REM: Classic or dud?

ha yeah alfred otm -- i was just looking at my list of favorite albums of '96 and New Adventures is right next to No Code

No Code is another one! It hit #1, "Who You Are" made the Top 40 (the Billboard charts endured their own interzone during this period), but the commercial decline was about to begin.

love who you are and hail hail tbh

1996-1997 was the period when the also-rans (Live, Bush) outsold their betters.

or at least got more airplay

yellow lips with golden hair scan the graveyard, dig the root

it was a weird time when there were a lot fewer rules about what could get on the radio (tho the eclecticism cost us the ska thing and the swing thing among others).

and then in 98 creed and nu metal showed up and that was that.

1996-1997 was the period when the also-rans (Live, Bush) outsold their betters.

these "post-grunge" years, which gave way to the equally bad "nu-metal" years, were the worst.

lighted in the amber yard, green shell back, green shell back, skylight, stock tight, nero pie-tied in tree, tar black brer sap, reason has harnessed the tame, a lodging, not stockade's game, another greenville, another magic mart, trevor, grab your fiddle

i still think fables of the reconstruction is their best album: an aggressive, tuneful, weird-america take on gothic southern rock.

peel back the mountain, peel back the sky, stomp gravity into the floor

It's interesting to try to work out what R.E.M. ought to have done, singles-wise, with New Adventures in order to make it more of a commerical success.

Perhaps:

1. Bittersweet Me
2. Leave (edited down, perhaps even mixed to reduce the siren which of course I totally love)
3. Undertow (maybe??)
4. Electrolite

I don't feel that any of it works in isolation, really.

the vocal on leave is really low in the mix too--that's a challenging song.

undertow, departure, wake-up bomb are maybe the most single-ish to me

I remember reading at the time that the record company wanted "The Wake-Up Bomb" as a first single.

i still think fables of the reconstruction is their best album: an aggressive, tuneful, weird-america take on gothic southern rock.

and to me this is their most turgid.

New Test Leper could have worked as a single. It's easy to envision an alluring video at least.

Maps & Legends was a very bad choice for song 2. It drags the album down.

kind of agree with this ^^^^

mm Q gave it 5 stars and there were good reviews but it kinda sank without trace and the singles were a bit 'grim' (Bittersweet Me, E Bow especially) in light of Britpop being in it's absolute pomp. in Dave Cavanagh's excellent look-back review in the Q REM special (c. 2000) he described it as being like "Nico had wandered onto Live And Kicking" (Live And Kicking was a loud colourful Saturday morning kid's telly show). next thing you know Bill's left etc.. but then about 5 years back it started getting CRAZY good raves from fans on forums etc. you see folk on Drowned In Sound etc say it's their fave REM album and no-one bats an eyelid. i mean it's a fucking excellent record (that could lose a good 15 minute chunk but hey).

UP is the only REM album not on Spotify. what's with that?

"Wake-Up Bomb" would've been a great 2nd single after something less Monster-ish to set the tone/bring back old fans but not as uncommercial as "E-Bow" -- maybe "New Test Leper" or "Leave." then maybe "Bittersweet Me" and "So Fast, So Numb."

fables of the reconstruction

i don't think it's their best album by any means, but having listened to it less i now go back to it more often

plus, kohoutek

i think the overtly, overly sentimental be mine would have been a nice single.

oh!, i kept referring to this as you and me above.

plus, kohoutek

gesundheit

lol Tim if by "compact" you mean "shriveled."

― Anakin Ska Walker (AKA Skarth Vader) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, September 28, 2011 6:27 PM

No. I'm talking about classicist songwriting, Alfred. Even a deep cut like "Wanderlust" on Around the Sun has really nice aspects of this.

i love "Be Mine" and agree it would've been a good single but considered it maybe redundant if that had happened fairly soon after "Strange Currencies"

Oh yeah def "Be Mine" but perhaps as final single (replacing "Electrolite"?).

yep

No. I'm talking about classicist songwriting, Alfred. Even a deep cut like "Wanderlust" on Around the Sun has really nice aspects of this.

This is where you and I differ. I lose interest in songwriting if the performance doesn't catch my ear.

i see where you're coming from, but be mine is so much more raw and direct than strange currencies

i vaguely remember being amused/annoyed by Stipe seeming to give very similar interview soundbytes in the '90s about different songs being "the first love song i've ever written" re: "Be Mine" and "Strange Currencies" and possibly one or two others

At My Most Beautiful also

I have zero problem with the performance on "Wanderlust."

xpost to Alfred!

i think joe keyes (emusic) did a nice job defending monter.

There is no way to overstate how passionately some people hate this record. Arriving on the heels of the dignified Automatic for the People, Monster was a hand job in a seedy theater, and the album that got R.E.M. out of the cabin and back into the arenas, and asserted their place among the legions of grunge bands they'd inspired. It is, as Stipe put it at the time, "a dick record," leering and lascivious, unsafe to take on an unchaperoned date. If Big Black hadn't already nicked the title, they could have called it Songs About Fucking. Before this (and, one could argue, immediately after), the group provided the po-faced template for Conscious Rockers, so self-serious that they were on speed-dial for things like Greenpeace benefits and the Clinton inauguration. Monster proved that if they couldn't be bipartisan, they could at least be bi-curious. Buck takes a lot of flak for his overuse of tremolo on this record, but the intention was to make everything on Monster of a single, snarling piece. The seasick swoon of "Crush With Eyeliner," buttressed by backing vocals from Thurston Moore, finds Stipe sarcastically sneering "I'm the real thing," a line that handily sums up the entire affair. Monster is full of personas, a meditation on self-invention in which Stipe turns himself inside-out and shines a light on his darkest corners (the Fun House barnstormer "Circus Envy" starts with him lamenting "here comes that awful feeling again" like a man turning into a werewolf). For an album hailed as the group's "return to rock," it's loaded with lovely slower moments, too. Though they burned the same chord progression on the tender "Everybody Hurts," "Strange Currencies" ranks among the group's finest compositions, a song of raw, pained longing. Monster also contains one of the best R&B songs of the 90s, the perverse and poignant "Tongue." Stipe has rarely been so unabashedly feminine, singing from the perspective of a lonely high school girl and using a triple-X framing device to describe emotional abuse. How many songs this heartbreaking feature the lyric "Anybody can get laid?"

hardly my favorite rem record, but not as bad as many people say. in fact, it's mostly very good, for what it is. a lot of my negative feelings toward it comes from my seeing 15 copies of it in every "used CD" bin everywhere.

Monster is full of personas, a meditation on self-invention

That's how I've listened to it -- it's the band's Roxy Music record.

"Let's go shopping for personae -- anything, anything that allows me to stick my tongue in your mouth."

Monster doesn't feel especially sexy or sexual to me, even by REM standards

most of those Keyes reviews are excellent. Thanks, Daniel.

monster was the last record i *really* listened to

i think it stands up *much* better than the rep it got at the time. nevertheless i don't think it is 'sexy' nor were band members' insistence that it was 'punk' convincing

amused by the recherche focus on latter-day albums people don't like. shallow figured, winners' page

I think it's very sexy---"Bang & Blame" is the band's "Let It Bleed", & you can hear the same vulnerability, openness. I hesitate to speculate this way since I'm hetero, but I hear it as a very beautiful homosexual song, about a kind of maleness I can't experience but find understandable & fascinating.

"camera" is sexy too

qualmsley's constant griping about the line of conversation is so funny i might start discussing Up at length soon. fyi divisive later records make for more lively conversation than the canonized 80s.

it seems so shallow, and low

i am totally in favor of a lengthy discussion of up

it feels much more bloated/overlong than New Adventures at the same length, but there are some moments i really enjoy on it, definitely could edit it down to a lovely little record

yeah it's not like the songs are indistinct but it could be edited pretty easily. like i said earlier my main problem is that it's pretty much an arrangement nightmare--i guess the late 90s were the last time it was cool to use "primitive drum machines"? (i guess moon safari did come out in '98). anyway, a song like suspicion is actually a really nice little song that has a good melody and good chord changes but it's totally sedated to death.

Up is overlong but I like its three-part structure & think each works on its own. I'd cut Parakeet as redundant.

The "I'm the real thing" line in "Crush w/ Eyeliner" is among Stipe's more annoying deliveries. Thinking about Monster, I just didn't believe any of it -- the lyrics, Stipe's delivery, the guitar -- the whole thing struck me as fake. But not just a put on, a bad put on. That coming from a band that always did sincerity incredibly well. The show I saw at the (then) Rosemont Horizon sucked. Flat out sucked.

I dunno, I still own it, which is as more a function of resale market dynamics (scanning the used bin, I'd see like 8 copies in a row) than ever going back to it. Maybe I'll take it to work tomorrow and give it a listen.

The comment above about New Adventures being what Monster wanted to be or should've been, otm. Maybe they just got better at bombast over the course of that tour...