R.E.M. trio albums POLL

I mostly meant that the end of "Around The Sun" has a big crescendo that is something like a brief attempt at that sort of epicness you get in post-rock and symphonic rock. And I don't think it worked for them. Maybe it isn't right to dismiss them ever taking that approach just because I don't think that song succeeded but I feel that it just isn't REM.

I am glad at least Turrican likes I'm Gonna DJ. I kinda love that song. It might be my favorite off Accelerate. It's between DJ or Supernatural Superserious, and I really like that album.

My favorites:

Up - Why Not Smile
Reveal - Beat a Drum
Around The Sun - I Wanted To Be Wrong
Accelerate - I'm Gonna DJ
Collapse Into Now - All The Best

To me it doesnt work because the song isnt memorable enough to warrant it.

Besides, in their heyday REM would have toned that side if it down especially if the tune didnt hold up

i remember feeling so dismayed by around the sun in high school. it's between up and reveal for me - i love the weird buoyancy of "lotus" but "imitation of life" and "all the way to reno" are still two of my favourite REM singles. (IIRC "reno" is my friend ari's favourite REM song period.)

"supernatural superserious" is a fun entry in the "michael stipe barks a bunch of syllables" canon

Im still not sure about Imitation - I think its catchy enough but at the same time the sound of a band trying very very hard to do and sound the way it once did almost effortlessly

Tell it to the Decemberists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR9DjdMrpHg

There's this part of "Man-Sized Wreath" that always sounds like they're about to break into a cover of "Celebration" by Kool and the Gang. I feel like 1984 R.E.M., playing this live, would actually have done it.

As for the poll, there's probably not a song they wrote after "Sad Professor" I think is as good as "Sad Professor," but in terms of my actual listening I think I rate both Accelerate and Collapse above the others. Maybe it's fanservice, but sometimes it's nice to be serviced.

The live in Hansa videos for Collapse are terrific. Their final live performance, so poignant but also celebratory. Rieflin sounds great and Stipe sings the shit out of Discover.

like everyone, this discussion has led me to revisit the albums in question. I still think Reveal and Around The Sun, are, well, terrible, but I'm not sure if Stipe the singer has ever sounded as good on record as he does on those two (vocally, Around The Sun in particular is a great performance).

album picks
Up-Hope, Why Not Smile
Reveal-All the way to Reno, Imitation of Life
Around The Sun-Around The Sun
Accelerate-Houston, Horse to Water
Collapse Into Now-All The Best, UBerlin

Reveal really does have some good songs, even if they're not the best recordings or arrangements or performances of those songs. I definitely gave it way more listens than the ones that followed, though I gradually started skipping over the long, I guess 'ballad' ones. MaresNest is totally right on about the consistency of the tempo. I think it works great on "Beat A Drum," "The Lifting," and a couple other things but it just doesn't feel like a record that was urgently made or urgently needed to be released. I quite like "Imitation of Life," but in memory it wasn't as much of a throwback to "Shiny Happy People" as it really is. Not a bad thing, since I like "Shiny Happy People" etc, and I dig Stipe's lyric, especially the opening line, but it does raise the specter of a band trying to hit a mark instead of doing what they want to be doing.

Up maybe involves some degree of trying to be "experimental," but mostly they seem like genuine experiments and the songwriting is there to back them up. One or two tracks should've-been-B-sides, but it's able to sustain much more of a 'feel' despite a greater variety in tempos and sounds. It also sounds, in hindsight, like a pretty reasonable step forward from where they had been as a band, with the long grinding, wails of Buck's Monster/NAIHF guitar sliding into the background as color and texture (Airportman, Apologist, Sad Professor, etc.). If NAIHF really would have been the best place to end it, Up would also have been a pretty satisfying, dignified final record, which I don't think can really be said of any of the others.

What do you think are the shoulda been bsides? Parakeet for sure

That was the one that prompted my thinking that! I guess the other would be "You're in the Air," everything else is kind of a solid REM song, part of the canon to me. Maybe that's the big dividing line after Up - there start being way, way more songs per record that stop feeling like key pieces of what the band did or was good at... less quotable, less relevant, less unique. Whereas I feel like almost every song on Up is probably in somebody's top ten REM songs.

i love "parakeet" jeez guys

I like Up and Reveal a lot, I'm still kind of mystified by the speed of the decline to Around the Sun.
re: the 'not sounding like the three of them were ever in the room at the same time' factor, I'm sure I read something suggesting that for the Around the Sun sessions they would all eat dinner and have a few drinks together every evening with Pat McCarthy, and then go back to the studio slightly tipsy to do a bit more recording, and the person that wrote this thing was suggesting that this was the reason the album came out a bit underwhelming. I like the idea of the three of them sobering up one morning and discovering they had recorded and released a terrible album on a bender

I do wonder to what effect their gradual realization that critical and commercial acclaim were now mostly beyond them played into those last albums. New Adventures' underwhelming numbers they could write off on unclear promotion (the idea it was a rattle and hum tour album), Up was inherently transitional but by the release of reveal it must have been clear their long day in the sun was done. And while I don't think they necessarily lived for that appreciation and attention it must have been a change to stop being cool after being the pinnacle of cool to an evergrowing audience for so long. Do you actively try to be pop again? Be a critics darling? Just do your thing? And what does "doing your thing" mean if Your Thing always seemed to pop and a critics darling before?

And before someone notes rolling stone still gave them four stars or whatever, there's critical acclaim and then there's critical ACCLAIM. I'm sure these guys were astute enough to recognize the difference.

Definitely clear in hindsight that pat McCarthy was the worst producer they could have had during such a directionless period, aside from reminding them that they still make enough money to hang around in studios across the globe for months.

Up is the best here, sure, but it's I can't imagine listening to it again. There are plenty of decent songs from Monster onwards, but "Electrolite" and "WTF Kenneth" are the only two I'd save.

Two notes - I also love "I'm Gonna DJ" - and good god the 2nd go-round of the chorus on "Diminished" is so transcendant, it's always bugged me how annoying the verses are.

I do wonder to what effect their gradual realization that critical and commercial acclaim were now mostly beyond them played into those last albums. New Adventures' underwhelming numbers they could write off on unclear promotion (the idea it was a rattle and hum tour album), Up was inherently transitional but by the release of reveal it must have been clear their long day in the sun was done. And while I don't think they necessarily lived for that appreciation and attention it must have been a change to stop being cool after being the pinnacle of cool to an evergrowing audience for so long. Do you actively try to be pop again? Be a critics darling? Just do your thing? And what does "doing your thing" mean if Your Thing always seemed to pop and a critics darling before?

― da croupier, Sunday, January 18, 2015 8:43 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Reveal was a UK #1 album that went platinum.

In fact, it went Top 5 everywhere... aside from The Netherlands, Japan, New Zealand and the US.

I remember cutting the UK TV ads for Reveal, Warner booked Paul Gambaccini for the voiceover and the first line was 'The love affair is back on!'

I imagine Reveal was the last time a lot of people thought, "I suppose I gotta buy the new REM record" -- it was for me.

I remember being excited to pick up Reveal after David Cavanagh's rave review -- I think that actually increased the letdown after hearing it.

turrican, please apply what i said about critical appreciation to commercial appreciation. it's not that the world took a collective shit on it, but that "still doing ok in europe" kinda pales to the new plateaus of success they achieved with each album through monster

It really is amazing how their turn towards a more generic alt rock group was reflected in their album covers and marketing. They really wanted to lose every trace of "oddball" after awhile or so it seemed.

Here is that Cavanagh review -- which is actually the source of that "love affair" quote!

turrican, please apply what i said about critical appreciation to commercial appreciation. it's not that the world took a collective shit on it, but that "still doing ok in europe" kinda pales to the new plateaus of success they achieved with each album through monster

― da croupier, Sunday, January 18, 2015 9:35 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Of course they weren't as huge worldwide as they were around the time of Automatic For The People or Monster, but that doesn't mean they still weren't a big band.

In fact, Reveal was probably more successful outside of the US than Up was.

But then, I've always found the American perception of this band, their albums and even some of their individual songs to be wildly different to the UK/European perception. In the UK in particular, this undoubtedly has a lot to do with the fact that R.E.M. didn't have their breakthrough here until Out Of Time.

I imagine Reveal was the last time a lot of people thought, "I suppose I gotta buy the new REM record" -- it was for me.

I remember being excited to pick up Reveal after David Cavanagh's rave review -- I think that actually increased the letdown after hearing it.

― Chuck_Tatum, Sunday, January 18, 2015 9:32 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nope, I think Around The Sun was actually the tipping point commercially. Y'see, Around The Sun made it to #1 in seven countries, and also made the Top 10/Top 5 pretty much everywhere else aside from Japan, New Zealand, Portugal and the US. Problem is, the fans didn't like it and this had a knock-on effect on what came after.

xposting, Up is also where we really learned, if we did not know it already, just how Bill contributed, not just musically (singing, piano, drums, guitar, etc.) but as a mediator between Buck and Mills in the studio. They have both conceded, iirc, that Up could have been shorter but neither of them wanted to cut any of their songs.

Up would have made such a great final album. Or the place they should have recorded an acoustic album with, say, no drums. Or the place where they should have gone on hiatus. I really could have seen the group coming back strong after a long break, rather than dutifully churning out records that at best occasionally got the sound right but rarely captured the spirit of REM. But of course, they also conceded that minus Bill they were a different band.

Incidentally, "Up" and Berry's departure all happened right after or around the firing/retiring of their longtime manager Jefferson Holt. Don't underestimate what a change in management can do to a group. U2 losing Paul McGuinness has clearly been bad for the band.

for reference btw:

I Ate The POLLtus: REM's "Up" 30 votes
POLL The Way To Reno: REM's "Reveal" 29 votes
Leaving Was Never My POLLed: REM's "Around The Sun" 18 votes
SuPOLLnatural, SuPOLLserious: REM's "Accelerate" 06 votes

otm about Holt's departure (which was a bit later, early 2000s, right?) and very ugly, involving sexual harassment claims, iirc. That kinda was their equivalent to Brian Epstein's death for the Beatles. They lost a mediator & sounding board & became a set of occasionally-hostile interests, compromising w/each other to keep things going for a while longer.

correction: you're right: happened in '96, around the same time Berry left

Feeling like piping up again against what seems to be a lot of consensus here. Around the Sun has a lot of slow songs. But I've never seen how they're inherently worse as a group of songs than those on the two albums that preceded it. Collapse Into Now is a wonderful record with very moving songs and was an awesome gesture by the group in finishing their career.

You know Up winning this would be ironic, in that it's the only one Berry was actually involved in writing.

The Holt thing was really 'off' - the whole close knit, 4 way tie thing, suddenly there was all this uneasiness, coupled with Berry's departure.

96/97 was generally a weird time to be an REM fan.

I remember reading the news about Bill Berry leaving R.E.M. and their decision to carry on and remember having mixed feelings about it at the time. On one hand, I knew it would never be the same again, which was saddening to me as I loved New Adventures In Hi-Fi (and still do) even if it didn't then receive the praise that it does now. I just didn't feel like they were finished at that point. On the other hand, I was curious to see how they'd handle the departure and was looking forward to seeing what they'd come up with. They did a really good job at first of putting on a front and making it look like they were successfully carrying on as normal with a near-same degree of chemistry as they had before and that they hadn't much trouble adapting to becoming a three-piece, if I recall. Then of course, the stories started coming out about communication breakdowns between band members and a stark difference in working methods between Stipe and Mills (who liked to labour over the details of the music) and Buck (who liked to work in a more instant way). From what I can gather, Berry was very much in the same school of "no fuckin' around, let's get this track done" as Buck was, so his departure left Buck pretty much out on a limb. I suspect Pat McCarthy was going along with the way that Stipe and Mills (the "majority" of the band by this point) worked and that alienated Buck further.

Buck, I guess, was no stranger to doing work outside of the band, but he seemed to be increasingly more interested in working outside the band than with the band. He eventually got his way on Acclerate and Collapse Into Now, which are more in keeping with his preferred working methods and I think Accelerate in particular is as underrated now as New Adventures In Hi-Fi was when it first came out, and I think it'll take a while for people to catch onto it because "it doesn't have Berry on it, therefore it's not a real R.E.M. albumzzzzZZZzzzZZZzzzz..."

However, I do think a difference in working methods between Buck and Mills were one of the reasons for R.E.M. splitting.

Like, I see Reveal as being a Mike Mills-driven record, and Accelerate as being Peter Buck-driven.

When did Mills start rockin' the nudie suit?

Or, you know, Nudie suit. I'm sure they all rock the nudie suit at times, like on their birthday.

Around the time of Monster, I think?

Which is when Pat McCarthy first started working with R.E.M., funnily enough (he engineered on Monster)

yeah that 'love affair' quote is from Dave Cavanagh in Q. the last line of his 5/5 star Reveal review ("Let the infidelity cease. The love affair with REM is back on.. "). he'd been THE music press REM champ in his days at Select but two years later it seems he had some kind of epiphany and in a 2 page WORD mag piece in 2003 he banged on about how much he wished they'd knock it on the head. "If there’s no more to create, or if there’s nowhere to go but back, REM must stop. They have already ceased to be unique and are in danger of looking foolish. Let them be different to those bands that go on too long and become an embarrassment.” etc etc. it seemed a big deal at the time.

The Mills/Buck tension makes a certain amount of sense, but on the other hand, Mills is a really strong presence on the final two albums, both in his playing and singing. For all that Buck's method may have won out, Mills was clearly enjoying being the driving bass player and second vocal line guy again.

i don't buy any theories that suggest things were TOO contentious between anyone in the band because every other day you see photos of any two of them hanging out at a concert or a restaurant or something. seems like whatever disagreements they have, they all get on board once its sussed out.

Turrican, NAIHF got excellent reviews at the time. Before its release there was little hint that it wouls be a commercial disappointment.