REM: Classic or dud?

It does?, I mean

also smh @ the "mike mills is the worst backing vocalist" stuff upthread

i first heard automatic for the people when i was really young and that's necessarily going to alter how i hear it now, but i'm still completely affected by his work in "try not to breathe"

i am under the impression that the vocals are mixed decently high on monster except for "let me in" but whatev

still love how "what's the frequency, kenneth" is this kind of harder but still traditional r.e.m. song and the rest of the record is unhinged glam. one of my favorite red herring singles.

also strange currencies > everybody hurts

So, are they doing the big farewell, or not?

Big Tour, Final Album, Valedictory Glastonbury Ending?

If so, that's gonna take 2 years...

haha losing my religion is a fucking huge benchmark for middlebrow pop pretension. can't stomach that shit. anymore.

'Let Me In' is my favourite on Monster - it manages to feel mysterious and beautiful in a way they've rarely managed before or since. Also the whole sound of the thing - I was so happy when the last Neil Young album came so close to that sound.

I know it's seen as a bit of a death knell, but I really love Out Of Time - I mean, I like a lot of REM, but Out Of Time was kind of my entry point. Shiny Happy People was the first song I heard by the band, so for a while when I was 11 y/o I was under the impression they were this wacky B52s-style pop band.

Out Of Time is so epic and graceful though. I used to listen to it loads on long family trips through France on the way to visit family in the South. I'll forever associate it with blazing sunshine and undulating sunflowers.

Country Feedback, so sweeping and fragile - maybe Stipe's best delivery - "I was central/I had control/I lost my...head/I need this.../I need this...". And on the other side you have Near Wild Heaven, a wonderful Beach Boys homage that gives me goosebumps and makes me wanna jump around like a loon.

I have a lot of time for "Bang & Blame" and "You" off of Monster.

still love how "what's the frequency, kenneth" is this kind of harder but still traditional r.e.m. song and the rest of the record is unhinged glam. one of my favorite red herring singles.

I don't really understand this... How is WTFK? that much different to Bang & Blame? I don't really get the glam thing either.. Unless you mean Stipe's eyeliner fetishism which crept in from time to time on every album onwards...?

"Crush with eyeliner" is a heckofa glam title.

Bang & Blame is kind of the point when Stipe stopped bothering to write songs in favour of the 'Bark. One. Word. One. Note. At. A. Time' vocal style he'd adopt with increasing frequency for the rest of his career.

Actually I might be confusing it with I Took Your Name. I've not listened to that album in years.

Bang & Blame was a fairly big hit. The one that starts "If you could see yourself now baby/It's not my fault/You used to be so in control" (or something along those lines). It's this shivery Johnny Kidd & the Pirates type thing with a big big rockin' chorus.

I hear/understand the glam thing now - I was thinking "Glam" as in Roy Wood, not glam as in the whole of Monster sounds like it's been recorded in an ice-blue dressing room booth, lightbulbs around the mirrors and feather boas hanging on the wall. Weirdly incongruous next to the rugged Americana that is their surface sound.

My problem with latterday REM is not only with the music but also with Stipe's persona. He was always this enigmatic figure who didn't often do interviews (press chores used to be handled mostly by Buck and Mills). Then around Up he seemed to lose most of that mystique and became this media-friendly interviewee. The lyrics got printed on the sleeve for the first time with that album as well. He just seemed to become a more straightforward and less complex person.

I dunno, he always seemed to be a nice bloke.

I had problems with early REM, in a way..

Their first Tube appearance, they sounded so much like the band I was in, it reminded me of "work"...

I find REM's strike rate throughout their career very impressive, considering The Rolling Stones were putting out stuff like 'Voodoo Lounge' around 31 years in their career.

No love for 'World Leader Pretend'? Man, I love that song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKDrhf-OgrA

Rob O'Connor had a good album-by-album farewell yesterday:

http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/listoftheday/141512/remthe-final-grades-are-in/

I also always thought Fables was a little underrated. Rob's final grade for "Effort" reminded me of the Kool Moe Dee scorecard that came with that one album; I think he should have also graded them for "Sticking to Themes," "Innovating Rhymes," and "Articulation" (on the first few albums, not so good there).

I love "World Leader Pretend." That's one of the 1/3rd of that album that really gives me a lot of pleasure when I hear it. "World Leader Pretend," "You are the Everything," a few more of the deep cuts. Seem like clear precursors to "Out of Time."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwgKo0D1FyQ

i admired the way they handled success, with about as much grace as is possible in the music industry

yeah an i disagree about them being genre tourists, REM always sounded like REM to me, even with the changes in styles they went through

Stylistic mish-mash was always there. Look at what they covered: Roger Miller, VU, Wire, their roots were always more complicated than they seemed. (Which is probably the real way they were like the Byrds, who they never actually covered afaik.)

Also, these are fun. The first-ever write-ups from the UGA student paper:

http://redandblack.com/2011/09/21/the-first-article-written-about-r-e-m-may-8-1980/

If you go to that old Mike Mills interview I posted last night, he talks about (and essentially brushes off) the Byrds comparisons everyone was making early on.

REM were the first band I remember seriously discussing with friends, and in fact forming friendships because of being into them / music in general. This was around 1991, when I was starting secondary school. I got interested after hearing Losing My Religion on the radio, then I taped Document (which I really really loved) and Green off a guy in my class and bought my own copy of Out of Time (also on cassette).

I bought AFTP the day it came out, I didn't really get it at the time but it's my favourite REM album now. An Irish radio station organised a "listening party" about a week before the release but I wasn't allowed to go - mostly I think cos my mum couldn't understand what the point of that would be, and I couldn't adequately explain it myself.

Bought Monster on CD and went to see them play at Slane Castle in 1995. That was truly memorable. During "Let Me In" everyone in the crowd (maybe 80,000 people) started throwing paper cups in the air, they turned the stage lights onto them all falling like rain and it made a big impression.

Stopped paying attention after that, altho I definitely rate a few of the later singles with their best stuff (Daysleeper, Imitation of Life, Leaving NY, The Great Beyond). No sadness at them breaking up now, I'm sure they're relieved at having fulfilled their contractual obligations. They all seem pretty good at finding creative outlets outside REM so I'm sure that will continue, not anticipating any reunion tours...

tl;dr version: good sometimes great band, very important at certain times in my life, they had a good innings!

they always talked about how they were aping the soft boys, not the byrds. still . . . anxiety of influence?

xpost

I love that the first article ever published about R.E.M. says "This was dance music impossible to resist."

I hate the "Green/Out of Time was the beginning of the end..." argument. In what way was Automatic not a peak? Maybe not THE peak, but still...

That's what I especially love about the "Carnival of Sorts" clip posted last night--all that great dancing!

My problem with latterday REM is not only with the music but also with Stipe's persona. He was always this enigmatic figure who didn't often do interviews (press chores used to be handled mostly by Buck and Mills). Then around Up he seemed to lose most of that mystique and became this media-friendly interviewee. The lyrics got printed on the sleeve for the first time with that album as well. He just seemed to become a more straightforward and less complex person.

I disagree with this, surely it's just imagined complexity rather than complexity itself? Dunno, in later Stipe interviews he just seems much more comfortable with himself as a person... you can't really fault him for not being the same person as he was 15 years before, or for not wanting to continue to portray that image.

Automatic certainly was a peak, the beginning of the end was Monster.

xp

I agree with Matt. I see Murmur to Automatic as an unimprovably elegant arc, each two albums marking a different phase, with two very different masterpieces bookending it. After that it becomes more difficult and diffuse but people who have problems with Document through Automatic I guess just aren't interested in bands above a certain level, however well they make the transition.

Musical redundancy and occasional clangers also obscure the fact that Stipe continued to write some great lyrics till the end.

every album with Berry was above a certain baseline of quality, and every album without Berry was below a certain baseline of quality, so i'm inclined to give him credit as the x factor and figure that the beginning of the end was him leaving.

you can't really fault him for not being the same person as he was 15 years before, or for not wanting to continue to portray that image

Not trying to fault him at all, just saying that it's a part of what made me lose interest in the band.

In what way was Automatic not a peak?

It was on a major label. For a lot of people, that matters more than the music...

every album with Berry was above a certain baseline of quality

Not "Monster" and "New Adventures", no. Both horrible and the worst they've ever done. At that stage, they might as well have broken up when Berry left, because their then last albums were rubbish with hardly any value at all. A once wonderful melodic pop band trying to play alternative rock. Ugh!

and every album without Berry was below a certain baseline of quality

"Up" and "Reveal" were both great albums. The songs were better om "Murmur" and "Automatic For The People", but the production on those two albums (and "Around The Sun", which still sucked because they songs did) was the best of their entire output. The glossy and sophisticated production fitted them perfectly.

Bringing in Patti Smith was also a bad, bad, bad, bad idea. That woman has never ever made a decent record. She can't sing, she has no sense of tune. No value at all. And Stipe's own Sonic Youth-influenced speak-singing on "E-Bow The Letter" added to the disgrace that was R.E.M's worst ever single.

Wait, who upthread called these guys genre tourists? Everything they did fit pretty comfortably within the world they created, I think, and R.E.M. from one extreme was not terribly different or unrecognizable from R.E.M. at the other extreme. And like the best band, the personalities of the principals never failed to shine through in any context. Which is why there was such a drop off when Berry left.

geir bomb

They have revisited every single one of their genre exercises later in their career, except for their early jangle pop. Which is a shame in the latter case, really.

Bringing in Patti Smith was also a bad, bad, bad, bad idea. That woman has never ever made a decent record.

coulda sworn she'd done some cover you'd be down with

New Adventures is terrific but it feels very much like a band that isn't quite sure where to go next and is almost self-consciously recording a greatest hits full of new songs.

Up is patchy but at least an interesting direction and they manage the transition to synths well without looking like twats, some great songs on there as well - You're In The Air, Parakeet, Falls To Climb, a handful more.

From then on it's mostly awful - Accelerate has its moments but feels like a band on complete autopilot.

Think my favourite REM moment was seeing them play Cuyahoga at Glastonbury 99 and thinking "of course!"

"Acellerate" was a huge step in the right direction after two way-below-par albums. A lot of it sounds like "Automatic For The People", which is not the worst thing to sound like.

They totally revisited jangle pop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pd0Qq_kRU4

But if you meant jangle-pop minus the post-punk jitters, than sure.

Then.

"Acellerate" was a huge step in the right direction after two way-below-par albums. A lot of it sounds like "Automatic For The People", which is not the worst thing to sound like.

Have you actually listened to it? At least the first half of Accelerate is one big slab of New Adventures Style Rock, admittedly with 80s REM songs underneath.