REM: Classic or dud?

It's the one moment from their post-Automatic era that comes close to evoking the strangeness of their early records

I'm not sure what in the pre-Automatic era (or on Automatic itself) evoked the strangeness of the early records. (I'm assuming we're talking about "Stumble" and "Old Man Kensey" and "Feeling Gravitys Pull" and things?)

The most obvious strange tracks on the later records would be "Blue" on the last album and then, I don't know, "Sing for the Submarine?" "The Outsiders?"

Sad Professor is beautiful!

Accelerate in itself ain't brilliant, but it has spirit and it made me (re)discover the band (up until then I hadn't been bothered to pay much attention to their oeuvre except for the hits)

I actually like Accelerate a lot. Really the only criticism I have of it is the bad mastering; Accelerate and Depeche Mode's Playing The Angel surely must be two of the most painfully loud albums that I own.

this is a good interview:

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/09/peter_buck_i_think_we_were_all_really_ready_for_a_change/

“Man on the Moon,” it’s a great song. But it’s five minutes long and I’ve played it a couple thousand times."

ouch!

that's gotta hurt.

You gotta do the hand movements on that one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW-66e_wyxg

Anyone would get sick of that out of tune wail Stipe always did during the instrumental break

I never liked MOTM live, partly because of that

Plus there was a lot of detail in the studio version that the live misses - all that lead guitar that they just didn't bother with.

Not top 50 R.E.M songs IMO. Not bad or anything, just never did much for me. I find it very un-R.E.M, even in the context of 'Automatic'.

listening to that early boot So Much Younger Then this morning, so nuts that they've never released this officially. "Baby I" is top shelf REM, and so is the rest.

I turned on the radio the other day just in time for the MOTM guitar solo, and it took me a few seconds to realize it wasn't "The One I Love."

huh, just read that Bob Mould played "Sitting Still" at the 2009 REM tribute concert. would love to hear that!

I love Man on the Moon, and I think it slots comfortably into their anthemic lineage - it's ''Fall on Me'' with a different palette. But I can see where it just wouldn't be somebody's thing.

i enjoyed that interview. i can't say that i've thought about peter buck much in a long time. i even listened to a couple of tired pony songs! didn't really thrill me. not horrible though.

MAybe I have thought the "un-R.E.M"-thing properly through. Normally I love anthemic R.E.M. But not this one. Lyrics maybe - no mystery. Makes me think of the movie.

xpost to DC

And "maybe I haven't thought". Jeez.

that is a good interview, seems like peter buck is doing exactly what peter buck should be doing.
interesting that he's on the internet downloading bootlegs -- i guess that makes sense... he should just let mississippi records release that So Much Younger Then show.

so it sounds like he is a silent partner in mississippi? i didn't know that.

Is there an album from the catalog that you feel is underappreciated?

I think if you asked all of us, we’d all have “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” in the top third, in the top five.

REM OTM

Interesting that Buck suggests he was ok with an indie-label/theater-concert future for REM. With Mills also doing smaller scale concerts, it sounds like Stipe was the one that was most put off by the idea of performing without Warner Bros paying for another "recorded on three continents" moneyloser.

i'm also curious if they really didn't take stock of the situation until the end of the contract, or if it was already clear earlier that their declining status would be untenable without that megadeal.

like, if it had been a three album deal, would they had split after Around The Sun?

never realized till now how easily their five-album contracts splits their career into thirds.

they could have been their own money-making machine if they had wanted it. how many r.e.m. records do you think they could sell if they did it themselves? i'll tell you how many. a bunch. they could have done the select city 10 night stand thing. v.i.p. tickets. blah blah blah. so much you can do when you have a base that large.

Peter Buck joined Yo La Tengo in Seattle a few months ago. He didn't add to much to the music but it was cool to see him jamming with Ira.

I think especially after Berry leaving that the aesthetic sense of what REM were supposed to be or what they were in the future seem to to be very different especially between Stipe and Buck. Not sure about Mills (or Mills caught in he middle somehow). Stipe IMO really dragged the band down in the 00s - was nowhere near the force he was in the 80s or most of the 90s. Unlike Buck he had - more than ever - extra curricular activities that had nothing to do with music and it showed.

Wait, did R.E.M. break up!?

MAybe I have thought the "un-R.E.M"-thing properly through. Normally I love anthemic R.E.M. But not this one. Lyrics maybe - no mystery. Makes me think of the movie.

― Mule, Thursday, October 10, 2013 11:54 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean that's not really fair to the song, considering that the movie was named after it and all. the song had kind of a hazy mystique to me when it was new -- for all i knew Andy Kaufman and Elvis and St. Peter were just swimming around in the same vague river of associations as Lester Bangs, Lenny Bruce and Leonard Bernstein.

Glad there is so much love on here for Fables, which is damn near perfect, as is Reckoning. The early, mysterious REM, as I've called them on here before. The vocal harmonies, the poetry of Americana, the restraint. I'd save everything up to and including Document, after which is the long slow decline.

So long and slow that many of their best moments come after Document.

some dude otm

it's the time of the year for Automatic, put it on a couple of days ago and enjoyed the anthems of decay

fuck, good call, I should bust it out tonight. Increasingly when I think of that record what I hear is the opening bars of "Sweetness Follows" and it sounds so good.

re: contract, it's been argued before on ILX that they could have renegotiated and walked out any time they wanted. But it might be that with that structure in place, it would be hard for any of them, and certainly for all three, to conclude "yeah, we should push against this and go out of our way to quit now." Very revealing in the interview that Buck takes it for granted that they would not be able to get a (suitable?) contract to make records. Also amazing to think that they had basically as long of a career span after Berry as before - years and years doing those big tours and making these basically unsuccessful albums. I could believe it had all become a real drag.

For me they're sort of the archetypal "if they'd broken up at X time, they'd be much more highly regarded to this day." But those things also fade and shift with time.

Has Stipe being doing anything? I didn't see anything in that interview.

I have a good feeling about the members keeping a lower profile. As I said above, I think the band suffered from overexposure and although I'd imagine a few of their hits will still be on radio regularly for many years to come, I think their fame dying down might help future fans appreciate their albums better. When people say they jumped the shark in the 90s (some people say as early as Fables) I just have the impulse to tell them that they are really missing out, because I really think their peak was New Adventures - Up era and I hope the new fans of the coming years will agree with me. That might be interesting to see; especially if this thread goes for decades and kids can peer in confusion at the opinions of older fans.

my understanding is stipe doesn't have a lot of interest in doing any more music and negative interest in touring.

For me they're sort of the archetypal "if they'd broken up at X time, they'd be much more highly regarded to this day." But those things also fade and shift with time.

― Doctor Casino, Thursday, October 10, 2013 8:42 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I disagree. I don't think that R.E.M. ever stopped being "highly regarded".

i was always curious what Buck would do outside the group, and it appears he's been up to a lot that you don't really hear about, partly because he doesn't do much press. is there anything especially good he's done since R.E.M.?

As I said above, I think the band suffered from overexposure and although I'd imagine a few of their hits will still be on radio regularly for many years to come, I think their fame dying down might help future fans appreciate their albums better. When people say they jumped the shark in the 90s (some people say as early as Fables) I just have the impulse to tell them that they are really missing out, because I really think their peak was New Adventures - Up era and I hope the new fans of the coming years will agree with me. That might be interesting to see; especially if this thread goes for decades and kids can peer in confusion at the opinions of older fans.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Thursday, October 10, 2013 9:06 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, New Adventures In Hi-Fi these days is (quite rightly) seen as one of their better albums for quite a number of people, and Up has always had its own cult fanbase which, from what I've noticed over the last few years, keeps steadily growing. If there's any R.E.M. album that's grown on me more since the band broke up, it's Reveal, which is an album I never used to have a great deal of time for, but seems to have come into its own for me over the last couple of years.

Judging their back catalogue a couple of years since the split, I'd actually go as far as far as saying they never "jumped the shark" at any point, but they did reach the point that they got tired of it and maybe realised that there was nowhere else they could go; a natural dead-end in other words, both in a 'music' sense and a 'career' sense. They certainly couldn't have got any bigger (and definitely not to the degree of worldwide success they had circa Automatic), and its very debatable as to whether they could have taken the "R.E.M. sound" (i.e. the combination of Mills/Buck chord sequences and Stipe's vocal melodies) and do anything with it they hadn't really done before. I think the band had reached the end of its natural lifespan, and the band themselves realised this.

Really, the only album of theirs that I would consider to be in any way a "bad" record is Around The Sun, which 9 years on from its release has failed to connect with me in the same way as all of their other records do. But all bands are allowed one dodgy album in an extremely long career like the one that R.E.M. enjoyed without it being considered a "shark jump" moment.

I mean, whichever way you look at it, they released 15 albums in a 31 year career, and 14(!!!) of those albums range from being (at the least) good to (at the most) indispensable, with only 1 being an out-and-out turkey. I'd say that wasn't bad going, and its definitely not something I could say of popular ILX staples like Depeche Mode and The Cure, and I'm a fan of both of those bands.

Eh. They've got no embarrassments but since the late Clinton administration they've released an awful lot of irrelevant albums.

For me they're sort of the archetypal "if they'd broken up at X time, they'd be much more highly regarded to this day." But those things also fade and shift with time.

― Doctor Casino, Thursday, October 10, 2013 8:42 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I disagree. I don't think that R.E.M. ever stopped being "highly regarded".

― Dog Man Star took a suck on a pill... (Turrican), Thursday, October 10, 2013 10:14 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I dunno, when SPIN did some 100 best alternative guitarists ever list recently, Buck wasn't on it, which would have been UNTHINKABLE back in the day. They're still respected, but they lost their shot at being alternative's Led Zep by dropping post-drummer albums fewer people cared about than even Robert Plant solo albums.

Of course it's possible that Reveal and ATS would sound worse if released under the mid nineties spotlight.

I'm with you on Reveal - it's much better than it's given credit for. Around the Sun has some nice moments but some really terrible moments too. I actually think if you take the best parts of AtS and the best parts of Accelerate, you've got a pretty good, pretty varied REM record.

xp

liking an REM album after 1996 is like liking Van Morrison albums like Enlightenment or Days Like This.

Eh. They've got no embarrassments but since the late Clinton administration they've released an awful lot of irrelevant albums.

― the objections to Drake from non-REAL HIPHOP people (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, October 10, 2013 10:49 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Irrelevant to you, maybe. Not necessarily to the hundreds of thousands of people who bought and enjoyed those records.