can't separate lyrics from music, and "Try Not to Breathe" is goddamn fetching.

I guess I feel like "LMR" has very interesting lyrics for a hit song, and the melody makes them feel powerful & meaningful, but they don't quite add up to anything in themselves. They're purposefully vague, right?

I don't mind vagueness.

the attempts to be evocative thru wordplay fall flat or feel forced ("Country Feedback")

no way

and i love that lmr is like a portrait of a breakup viewed from such a distance that you could easily mistake it for something else. its emotionally powerful use in aftersun cemented this for me

morrisp, again, you can't cleave lyrics from music. Upsetting its c&w roots with that sinister guitar drone, "Country Feedback" builds in intensity with each Stipe declarative sentence. The song devastates me.

I don't disagree! I was pretty much responding to fgti's critique of Green's "lyrical clunkers," and thinking thru the lyrics on their own (which I don't typically do...)

(I also don't disagree about "Country Feedback" being a powerful song – but I've always laughed a little at a line like, "You come to me with a bone in your hand"... it makes me picture The Flintstones or something.)

And (fwiw), I can see someone listening to a song like "I Remember California," and thinking it's corny, or just a pile-up of clichés – "I remember traffic jams," gee how original – but the cumulative impact of these (deceptively?) simple phrases, some of which aren't quite clear (what are "motor boys"?), just works for me.

these days-fall on me-cuyahoga is as good as it gets imo

― is he disgruntled adrian? (voodoo chili), Thursday, November 16, 2023 3:32 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

also Out of Time >>>>>>>>> Green

Out of Time is the worst of the Berry era.

Very high highs interspersed with songs that are just OK at best, or "belong" at worst.

in the past i've seen s reynolds talk of 'hidden shallows' in stipe's lyrics which seems like the oddest person to pick on for the simple reason that he's the only songwriter i've ever seen explicitly acknowledge the necessity to *never* be that sort of lyricist.

s reynolds doesn't seem like a talented enough writer to convincingly sing a line like "night time fell at the opening in the final act of the beginning of time" so it all comes out in the wash. not to overly white knight michael, who doesn't need it any more than like dylan or his hero p smith

Out of Time is the worst of the Berry era.

Would probably pick Automatic for this one

I love “hidden shallows” that’s very astute

I just scanned the lyrics on the offending Green songs and they don’t look so bad on the page. Idk! I just sat there today listening and thinking “wow wow wow I hate this”.

Also this particular thing is hard to describe, but I can really pick up on when a singer hasn’t taken the time to super-absorb the lyrics to a song so that they feel second nature in their delivery. Considering the insane lengths that Stipe must’ve gone to do deliver a song like “Sidewinder”, with all its nutty tight “callmewhenyoutrytowake her up”s and melodic leaps, like, it’s incredible that he was able to sing it so magically, it sounds like he’d been singing it for years. Nothing on Green sounds like that, there’s a kinda “still figuring it out” quality to the vocal performances which makes the lyrical choices feel even more last-minute and inessential

I listened to Monster too and it’s fine, I can’t get over how that one very-pretty song sounds exactly like Everybody Hurts and how Bang And Blame lifts its melody note-for-note from Losing My Religion. Do people like Tongue? I thought it was cute and fun

re: Stipe becoming the best singer in the world overnight, i remember a Bono quote from the early '90s saying something about that happening, how he'd suddenly morphed into this amazing crooner, just becoming the best singer around at the time.

Out of Time is the worst of the Berry era.

Would probably pick Automatic for this one

― a (waterface), Friday, November 17, 2023 bookmarkflaglink

lol I think Automatic is their best, full stop.

one very-pretty song sounds exactly like Everybody Hurts

That song is called “Love Theme From ‘The Bear’”

I listened to Monster too and it’s fine, I can’t get over how that one very-pretty song sounds exactly like Everybody Hurts and how Bang And Blame lifts its melody note-for-note from Losing My Religion. Do people like Tongue? I thought it was cute and fun

― as a lyricist he is from hell (flamboyant goon tie included), Friday, November 17, 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I really like Monster and I think it's aged well in their discography - no other REM album sounds like it.

I listened to it the other day and I had the realization that (although I like the song), "I Took Your Name" is the point where Peter Buck goes back to the same well one too many times.