REM: Classic or dud?

Really odd that I have never owned "Reckoning" considering how much time I have spent with "Murmur" and "Fables of the Reconstruction". Next time I see that cheapish on vinyl I am going to buy it. The time has come.

I think it's one of their weaker efforts. You have "SCR" and "Don't Go Back...", two of their best, but otherwise, it's a bit lacking.

lol what?

Pretty Persuasion, Harbourcoat and Seven Chinese Brothers are like all-time.

^^this

Reckoning feels like a GOAT candidate when it hits just right.

Reckoning def my fave, though i've known these albums for so long I basically just bracket the albums in my mind under slots - The Club/Theater Years (Chronic thru Fables), The Arena Years (Lifes thru Green) and The 4x Platinum Years (Out Of Time thru Monster) - and i'll get in a mood to dive into one. It'd be really hard to honestly rank each one individually.

LETTER NEVER SENT

Reckoning is the best

Every song is great... "Camera" is a career highlight; "Seven Chinese Brohans" is near-perfect.

The second side of Reckoning is weaker - good, but weaker - but that first side is brilliant.

I would say the same about Lifes and Docu

side 2 > side 1 of Reckoning

LETTER NEVER SENT
so the best

been listening to the i.r.s. comp today and remembering when this was my favorite band. the emo pours out of me.

Best song they ever did: "Life and How to Live It"

"BARK at night and RUN-ning round TALKing in the STREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETS" CHING-CHING! cha-da-chung, cha-da chung, cha-da-da CHING-CHING!

listen to the holler!

"Mine Smell Like Honey" is such an amazingly great song.

Unsurprisingly crap late period song title though

ha i could never get past that title. will there ever be a groundswell of love for REM's latter days i wonder, now that they're gone? guess i can see it happening.

Nah.

No, it's a beautiful title. I mean, obviously, there's a silly pun, but the sentiment of the song is so righteous.

You're going to sing the praises of your fruit
I can hear you shouting over it all

too late i'm already pitching my "why REM was the best band of the 21st century" thinkpiece to PASTE. xp

all i can think of when i think of Michael Stipe singing "Mine Smell Like Honey" is testicles

silly pun

or silly double entendre, I mean

The song is an affirmation of life.

And all its freaking scary-ness.

all i can think of when i think of Michael Stipe singing "Mine Smell Like Honey" is testicles farts.

new peter buck album is the best "rem" album since 'new adventures in hi fi'

hahaha, are you being serious or not? i haven't heard it yet. but of course every time rem put out a new album peter buck would always claim it was the best one they'd done in decades or something

ha ha yeah he always says that but no, for real, this is awesome. it's loose and fun like rem hasn't sounded in way too long. first three songs are larkish like maybe what you'd expect; then it gets really tuneful with "travel without arriving," followed by a swampy organ dirge a la 'automatic for the people,' and just keeps soaring. get in on this if you have any love left for this band

was there a post-Berry poll? maybe there should be? Up/Reveal/Accelerate/ etc.. all that stuff.

I'm glad to hear the Buck album has a bit of variety to it. The live clips I've heard so far were pretty ropey. I don't begrudge him having a bit of fun, but millionaire rock star doing Nuggets just doesn't work for me. Also, now we know why he never sang in REM... However, tunes and swampy organ dirges sounds promising... Isn't Corin Tucker singing a couple too?

yeah, and she sounds good. pete sounds like tom waits hungover, with a cold, but i'm telling you, the songs are there. a very very pleasant surprise

will there ever be a groundswell of love for REM's latter days i wonder, now that they're gone? guess i can see it happening.

I've thought about this recently since the split - I think it depends if Up retains the goodwill it has right now cases will be made for at least up to that point. New Adventures has become a sleeper critical hit as well.

Generally aside though I think people will forget they existed in the 21st century (lol NYE 1999). Many many people will forget they existed after Bill Berry left.

I wonder if their critical consensus will go further back as the years progress, to the point where 'should've split after AFTP' becomes the dominant line. People are already quite ambivalent over the overall 90s stuff.

Starting with Out Of Time, which has really suffered in retrospect over the years (10/10 in NME at the time I think?). Monster is obviously the used bins favourite, and Up (and a lesser extent New Adventures) is too divisive.

Automatic is the only 90s album that has survived all this

However if we're talking about the very late period, I don't see enough people going back on it for these recent albums to even become what Up or New Adventures are right now. Too far down the line

In my head, "Up" is the final R.E.M. album. The other records are all artifacts of some other band, like when McCulloch and Sergent formed Electrafixion.

"Out of Time" definitely boasts the largest discrepancy between highs and lows of any R.E.M. album.

dunno, out of time and aftp are pretty equal in my mind. and they both have a skippable opening track.

Out of Time is still for me in the highest REM tier, along with Reckoning & probably AFTP.

Out of Time has "Country Feedback" on it, so it rules, basically.

Yeah, I love its highs as much as any R.E.M.

"Drive" - 'skippable', heh? ...o well wotevah, dude:P

will there ever be a groundswell of love for REM's latter days i wonder, now that they're gone? guess i can see it happening.

― tylerw, Wednesday, November 7, 2012 2:41 PM (Yesterday)

So, I was thinking about this question today and have to question the framing of it. R.E.M. was a very popular group for a long period of time. I'm sure I can look on Amazon or iTunes and there will be plenty of four and five star reviews for every single post-Bill Berry album. I think I've also had enough personal experiences to not be surprised by someone telling me they love Around the Sun (a number one album in Austria, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and the U.K.).

So critical consensus ends up striking me as an irrelevant sample size, perhaps especially so in this case. I always remember a photo I saw from an Eastern European tour in the early '00s where someone was holding up a sign that said, "Reveal Changed My Life." R.E.M. was a band that inspired that kind of thing a lot more than the critical discourse around them acknowledges and for a lot longer - perhaps for their entire existence.

Yeah, I've had the same reaction seeing concert footage of their 2000s days generally - - playing all over the world to gigantic arena crowds, audiences not so invested in what passes for street cred in like US/Europe indie circles or whatever. To them REM are this great, unstoppable band. Dunno if that'll ever penetrate back into the English-language conventional-wisdom though.

I like Accelerate and Collapse Into Now quite a bit more than Reveal, Around the Sun, or Up.

Collapse Into Now is that much more powerful now that you can see how much of it was intended as a goodbye.

I find much of Collapse Into Now to be as good as anything they ever did - "Überlin," "Oh My Heart," "That Someone Is You," "Blue," etc.

Was very disappointed in Buck's recent solo album, however: what it revealed to me was just how much the whole was greater than the sum of the parts, even after Berry left. Without Stipe, Buck, McCaughey, and Mills indulge in the kind of boring 60s rock homages that you would expect them to.

I love Out Of Time but in hindsight it seems a pretty baffling 4x platinum "breakthrough"

Out Of Time is one i should post in that 'love the songs, hate the album' thread

my first "Classic or Dud" question!