REM: Classic or dud?

I wouldn't chop "Sad Professor" for a shorter Up either.

'Diminished' and 'Sad Professor' would be the first two tracks on Up to get the chop ...

― The Anti-Climax Blues Band (Turrican), Monday, June 19, 2017 10:47 AM (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this sucks, these are like the two best tracks ffs

I still like "Daysleeper" when I chance to hear it. I kinda want to mash it up with "Nightswimming" some time.
I do like "Hope." Between "Diminished" and "Sad Professor," I'd keep "Diminished." But there's no real necessity to choose. If you don't feel like listening to the whole album you don't have to.

The only REM song I like post-Up is "Imitation of Life."

"You're In The Air," and "I'm Not Over You" would be the easy ways to tighten up the running time.

But then it would lose the line "I want you naked I want you wild."

Speaking of Up, does anyone else remember David Cross and Bob Odenkirk reviewing it among a selection of new albums (Archers of Loaf's White Trash Heroes was another) on MTV when it came out? I'd love to see that clip again.

I'll say it again: "Suspicion" is one of their best songs and terribly underrated.

I wouldn't cut "Diminished", it feels too important to the whole style of the album. But I honestly don't know what I'd cut. Maybe "Walk Unafraid".

"Walk Unafraid" was probably the song from this album that they did live the most. Still in their sets ca. 2008.

and it was a huge banger live

i'd cut "lotus" and "daysleeper" prob, not bc they're remotely bad songs (they're both amazing) but bc they're the biggest stylistic outliers on the record ("lotus" is so much louder than everything else, and "daysleeper" feels imported from out of time/automatic aesthetically)

The one track on Hi Fi that bugs me is "Leave".

leave bugs me too, actually! the siren guitar noise is fun for a while but wears out it's welcome on repeated listens

haha "Leave" is the only song on New Adventures that I've always loved, from first listen on.

Yeah, I'd also prune 'You're In The Air' ... 'Walk Unafraid' is one of the best things on the record, IMO, and worked fabulously live.

"Lotus" is on the short list of obnoxious REM songs.

'Suspicion' isn't one of my absolute favourites, but I like it and can understand why people consider it a highlight, even if I don't.

Bill Berry wrote the guitar riff to 'Leave', I think.

i find it hard to rank their albums because up to and including NAIHF there's such a quantity and quality of material...my favorite remains Reckoning, probably. i have a huge soft spot for Monster and i think it's a genuinely excellent LP. it sounds like no other album i can think of right now, let alone any other R.E.M. album. actually if there's anything that sounds like Monster, lmk.

monster is probably the only return-to-our-roots record i can think of where the idea went so wrong that it opened up a new space in their music

I love the one-two of Airportman to Lotus. But at the same time both are outliers to the rest of the record - they're never more subdued nor more garish. Maybe the chore of Up isn't the quality of any one song but rather that it takes a good 10-15 minutes to even settle into it's overall sound?

And the air of lassitude.

No, the chore of Up is a combination of overall length, slow-to-mid tempo tracks and everything is buffed to perfection and slicker than usual.

Like, Up was undoubtedly their slickest production to date - Berry and Buck liked to bang things down quick and went more for feel, Mills was more interested in slaving over things. Mills and Stipe were in the drivers seat for Up, Reveal and Around the Sun. Buck reasserted himself on the last two.

I get that but I don't think the "buffed" production is a drawback - I like Up and Reveal a lot. My challenge with Up is that I agree it's too long, but if I go track by track it's not obvious to me what should go. They're all good songs even if the album doesn't take off. Just a theory that maybe if you chopped those two outliers at the beginning (and maybe resequenced?), the feel of the album would change dramatically. I haven't tried it - just a thought occurring to me now.

I liked Reveal and Around the Sun a lot at the time because they seemed to involve a new interest in compositional concision. Neither is amongst my favorite R.E.M. albums overall but I think those charms still resonate and Around the Sun, in particular, is underrated. I like it more than Reveal.

I know I probably said that like ten times on here a decade ago!

I recommend the recently-ish released Unplugged two disk set, second disk, for good revisitations of Up and Reveal songs. and a killer Cuyahoga too

I concur on the Unplugged set. "Sad Professor" is better live. Probably "Lotus" is too.

"You're in the Air" seems a bit flabby to me in my memory but it's possible that if I listened to it today I would discover something essential.

Sounds obvious/corny to say it this way but: Up is not a record from the same band as made Fables. I like both bands but they're different bands (like Joy Div/New Order different, not Stones/Beatles different).

Circling backward it occurs to me that I probably like "Imitation of Life" because it reminds me of "Electrolite."

"You're in the Air" seems a bit flabby to me in my memory but it's possible that if I listened to it today I would discover something essential.

I've written this before but Reveal is an example of time rot: too much money to buy studio time, so much fuss over so little. These meticulously programmed and hysterically arranged sounds in search of tunes and often confusing overstatement for tunes. Even so, "The Lifting" is one of their strongest openers, and I like "All the Way to Reno" despite the lookit-the-synths-mom approach to programming.

"Reno"s a great tune

Stipe is in such great form on Up.

no one will stan for around the sun, accelerate, or collapse into now :(

I did a few hours ago!

A couple of people really liked the latter two. Around The Sun is a bit of a mess but has some great moments and probably better than half the albums being praised by rock magazines at the time.

"Leaving New York" was really nice

I'll usually stan for Around the Sun at the slightest provocation, just give me a sec. Easily my fave of the 00s albums.

So, i've given "Hi-Fi" a couple listens and while can say i understand its appeal, i doubt i'll coming back to it 20 years down the road.

I really, really love Accelerate - I'm really glad that they managed to get that one out of them before they disbanded.

I listened to "HIFI" a little more and there are some songs that may grow on me. It seems a bit too long though and I'm not too fond of their more rocker side so I might edit it at some point...

There's something I was wondering about that band : I remember they got a huge record deal, like the biggest ever, in the mid90s.
But I think that contract was signed AFTER their biggest hits (after Automatic, iirc). I don't know about their sales after that but I suppose the record company lost a lot with them, didn't it ?

Their sales nosedived in the US, but in the UK other parts of the world they remained as big as ever.

but was it enough to make that record deal worthwhile ?

I remember seeing a ton of unsold copies of New Adventures in HiFi at my local Camelot Music the week that album came out. They couldn't give them away.

My recollection is that HiFi was the first album under the new $80 million Warners contract, which didn't seem totally outrageous at the time, but yeah, they never sold (or toured, at least not in the US) at the Monster level again.

"Stand," "Losing My Religion" strike me as their high water mark in terms of sales and FM airplay.

So it seems likely that deal was not a great deal for Warners when viewed in isolation. Maybe Warners thought they were buying another ten hits like "Shiny Happy People," but would have settled for five more "Orange Crush"es or "One I Love"s.

But karmically speaking I tend to think of it as the universe retroactively paying the band _back_ for having made stuff like Murmur and generally laboring admirably in the trenches of college rock.

And I'm sure the Warners execs still had pretty nice houses anyway, even if REM did not necessarily earn out every advance. Surely they just exploited some different murky indie band and made out fine.

Their world tours were fucking massive. Don't know how they did it. For some reason they did two Scottish dates on the same tour, they were supposed to be months apart but due to someone getting ill, they ended up being the same week, unfortunately.

It was a bit after Around The Sun.

Yeah, in looking it up just now, I see that they still played arenas in the US in the '00s. They were definitely selling more tickets than records here.

Lotus is a canary in the coal mine for the later records, where they quickly appeared to lose whatever critical ear they had for their own material.

yeah but the touring income wasn't part of the deal, was it ?
their back catalogue wasn't included either.
it was just advances etc for the next 5 records.
clearly, it seems like a shipwreck of a deal but I agree that the band may have deserve it (and obviously, no one is crying for the execs who did it).

ahah :
https://www.theguardian.com/music/shortcuts/2016/may/23/adele-90m-record-deal-sony-megadeals-labels

Tarfumes, exactly: more tickets than records. This is common, I think, in bands with a long "tail" of oeuvre. People with enough money for an arena concert ticket in 2005 included a wide range of people who had followed one several paths into the band's music. Very few were coming because they'd only heard "The Great Beyond."

If you went to see them in the years 1990-2010, you were sharing an arena with some people who were just waiting to hear "End of the World," some who only knew Green, and some old-timers who had seen them in Athens and were hoping for a relative rarity like "Camera." Add all those up and it's a big audience.

True about the "tail."

And reading the terms of their contract (http://articles.latimes.com/1996-08-25/news/mn-37596_1_warner-bros), I wonder if their royalties from HiFi through Accelerate ever caught up with/paid back their advances (though I'm sure the label would say they hadn't even if they had).

When I saw them I got a strong impression that a lot of people will pay a lot to hear a few 90s hit singles. I can't read their minds but I'd bet on it. Maybe they're just the friends/family who're driving actuals fans home?

Who cares. I'd rather a good band has a big audience than one that only consists of "actual fans."

monster is probably the only return-to-our-roots record i can think of where the idea went so wrong that it opened up a new space in their music

― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Monday, June 19, 2017 1:09 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink