REM: Classic or dud?

R.E.M. News - boo

Favorite nineties REM songs:

Half a World Away
Near Wild Heaven (lovely melody, lovely Mills vocal; glad he didn't get too many)
Leave
Bittersweet Me (my favorite of their nineties second singles)
Tongue
Monty Got a Raw Deal
Texarkana
Me in Honey (effective use of Kate Pierson)

alfred otm

my first kiss was to Leave. thanks REM!

thread needs more awesome live REM videos like tipsy posted upthread. everyone's seen this one, but still it's a classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykp0Vq77IBw

yeah to alfred's list. i'd add new test leper, which works really well despite being kind of bland, and electrolite.

Alfred, I was gonna post something about how much i adore "Near Wild Heaven."

"Bittersweet Me" was great. I used to hear one of the other NAiH-F singles, "Electrolite" alot in grocery & drug stores. It made shopping pleasant.

That's a great list.

"Band and Blame" is my favorite second REM single of the 90s; Stipe's vocal is uncharacteristically tender & as Alfred said earlier, it exudes sexuality: open, vulnerable, wanting, "dares to cross your threshold".

ack "Bang & Blame", way to miss the point, self.

electrolite gets a bad rap because it's played a lot in grocery and drug-stores.

but the hook and melody makes it an unforgettable earworm.

i hate band and blame with the heat of a thousand suns.

yeah "Electrolite" has had an unexpected second life as Muzak; I hear it far more than the other NAIHF singles.

"Bang & Blame" is kind of interminable, imo everything it does well is done better by "I Don't Sleep, I Dream"

"Do you give good head?"

and that terrific strummed electric hook.

My favourite '90s song, with my favourite R.E.M. lyric ever: "You know, there's talk of time/Talk is fine."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_JnCWT-_O8

I adore Out of Time, which still doesn't get much love because It's The Big One. The marvel for me, as I wrote in my own obit, is how "Losing My Religion" sounded a hundred times more ambiguous with each radio play. I've never gotten tired of it.

And the record has all kinds of crinkles and filigrees. "Near Wild Heaven" I mentioned, but what about the loping "Endgame"? Those flutes!

i don't know if it's naive to hope for any fruitful side/solo projects at this point but i feel like one thing about the breakup is that practically any of them is more likely to make a really good record in the future outside of REM than they would have with the band

bang and blame made me wish michael stipe's lyrics went back to being unintelligible.

And the record has all kinds of crinkles and filigrees.

yeah, this is kind of true. there's a mumblecore-type song on this disc that i liked. belong, maybe?

I listened to Out of Time today when I got the news. It's my favorite REM album. "Radio Song" gets hate here but I think the opening is thrilling: Buck strums a gorgeous riff, then Mills comes in with clear notes, then Stipe with lovely mystic nonsense.

i hate radio song with the heat of a hundred suns.

it was around out of time's release that i realized i didn't love every song on every one of r.e.m.'s discs anymore.

Out Of Time has aged very very poorly for me and is probably my least favorite of the 90s albums but i love that goofy old "Radio Song"

Green has some grisly stuff, and it's the first one I ever owned.

the whole 90s period was so . . . okay but generic.

i come to celebrate fables of the reconstruction

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

i will join your celebration. i like bits and pieces of 90s REM. i started with late-period REM and worked my way back. the first REM song i ever heard was actually Airportman (yeah, including Everybody Hurts and Losing My Religion and...well, i think i may have heard Stand in a supermarket when I was a kid). i had a strange upbringing, musically. but anyway, since i started with Up, and then worked backwards to New Adventures and AFTP, i used to be a big big fan of 90s REM. at some point i decided to see what 80s REM was like, and Murmur blew me away to such an extent that i can barely listen to the 90s stuff anymore. their first 4 albums are just unstoppable

"generic" isn't really a word i would use to describe 90s REM. there were times when they were relatively in step with the times but they never sounded anonymous.

they became shape-shifting genre tourists, veering away from their distinctive jangle-y gothic southern rock sound.

just heard this but i think i prefer it to the album version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgh0y9vTgY

they never struck me as Elvis Costello-style pastiche masters even at their most dilettantish, though. everything still went through a pretty heavy REM filter (or at least Stipe filter).

beginning of the end was the speak-sing stuff

never noticed or was bothered by speak singing much beyond hating E-Bow

oh man, that's way better than the album version.

stipe picks up a guitar and i thought, "does he know how to play any instruments"?

(i actually kind of liked e-bow, but i couldn't tell you why)

i love e-bow

and i'm not afraid to admit it

a track that got lotsa love on our big REM poll here was "Country Feedback", & it's a good song (lots better than "E-Bow", who love here I also don't get), but I think I hear the first version of the annoying speak-sing thing we're talking about on that song.

and yeah, e-bow was speak-singing, but it was the Beginning of the end, see, so it was still R.E.M. near the top of their game

E-Bow made me go back & reconsider why I dug Patti Smith.

e-bow is great!

Though E-Bow, I'll take you over "How The West Was whatever"

that rockville clip reminds me that mid-80s stipe and late-80s slash and anytime-ever howard stern would have made an ideal hair-metal band -- or ramones cover band.

never really a fan, even though they should have been right up my alley. i think i bought one of their WB albums and liked a few songs over the years. so i really have no reaction to this news.

'90s R.E.M. - or at least "Green" and beyond R.E.M. - is full of albums with 1/3 I hate, 1/3 I think are OK, and 1/3 I love. Which always makes listening to things like "Out of Time" a thrill; the dives and dips between high and low keep me on my toes. Like, "Radio Song," boo! "Near Wild Heaven," awesome! "Shiny Happy People," nah. "Country Feedback," yeah!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CERhzm6t7I

yeah, Country Feedback still kind of haunts me in this weird way. just the way "IT'S CRAZY WHAT YOU COULD HAVE HAD" begins to turn in on itself or something.

it's taken me a while to realize that new adventures in hi-fi and monster are my favorite r.e.m. records but there you go

"e-bow" is so gorgeous, for a while it was my favorite r.e.m. song.

"E-Bow The Letter" was awful and horrible. Absolutely despise so-called "speak singing" no matter who does it.

I adore Out of Time, which still doesn't get much love because It's The Big One. The marvel for me, as I wrote in my own obit, is how "Losing My Religion" sounded a hundred times more ambiguous with each radio play. I've never gotten tired of it.

"Losing My Religion" is awesome, but as an album, "Out Of Time" is much more uneven than "Automatic For The People", which doesn't contain a single bad track.