REM: Classic or dud?

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!

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

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, November 8, 2012 4:41 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I can definitely agree with this. The tracks on Out Of Time that I love, I really really love. The ones I dislike, well, I don't *hate* them, but I could definitely live without hearing them again.

I don't agree with the guy who said that New Adventures In Hi-Fi was a 'sleeper critical hit', though. From what I recall, most of the reviews of the album at the time (here in the UK, at least) were positive. It was also a #1 album and 'E-Bow The Letter', an INCREDIBLY perverse choice for the first single, still made it to #4 in the singles chart. I've personally always liked the album, and I'd go as far as saying it's one of my Top 3 favourite R.E.M. albums.

I do think it took time for the reputation of "New Adventures" to settle as high as it has. Like, at the time, I don't recall that album instantly finding its way into anyone's Top 3 R.E.M. status. Hence the "sleeper" tag.

Per reviews, I want to say it wasn't until after "Up," or at least c. "Up," that R.E.M. reviews began to take on an air of apology or excuse, coming off as reviews of the R.E.M. albums people wanted them to be rather than the albums they were. Which, to the band's credit, is still a respectful attribute few acts on the downward turn of a parabola earn.

yeah it placed at #11 on Pazz & Jop, which is not bad until you consider that the three albums before it all placed at #3. their critical profile at the time was diminished as quickly as their commercial profile.

referring to New Adventures, i mean.

up until that point the only R.E.M. album that missed the P&J top ten was Green

Every late period REM album has something to offer (even Around the Sun). It's tough to think highly of them in light of the early stuff but if you can consider of them outside the greater legacy, they're not a bad batch of albums. I have said before but I think Reveal gets a real bum rap. It's a great record.

The live disc on the "Document"-reissue sounds really, really good. Intense, energetic, and great renditions. Well worth checking out.

Every late period REM album has something to offer (even Around the Sun)

Yes. "Leaving New York" and "I Wanted To Be Wrong" are brilliant. I also like "High Speed Train" and "Aftermath" quite a bit. The album as a whole is a reflection of where they were at that point in time, as every album that they made is. I actually prefer Around the Sun in all its messed-up, mid-life crisis, glory, to the "let's give the fans what (we think) they want" reaction that was Accelerate.

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

Agree again. "Low" may the single worst song they ever released. I'm not a fan of "Radio Song" or "Endgame," either. But the highs - "Losing My Religion," "Near Wild Heaven," "Belong," and "Half a World Away" - are great.

The live disc on the "Document"-reissue sounds really, really good. Intense, energetic, and great renditions. Well worth checking out.

I saw them on that tour, and it was a pretty great show. But those arena shows were the death of them. The arena slog resulted in a disinterest in playing together that was palpable on everything from Green on. Out Of Time was the end of the line for me (although New Adventures has a decent moment or two).

I remember an Up-era interview where one the band, (Mills possibly) suggested one of the reasons New Adventures didn't sell that well was because casual fans were put off by the idea of an new album partly recorded in soundchecks and dressing rooms. So nothing to do with it's predecessor alienating the many who bought their biggest album and realising a wilfuly obscure, tune-free track as lead single.

those arena shows were the death of them. The arena slog resulted in a disinterest in playing together that was palpable on everything from Green on

I disagree. First of all, they didn't tour behind Out of Time and Automatic, so I think their batteries were recharged when they did tour behind Monster. And they used the Monster tour to do what they used to do in the good old I.R.S. days - i.e., write and road-test the next album while on tour behind the last one, with the result that New Adventures was their last unquestionably great album. I like a lot of what followed after Berry left, and Up is great in its own way, but New Adventures is the great R.E.M. "rock" album that Monster was supposed to be, and the reason it's great is that they wrote it on tour instead of in a rehearsal studio (or in the actual studio).

I remember an Up-era interview where one the band, (Mills possibly) suggested one of the reasons New Adventures didn't sell that well was because casual fans were put off by the idea of an new album partly recorded in soundchecks and dressing rooms

If they were casual fans, how would they have known that New Adventures was recorded in sound checks? It would seem to me that the definition of a casual fan is someone who doesn't keep up with that level of minutiae. Far more likely that, as you note, that "E-Bow" was a challenging first single, although "Losing My Religion" and "Drive" weren't the most obvious first singles from their albums, either. But they could get away with releasing an acoustic dirge as a first single in '92, whereas they could no longer get away with that in '96.

I still maintain that "Bittersweet Me" should have been the lead single from New Adventures.

Yeah. Losing My Religion was an unusual smash hit, but it undoubtedly launched them into bigger leagues, especially internationally. Drive was tuneful enough to release while they were riding high, E-Bow The Letter has no tune to speak of.

I've always felt a kind of weird resentment to that particular song, mainly because was hyped even by friends as some kind of mind-blowing art single despite not being very good. Two years later came Daysleeper.

i love playing armchair a&r about what an album's singles COULD have been but i dunno if there was any magic sequence of singles that would've drastically improved the initial response to New Adventures -- i love "Bittersweet Me" but i dunno if it would've slayed as a lead single. "New Test Leper" might've come off like Automatic Redux and "Wake Up Bomb" might've come off like Monster Redux. if you look at my old commercially disappointing major label rock/alternative albums of 1996 poll, which New Adventures won, i think there's a case to be made that alt-rock as a whole was in a sales freefall that year and there's a good chance neither REM nor any of their contemporaries could possibly be as big in 96 or thereon as they'd been in 91-95.

Then again, I would have said Electrolite.

"E-Bow" def one of their best songs, though. It's a amazingly strange thing. They never made anything like it again ( probably not before either, for that matter. It's pretty singular)

Several xposts

yeah think landscape had changed, i can remember that alot of ppl reading success of alanis, hootie, and in a different way beck at the time as market wanting to move on from altrock, think delayed reaction to monster was a factor and choice of 'e-bow' (which i do love) as first single played a huge role as well.

They never made anything like it again

I think I only played it twice, but 'Blue' struck me as Son Of E-Bow.

On second thought, I actually might not know their post-Berry output well enough to know if they made anything like it again. You may very well be right.