I Ate The POLLtus: REM's "Up"

And yet it's the most traditional ones on this that I like best - "Daysleeper," "Walk Unafraid." "Hope" could be a Green ballad. There are so many great tracks on the four albums after this that I have to disagree with you about their direction.

Overheard this exchange in a record store a few minutes ago between two guys who seemed to be playing the role of music expert and student:

Student: "Lenny Bruce...he was in REM, right?"
Expert: "Yeah, definitely"

I of course dutifully played the role of bystander who internally lols

Okay Tim, I'll take that challenge. What's the Best-Of-Post-Up look like?

I believe it is an EP.

I applaud'em for playing "Airportman" at the Tibetan Freedom Concert.

"The Great Beyond"
"The Lifting"
These might be my ten. There are others I like, too.

"Imitation of Life"
"Leaving New York"
"I Wanted to Be Wrong"
"Wanderlust"
"Aftermath"
"Living Well Is the Best Revenge"
"Mr. Richards"
"Uberlin"
"Every Day Is Yours to Win"
"Mine Smell Like Honey"

Uh...

These might be my ten. There are others I like, too.

"The Great Beyond"
"The Lifting"
"Imitation of Life"
"Leaving New York"
"I Wanted to Be Wrong"
"Wanderlust"
"Aftermath"
"Living Well Is the Best Revenge"
"Mr. Richards"
"Uberlin"
"Every Day Is Yours to Win"
"Mine Smell Like Honey"

Oh, and "Walk It Back."

this used to be my favorite rem record

I'll be pounce pony, phoney maroney
Pony before the cart

20 years now.
Rediscovering this album these days. It is really great (tho I don't care for Daysleeper). Love the organ and the drone wandering around a lot of the songs. Dont get why its poorly rated.

Also a very unique vibe. Feels like drinking coffee under a warm blanket in a bare room. Very '98 I guess.

that's how I spent 98

Weren’t we all

This album appeared shortly before the trend for overcompressing indie-synth records so that everything sounds in-your-face and very bright. By contrast there's still a sense of mystery to this album that just isn't there on subsequent REM records. I spent the summer listening to a lot of Cluster and Harmonia, Another Green World etc and they feel like the closest reference points for the electronics on Up.

It's hamstrung by the track order, Airportman works perfectly as an opener but once you've got through Lotus and Suspicion it feels like a real trudge. The middle section and the final two songs remain wonderful though.

Yeah a nearly-6-minute-long down tempo 3rd track is a total momentum killer. It's too long overall for sure, i'm sure there's a doc (on the remastered/deluxe versions maybe) where Buck is saying that he wouldn't cut a couple of 'his' tracks because Stipe wasn't going to cut any of his.

Belongs on the AFTP thread maybe but this is interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaiLpMsz2FE

xpost I assume you mean Buck versus Mills. Certainly Up, among other things, underscored the tiebreaker roll that Bill Berry played, not to mention his musical contributions.

Ah maybe so yeah.

I often listen to this entire album because I want to hear Falls To Climb, and it's a very enjoyable ride to there.

Could never see the point of Hope though, if you end up with a melody -that- similar to Suzanne, why not simply cover Suzanne? (I never read up on the lyrics of Hope, maybe I should?)

The phrasing seems similar but it's not the same melody.

It's not exactly the same, no, but it's similar enough that they gave Lenny co-credit for the song. Can't help but always think of Suzanne when I hear Hope.

I’m rarely sold on Stipe as a lyricist but I really like the lyrics of “Hope” - “but the last try was a failure and the intern was a mess” is a nicely grim line, and the whole thing is a really compelling look at the places that someone’s mind can go if they’re stuck in the hospital with nothing certain to hold onto anymore. I’ve been loving “Suspicion” lately as well, the album does kind of lose me as it goes on though.

iirc they realized once recording was done that they'd unconsciously gotten it from "suzanne," or sth like that. i agree, the lyric's fantastic. also like the pulse of the backing track.

Adore this album.

honestly you could ditch "Airportman," "Parakeet", "Why Not Smile", "Diminished" and "Suspicion" and lose almost nothing from what this album was trying to accomplish

Those are some of the best songs though.

in fact if you swapped all those out for the two b-side instrumentals ("Surfing the Ganges" and "Emphysema") it would be a more colorful and better paced record imho

Before this album came out, I was listening to an advance copy in the bedroom of my third-story apartment, with the window open. My roommate came up from the street and said a guy was standing down on the sidewalk, staring up at my window. As my roommate approached the front door, the guy asked her who was playing music up there. Then he said — “No one’s supposed to be listening to that album yet. I’m friends with the band, and I’m gonna tell them about this.” It was very weird.

Up is REM's Dukes of Stratosphear record -- self-consciously ditching their identity to make a bunch of songs in the styles of their various heroes. I tend to like these records bc while they don't always produce a group's best music, they usually tell you more about the band than just another release at this point in their careers.

All of the songs are here are unmistakably "REM Songs"--how could they not be?--but dressed up in arrangements like they are staring in a mirror wearing mom's party dress. The Beach Boys nightswim across this album in a million places -- "At My Most Beautiful" is the most obvious (and least successful), but not one but two songs nick the vibe(s) of "Til I Die" ("Suspicion" and "Diminished"). Meanwhile, "Lotus" tosses a few seconds of "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" strings in the intro.

The other influences are fun and/or interesting -- "Parakeet" has Richard Wright playing the leslie speaker piano of Pink Floyd's "Echoes," the Paul Thompson whomp of Bryan Ferry's "Tokyo Joe" in "Lotus." Mid-70s Eno crops up in a bunch of places as well -- notably on the rhythm generator and piano chords break midway thru "Why Not Smile."

"Daysleeper" is the one track where they pay homage to themselves (and was unsurprisingly the single) -- it's ... fine? It doesn't say anything about who they are I didn't already know from Out of Time nearly a decade earlier. By contrast, "Walk Unafraid" feels like it could be a highlight on any record of theirs.

Fun record.

great observations---I thought of Reveal as more the Beach Boys rip, but you're right that it's here too. It's good to note the influences on the songs you mention, because "Parakeet", "Diminished", and "Suspicion" bleed together for me and the influences are a way to crack them apart. I prefer the "Sad Professor" on the 2001 Unplugged set.

I love all the unabashed somnambulist miserablism on this one, because of course I do (Sad Professor, Daysleeper, Falls to Climb all come to mind)

Excellent perspective! This is still the only post-IRS album I'll rep for, but I do so unreservedly.

Peter Buck is a huge Soft Boys / Robyn Hitchcock fan, if this is their Dukes album I wonder where we find that homage.

I may have to get this

https://craftrecordings.com/products/up-25th-anniversary-edition-2-cd

oooh same! I was waiting for this one.

I was going to say, “25th anniversary already?” Then I saw this:

Unreleased 11-track performance from R.E.M.’s Party of Five taping

I love the new cover. Seen much bitching elsewhere about the lack of extras/demos etc. I'm guessing this is the docu, it'll be nice to get it in a HD version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT1wdva2jbU

Always truly loved Up, and saw the tour.

I think for this record they effectively released the demos? Not intended as a slight, I love it.

I loved this record in spite of not really wanting to (as a Bill Berry stan).

It's only grown on me since then. Poll results are basically accurate, but I still harbor affection for the less adored tracks. Diminished, Sad Professor.

would have voted for “diminished”.

Ooh, is that the doc with Berry on a tractor, declaring good-sportedly, that "it figures, I leave and they make their best album"?

I love watching/reading/listening to Up-era interviews; there's a Radio 1 one where Peter or Mike mention that the 'psychedelic' qualities of dance music, rather than (naturally) the beats, were an influence and I'd like to have known specifically what they were listening to.

Xp oh.. possibly yeah I remember him being generous about it.

Adversity does tend to force artists to make different creative choices. Bill leaving made the other guys work harder to come up with stuff, and I think that shows.

I will never not love the full lineup
and Mr. Berry, but I can see why coming to that crossroads in their career kinda forced them out of their comfort zone and made them create a pretty damn good album.

Sadly, that energy did not produce sustained quality. Apart from maybe "Imitation of Life" I rarely even think about REM post-Up. Sorry nit sorry.

There's an album's worth of good stuff post-Up, but no good albums.

There's an album's worth of good stuff post-Up, but no good albums.

Yup. I collected everything I'd want to hear on to one CD-R - filled the disc to the very limit but it also had songs from Up and several non-album cuts.

"Hope" really is good -- that electrofuzz fade-out *chef's kiss*

My last pair of headphones would make the noise bit torturously loud. All sorted now though.

Walk Unafraid 0
The Apologist 0

Still baffling!

Well, we only got to vote once. A multiple-choice ranking of Up tracks would have gotten more balance into the mix. I love Walk Unafraid, Apologist, Lotus... but Daysleeper and Hope are undeniably grebt.

Really quite an extraordinary record and I am glad it happened. I have sentimental faves on Fables, Green, etc., but I think Up is a special case. An album that happened exactly once. It cannot be compared to anything else because it just sits there like Mont St. Michel at low tide.