REM: Classic or dud?

it's a crowd pleaser for sure. plus, its just a really good faithful cover. the original and the cover are equally cool.

Even in retrospect, I don't think that Murmur and Reckoning were the creative pinnacle of this band. Reckoning is undoubtedly one of my personal Top 5 R.E.M. albums, but there's a certain type of R.E.M. fan that overrates the shit out of Murmur.

murmur and lifes rich pageant are the only albums i would listen to in 2017. murmur has my fave songs/sounds. and i love the mellencampania of LRP a ton to this day. "begin the begin" might actually be my fave r.e.m. song! which is a weird thing to say in public for some reason.

I find myself singing Cuyahoga all the time now. "Lets put our heads together, and start a new country up" - i've lost all hope in fixing America and think we need to accept that our fathers fathers fathers tried - and failed. Anyway, Cuyahoga has been on my mind just about everyday since January.

I think the sequence LRP/Fables/Document/Green would suffice to supply almost everything I need in this world. It omits early obscurantist fumblings, overlaps their ascent to global fame, and skips out before they got too navelcentric again.

There are some key tracks that aren't in that sequence, so some caveats must be allowed, but even so I'd be pretty happy with those four.

if chronic town = obscurantist fumblings then
moar plz

Amazes me all this about "Superman". I vaguely remember hearing it was a college radio hit. It's among my least favourite of their 80s output.

Their Pylon, Television and Mission Of Burma covers were fantastic though.

i love the mellencampania of LRP a ton to this day

^^^ this.

In fact: TS: R.E.M.'s "Life's Rich Pageant" vs "Document"

Re: "Superman," jangly Rickenbacker + ringing snare is an unbeatable formula (see also: "Earn Enough For Us").

I think the great thing about Superman is it shows a band that didn't take itself too seriously.
see also DLO.

I don't think REM were ever at risk of being seen as a face-like-a-slapped-arse punk band

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sBVX9kRmBE

'Murmur' >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> the universe

That footage is great! Contemporaneous taped-over news footage at end feels like REM sourcebook: Big Orange, Edwin Meese, El Salvador....

pitchfork's AFTP review today reminded me of this pretty exhaustive piece on the remix to Dolby Atmos which is available on the super deluxe version of the reissue:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/11/spatial-audio-is-the-most-exciting-thing-to-happen-to-pop-music-since-stereo/

even if you're like me and will never, ever, be able to afford the audio equipment described in the article, it's worth a read for r.e.m. fans. apparently AFTP is the first commercial release to get the Dolby Atmos treatment. about 2/3 into the article, there's a great rundown with Scott Litt and Clif Norrell, talking about how they went about the remix. with cameo appearances by Mills and Buck!

and the Dolby Atmos thing really does seem enticing. there's the $15,000 home theater option which requires "spatial-audio speakers" (so a 7.1.2 setup would be 7 speakers, a sub, and 2 spatial speakers), which sounds like a room that i'm not allowed to be in. but apparently it's possible to get a similar effect using a pair of headphones and a massive pain in the ass setup process on xbox or ps4. the author goes into much more detail, if anyone is interested.

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completely separately, ITEOTWAWKI(AIFF) has been sounding extra, extra good to me recently. there's something baked into the song's DNA that activates whenever the world is literally about to explode.

I'm not interested in the retirement home baiting stuff, but no matter how much I listen to 'It's the End of the World...' it still manages to retain its potency. I guess this goes for Automatic for the People too, which remains a great record.

I wonder how long before young people rediscover Automatic as a lost masterpiece and start citing it as an influence? We've already talked about REM's faded influence ...

Anyway, today is the first day I enjoyed Ignoreland.

Yeah, that great lost album that has kept appearing in "best albums ever"/"best albums of the '90s" lists since the moment it came out. Pretty much anyone with an interest in '90s alternative rock has heard this record, and I'll bet plenty more have been exposed to it by their parents - it sold a fuckton of records.

Don't be stupid. We've already talked about REM's at least anecdotal faded cachet. Sales mean shit. Critic lists mean shit. It took 25 years for the Sex Pistols album to go platinum.

By lost I mean lost to those who don't know REM from Adam.

yeah we massively covered this in the thread about Pitchfork's 80s list, in which Sade to name one, shows up way more than our Georgian heroes. hey nothing against Sade before someone jumps down my throat it's all good. i think when people rediscover them it'll be the first 4 albums they'll go for, much the same as when people rediscovered Talking Heads, or 'the early stuff' at least.

Yes, it's true on some level that R.E.M. aren't as regularly cited as an influence as much as they used to be, no doubt as a consequence of perhaps going on for far longer than they should have done, but to state that Automatic for the People is in any way a "lost" album is about the stupidest R.E.M. opinion I can think of.

It's not "lost" and never stopped being recognised as a classic album, it's more that it doesn't seem to get talked about as much as yer Nevermind's or Siamese Dream's anymore.

turrican do you have a list of bands that you don't like

I know I'm an oldster but in my world, if people are citing R.E.M. as an influence or talking about how R.E.M. saved their lives or whatev, they are more likely to cite Fables of the Reconstruction, Reckoning, Murmur, Life's Rich Pageant.

They are not, by and large, talking about Green, Out of Time, or Monster. They're almost certainly not talking about Up or Around the Sun. Of course I love Automatic for the People and it's a stone classic, but.

Some of this is as piscesx says: If you heard and liked some Talking Heads on the radio, your curiosity led you backward through their catalog, not forward to their late-career releases. If you liked, say, "Burning Down the House," your exploration of the band's catalog probably led you toward The Name of This Band Is, not to, say, "I Zimbra."

I think the way the discography will be viewed in the future is that the first 10 albums will be considered the "true" stuff and the three-piece stuff will generally be dismissed, apart from a small cult of fans that are heavily into Up.

I Zimbra is an earlier talking heads song though

I could totally see a younger class of bands embracing Automatic as an influence, sort of like what happened with Graceland a decade or so ago. It might take a while, though. There are still enough acts in the current gen paying reverence to R.E.M. (Real Estate, National) that it's still a little too early for younger bands to distinguish themselves by claiming that sound as their own.

I get the heightened reverence for the early R.E.M. stuff, because those are great, but the sound on those is pretty confined and limiting. Hard to do it w/o sounding like a straight R.E.M. homage. Automatic leaves a lot of threads to expand and build on.

I know I'm an oldster but in my world, if people are citing R.E.M. as an influence or talking about how R.E.M. saved their lives or whatev, they are more likely to cite Fables of the Reconstruction, Reckoning, Murmur, Life's Rich Pageant.

They are not, by and large, talking about Green, Out of Time, or Monster.

Depends where in the world you are. Americans are likelier to say the IRS stuff, Europeans are more likelier to say Document up to Automatic for the People.

I love those IRS era albums, but people wildly overstate the quality of them in comparison to the first five WB albums. There's not that much of a gulf in terms of quality and never has been.

Ironically, I think Out of Time would have been a more apt name for Automatic (and, imo, vice versa).

One thing I love about Automatic for the People is that it all sounds like it was written and recorded in one place, but it went through about five or six different studios across North America...

I love those IRS era albums, but people wildly overstate the quality of them in comparison to the first five WB albums. There's not that much of a gulf in terms of quality and never has been.

imo you perhaps similarly overstate the quality of the early WB albums in comparison to the later ones.

Hah, no. I think Around the Sun is a complete waste of time and an utter pile of shite, and while I like Up, Reveal and Accelerate, they're not in the same league as their first ten albums.

Out of Time and Automatic for the People are wonderful albums. R.E.M. were treading water aesthetically a little before them with Document and Green. Both of those are good and I still enjoy them, but neither of them has the zing of Lifes Rich Pageant.

Monster is a record I have not played much in quite a while. Ostensibly, I like some of the songs like "What's the Frequency, Kenneth" and some others. That song is a classic. But that is easily the worst sounding R.E.M. album. And I'm not a fan of the the New Adventures/Up development of their songs into longer narrative form. Both of those have songs I love, but they are atypical ones ("Electrolite" and "Hope," for example).

I was glad when Reveal came out and that they were seemed to be moving away from the longer form and showing more interest in classic song structure again. In retrospect, though, I think that is possibly their weakest album and that the songwriting is just not there enough of the time. Around the Sun was (as Christgau said at the time!) an improvement and has quite a number of great tracks. Accelerate was kind of another genre exercise that I haven't listened to in a while; Collapse Into Now is a tour de force farewell and to me their best album since the early '90s classics.

Hmm, I can't even remember if I ever heard "Collapse Into Now."

Listening now, this would be a lot better without the big "rock" production. .

It's not "lost" and never stopped being recognised as a classic album, it's more that it doesn't seem to get talked about as much as yer Nevermind's or Siamese Dream's anymore.

What's funny is I would have said I'm surprised by how nobody talked about Nevermind anymore. Ask me in 1993 and I for sure would have said that, not AFTP, was the record people would think of as defining the era.

Couple of quick thoughts after listening to "Green" this morning. One, "Green" is mostly good. I think I broke it down, like a lot of REM albums, into 1/3 great, 1/3 good, and 1/3 eh. Which brings me to, two: why, after signing to WB, does every REM album seem to have at least a couple of songs that sound like kids music? "Stand," "Get Up," "Pop Song 89," "(Untitled)," "Radio Song," "Shiny Happy People," "Sidewinder Sleeps" ... Is it just the mesh of Stipe's goofier faux-naif lyrics with peppy tunes? Is there any equivalent to those sorts of songs on the early records? Not badmouthing them, just observing that they could easily constitute a set for the diaper crowd. (And I don't mean aging REM fans, zing!).

Third, maybe not as much as a band like, say, the Smiths, but this is another group that's almost miraculously more than the sum of its parts. Weird vocalist, non-virtuoso lead guitarist, solid rhythm section, great vocal melodies that frequently make the songs imo, ace arrangements ... there are few indications early on that the band would be come such a novel chamber outfit.

Last, a funny story, which I don't know if I've told before. I have a few friends who are session guys, just gigging musicians who do jingles and stuff. One guy was on a commercial session right around when "Losing My Religion" was peaking, and apparently every producer/writer at the time had a mandolin in mind. So my friend is there playing guitar when they call in this excellent mandolin guy for a jingle. The guy sets up in a booth, starts tuning his mandolin, does a couple of absent minded strums to make sure he's good to go, then hears a voice through his headphones:

"That's great, we got it, thanks so much!"

there are several good songs that get lost in the haze of around the sun

xpost
Goofy/kids song “habit” starts with “Superman”, maybe?

'We Walk'

otm, that's right. so it was always there?

Michael Stipe was a fan of bubblegum music.

pretty clearly they all were. Just another strange facet of this strange band.

at least with 'we walk', the vibe is ambiguous enough that it can be interpreted as a 'death chant'. the morphed pool ball explosions at the end, which somehow sound foreboding, add to that, as well as it's lead in to the more obviously dark 'west of the fields'.

are there similar interpretations of their other lighter songs? is 'shiny happy people' actually an instruction manual on how to kill your parents?

"Can't Get There from Here" is totes one of these

"Can't Get There From Here" is an instruction manual on how to write a crap song

Yeah, it hasn't aged very well!