I Ate The POLLtus: REM's "Up"

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.

I feel like much of what they learnt doing Up would go on to contribute to the more songful album they perhaps always originally wanted to make in Reveal. So Up is amorphous and open-ended by design. Absolutely a one-off yeah, their own enigmatic Victorian folly.

Except Up is way better than Reveal.

But the band rather disagree afaict

(Personally my love for Up is such that I listen to it more than any of the first four I.R.S. albums so...)

Xp If so, they are wrong.

I'm interested to read their reflections on Up in the 25 set's liner notes. I remember Mike(?) in particular seeming a bit sullen about it at some point in some context when someone told him it was their favourite (pausing and then saying "it's good but it's not our best"). Ofc what I'd really love to happen is for Michael and Mike to do promo including a song-by-song radio interview but that understandably only ever happened for AFTP and Monster.

(and to a degree Out of Time)

there was some time about a decade or so back when i heard this and i remember thinking "of course that's where thom yorke got that idea to do kid a/amnesiac"

I have to find the interview, but somewhere there's a look back at Up (maybe an oral history) where it's mentioned that Mike Mills had little involvement in Up and openly complained about it, to which Peter Buck responded in the present day: "Want to participate? It's easy - JUST SHOW UP."

I can see them preferring Reveal if it was more of a collaborative effort - very uneven, their worst outside of Around the Sun, but I don't think they really settled into the idea of being trio until then.

Hmm. Up has so many keyboards

I'm pretty sure it was Up only because I was taken aback for that reason - it's the one post-Berry album I like in its entirety - but if I can remember where I saw it, I'll post a link. It's tough because I've read way too many articles on R.E.M.

I'm quite used to being the solitary Reveal lover wherever I am. And while it isn't as strong as Up their constant talk about it being a summer record lines up perfectly with my own liminal R.E.M. nostalgia from many, many moons ago.

(Like Up it is also soaked in keyboards and synths, but more in the sense of bubblebath dressing. Cosy lite-psych sfx sprinkled throughout folky soft rock was a spring 2001 aura, cf. Travis' likely-very-despised-here Sing.)

Here's the perfect Up bonus disc (79 minutes, even fits on a single CD):
Emphysema
Surfing The Ganges
Why Not Smile (Oxford American version)
Sad Professor (live in the studio)
Lotus (Weird mix)
Suspicion (live in the studio)
At My Most Beautiful (radio remix)
Suspicion (live in Ealing Studios)
Walk Unafraid (Peel session)
Daysleeper (Peel session)
Lotus (Peel session)
At My Most Beautiful (Peel session)
Passenger (live on Jools Holland)
Country Feedback (live on Jools Holland)
So. Central Rain (live on Jools Holland)
Electrolite (live on Jools Holland)
Man On The Moon (live on Jools Holland)
Perfect Circle (live on Jools Holland)

Man, I love Reveal and I’m so sick of seeing it casually dismissed as a piece of trash not worth debating. It’s great. No skips. The Lifting, All the Way to Reno, Imitation of Life - all fantastic.

Sequencing was R.E.M.'s biggest foe for a while there I think - the whole stretch from Monster through Reveal (not sure about Around the Sun, never actually heard the whole thing) falls into the "great album, kind of wants to reshuffle and lose 2-3 songs though" category.

Below is my long-time Up edit; to my surprise, the four songs I've omitted are among the top six in this poll, so it may displease.
The singles are frontloaded on side 1, which ends with an epic. Side 2 slows down with each subsequent song til it reaches stasis (I was thinking of Before and After Science as a model).

Daysleeper
Lotus
Suspicion
Sad professor
You're in the air

Walk unafraid
The apologist
Diminished (sans "I'm Not Over You")
Parakeet
Airportman

I mostly like Reveal and what particularly impresses me is the production, it makes me think of heat making the air shimmer

Below is my long-time Up edit; to my surprise, the four songs I've omitted are among the top six in this poll, so it may displease.
The singles are frontloaded on side 1, which ends with an epic. Side 2 slows down with each subsequent song til it reaches stasis (I was thinking of Before and After Science as a model).

Great edit, I think you nailed Side A. I'd start Side B with "Hope" and end with "Falls to Climb".

Not that I would change the final album but I think Why Not Smile would make a great opening song