Best of the platinum R.E.M. albums

my intro to Monster, and REM for that matter, was when I was 12 and invited to a birthday party at a mini-golf course by a classmate I'm sure I was trying to impress. Having no money, my mom took whatever suggestion I'd said - my best guess is a coded "A CD by a band because I'd heard this band called The Offspring sing curse words at the playground so that must be cool." So she came back saying she'd asked the person behind the music section at the local K-Mart for any "age appropriate" (i.e. NO SWEARING) and that's what she was recommended.

that classmate could not have been less impressed when he unwrapped it at the birthday party. I swore off the band despite never having heard a note of their music.

"REM? Who invited that kid?"

i've watched the children come and go!

my feelings are fluid, but today

fables of the reconstruction (they may hate it but i dig the joe boyd production on one of the finest set of songs i've ever heard, front to back)
murmur (this is maybe the greatest debut album in english-speaking rock history)
life's rich pageant (this has their best songs)
"chronic town" (if this were an album with another five songs this good it would be their best)
new adventures in hi-fi (rivals the cure's disintegration as an all-time awe-inspiring 'how are they still this awesome this long into it?' album)
green (the first one i heard in real time, too young to have a problem with anything i liked)
out of time (this has some of my favorite songs not on any of the aforementioned)
reckoning (this is still better than most bands' best album)
automatic for the people (the last two songs stick the landing the best in a canon full of amazing album closers)
document (despite it being this low i still love this album -- side 2 continues to grow on me however many years after first feeling disappointed by it)
monster (this is still better than most bands' best album)

the post-bill years remain elusive, but i still think it's me, not them

One of the things I like about the last two albums is that, when they go back to more rock per se, it's not the rooted in the '70s hard rock of Monster/NAiHF. It's something smaller, and while it's not really confined to whatever parameters define garage rock, it's kind of more in that ballpark. And that's what they were originally, too. It's a good use of Scott McCaughey and Bill Rieflin.

The thing about that "Do it one more time/Show the kids how to do it fine" bit criticized above in "All The Best" is that, when he's singing that, he's singing it over fucking "The One I Love."

"Every Day Is Yours to Win" - last Velvets style jam

listening to dead letter office a lot the last few days. it's kind of a move to cover VU THREE TIMES

but i also wasn't around when it came out, which i think was right around time the VU (1985) album came out, kind of an eara of relative rediscovery of the velvets, maybe? maybe covering them 3 times was more like covering a kind of obscure band?

If you covered them three times, Lou Reed blew you.

xp I think they were covering VU from the beginning(?) Here they are in '84 (I'm sure there are earlier clips):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEEDxQ-xl40

Apparently "There She Goes Again" was the b-side of the IRS version of the "Radio Free Europe" single (which I didn't realize).

kind of an eara of relative rediscovery of the velvets

Definitely. The Polygram reissues of the first three albums came out in '85 as well.

also while relistening to DLO, i've thought more about my assumptions of the pylon cover. "crazy" is one of the greatest songs of all time, i fucking love pylon. i assume that r.e.m. was trying to do pylon a favor by making it track #1 on DLO, but have they ever talked about it?

peter buck's famous anecdote about r.e.m. and pylon releasing records on the same day, so he went out and picked up the pylon album to see what he was up against. paraphrasing: "i was so disappointed that their record was so much better than ours."

lol

I'm pretty sure Buck thought, "....but we're gonna outsell you four to one."

all told, pylon's og is clearly better but rem's take is hardly disrespectful.

Pylon opened for R.E.M. a few times (including a leg of the Green World Tour). Also, when Rolling Stone called R.E.M. "America’s Best Rock and Roll Band" in 1987, Berry apparently insisted that title belongs to Pylon (though I don't see that quote in the archived article; maybe it was a sidebar).

(I have the actual issue in a box somewhere...)

I was on the Natalie Merchant thread and went to YouTube to find this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpIxOPUxIt4

And much to my surprise, found this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKlwHbXVBJ8

i gragbbed this still

https://i.imgur.com/8K6Na5G.png

awesome performance! regis looked stunned

ha Peter buys a mandolin in that RS article. I remember reading that one!

“Iwill never, ever, ever, ever play another general-admission show, ever. Ever. And I will never, ever, ever play a place that’s bigger than the place we played tonight, ever.” A pause. “Did I put enough evers in there?” It’s one day later, and Peter Buck isn’t feeling so fine. R.E.M. has just played to 12,000 fans in Williamsburg, Virginia, the only general-admission show of their 1987 tour – and while nobody was hurt, the crush down front was serious, and the band was upset.

“Fables sucked,” says Berry bluntly – though others in the band are somewhat happier with the moody, atmospheric record.

the crush down front was serious

Was it orange, or with eyeliner?

i'm not supposed to be like this

Two bad REM songs that might be ok:

“The Outsiders” - The bit at the end where the drums pause and restart, like “hey we’re hip-hop now!!!!”, is cringe, but the vibe is tender and lovely and the Q-Tip section always moves and surprises me. This might me my favourite song from the REM: the chintzy era

“I’ll take the rain” - David Cavanagh loved this but it’s a career nadir for me and Stipe’s vocal is unusually feeble. And yet… it’s a lovely, strong melody. They should’ve sold it to Lee Ann Womack or something

it's an abysmal attempt at a power ballad, and, no, Lee Ann Womack wrote and commissioned much better songs

Not sure if I'd thought of this before, but Around the Sun sort of reminds me of Bowie's Hours

With almost as shifty a cover

Shitty even!

Hours cover is amaaazing. Albeit only with all the text, that massive viridian O.

Amazing in 1993 during peak Corel Draw.

And those thong sandals

It looks like the Designers Republic's idea of a dentist waiting room and that is one of the only times I will invoke a trip to the dentist in my praise of anything (except, presumably, dentistry).

Around the Sun cover has a similar muzzy morning/chillout CD look to it except it's just kind of boring.

Reminds me of this actually

https://i.discogs.com/l3WeAoIvYqmbKnbQeKUKfQt33Vi7mtVezjUSD52kKfI/rs:fit/g:sm/q:40/h:300/w:300/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTQ0MzE3/NS0xNDg2MjE3MjA4/LTI0MTkuanBlZw.jpeg

Re: hours I had the exact same thought!

To an extent, both Around the Sun and ...hours were disappointed attempts to give fans what they (artists and listeners alike) thought they wanted: "why can't they just sit down at the piano or with an acoustic guitar and write us the soulful, melodic songs the way they did in a past decade?" Both are somewhat underrated with a handful of great songs apiece.

both are extremely disappointing

...hours is the worst album he released after Tonight.

Around the Sun is not really any worse compositionally than the other albums from that period (which is to say that it’s excellent, really). A bunch of slow songs, I guess.

There are two outright duds on AtS, in my opinion - The Outsiders and Wanderlust. The rest of the album is slow but generally solid, with one or two truly terrific songs.

As a game with myself, when I listened to all their albums a few weeks back I "rated" every song on a scale of 1-5. My criteria were 5 = truly excellent AND nebulous/subjective personal associations and nostalgia; 4 = truly excellent but lacking that intangible/nostalgic factor; 3 = very good; 2 = just OK/fine; 1 = trash, skip, delete.

And in doing that I only marked seven songs, over the course of their entire recorded output with a 1. (and five of them came on the last three albums). That's a pretty astonishing level of quality.

...hours is the worst album he released after Tonight

absolutely. It has one and a half good songs on it, which is even fewer than Tonight.

What were the two duds from the earlier albums?

I liked AtS fine one I accepted the odd production/mix choices, it’s a formless pastel thing. More inclined to revisit it than Reveal (or hours for that matter)

What were the two duds from the earlier albums?

― Cow_Art, Friday, December 1, 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Underneath the Bunker and Belong.

"...hours is the worst album he released after Tonight."

Agree with that, although I don't think it's ever actively bad. Some nice songs and all. The most curate's eggy of all his curate's eggs.

Disagree on Belong being a dud

I think "Oddfellows” is the only true dud (pre-NAIHF). There are a few others I’d give the “2” rating.

I think side 2 of Document is amazing/underrated. West of the Fields (2) and Hairshit (1) are my only skips through Aftp.
pgwp- Good arbitrary nebulous rating!

I don’t care for “West of the Fields”’ chorus, but the verse parts are great IMO, and it ends the album well.

"fireplace" is the worst for trying to shoehorn the e-street band (sax) into a song that didn't need it.