R.E.M. trio albums POLL

"she just wants to be" is def one of my least favorite rem songs

wow just looking at the tracklisting i'm like "this is a very uneven album that i listened to constantly in high school for some reason?" i used to love "i'll take the rain" but now recognize it as the palest xerox of a rem ballad

i love "i've been high" and "disappear" (which sounds like it's broadcasting the second side of accelerate early) though

all of Around The Sun sounds like the part of a concert where your favorite band plays newer material and all the energy drains from the room.

'She Just Wants To Be' sounded much better live. Around the Sun starts off well ('Leaving New York', 'Electron Blue') and then it goes south.

most of these songs sounded much better live. the around the sun tracks especially

around the sun songs i'll go to bat for:

electron blue
the outsiders before q-tip appears
i wanted to be wrong
boy in the well
aftermath
ascent of man

"high speed train" is also great i think but it covers very little ground that "boy in the well" doesn't

I'm surprised DC didn't note "I've Been High" as one of the good ones! the electronics threaten to swallow the singing but if you don't like his singing here then that's a good thing. I think his singing on it is gorgeous and as I said even better on the Unplugged from 2001, where the sequence is "Disappear" -> "Beat A Drum" -> "I've Been High".

yeah idk with that one, it just kinda bores me. the lyrics don't land with me, i hear them as generic deep-thought stuff, the images and word choices aren't very unique. i don't fall in love with songs because they have unique words mind you - just trying to articulate what it is that's present in many other r.e.m. songs that's missing here.

i've made this point before but around the sun kind of "works" as a document of post-9/11 exhaustion. it came out a month before the 2004 election but it's so depressed i feel like it actually predicted four more years of dubya

there are still too many aimless ballads stacked on top of each other

also re: reveal: the tempo is all very samey on a lot of songs here, and it's a few bpm too slow imo. feels like he gets an idea out, takes a swig of water, deep breath, step away from the lectern, come back to deliver the next line.... everything's kind of contented, no urgency to anything.

'Summer Turns To High' is an underrated one from Reveal, IMO.

I like the lyric "The light, sometimes it washes over me", it's evocative of a feeling of passivity, and I've always had an ear for Stipe's lyrics suggestive of being a bottom (cf "Bang and Blame") though probably that's just me.

man "i'll take the rain" just goes on and on. it's 5:51! when it comes back to the strumming around 3:40 i have a momentary terror that "she just wants to be" is about to start again.

'I'll Take the Rain' is my least favourite track on that LP, because it's totally unsuccessful at what it's trying to achieve. It aims to be this anthemic tear-jerker and it doesn't make me feel a thing.

"beach ball" goes down smoothly enough. always reminded me a lot of "emphysema," the b-side to "daysleeper." or i mean it would go on up fine, swap for "parakeet," just part of the texture.

imho apart from "the lifting," "imitation of life" and "beat a drum," every track on reveal is at the level of the couple of tracks i would cut from up, or worse. feels very much of a piece with around the sun from what i can remember of that album. it's cool that other people like this album more than i do but it's really head-scratching to me to remember that it was well-reviewed and well-received at the time. i remember someone making the argument that this had to do with british music journos having a thing for brian wilson around this time, or something, but that doesn't seem like much to go on.

i am almost 100 percent certain the lyric is actually "but life sometimes it washes over me" euler

"The Lifting" and "I've Been High," after which I realize, after thirty minutes, that I've been snoring.

I actually like Reveal a lot, undoubtedly moreso now than I did at the time of its release. Especially now that I understand the type of record they were trying to make - this hazy, summery kind of record both thematically and sonically. The laid-back vocals and tempos are quite evocative of hot days where you just want to take things slow. Also, Stipe's voice sounds beautiful on it and I don't think the vocals are half-hearted at all - they suit the material.

Even on something otherwise gorgeous like 'I wanted to be wrong' it feels like they can't leave well enough alone, like when the slapback guitar comes in on the instrumental break.

That song rules. Maybe my favorite of any of their political songs.

i remember someone making the argument that this had to do with british music journos having a thing for brian wilson around this time, or something

Also late '60s Glenn Campbell/Jimmy Webb was buzzy then.

i don't enjoy "REM does beach boys"

Not sure I do either and yet "Summer Turns to High" is probably one of the best songs on Reveal. At least I maybe have a sense of what they were going for with the arrangement there, as opposed to, say, "Disappear" (thought I get what Brad was saying about that song presaging Accelerate - wish it was arranged like it would have been on Accelerate).

Could similarly take "Chorus and the Ring" more if it had been arranged like one of the more abstract, eccentric songs on Green.

Stipe's voice sounds beautiful on it and I don't think the vocals are half-hearted at all - they suit the material.

The contrast between it and hearing, say, "Make It All Okay" on the next album, though - I feel like I'm hearing him really sing again.

I remember disliking 'Beachball' with a passion in 2001. Love it now, though.

Re-listening to Reveal and 'Saturn Return' only improves with age. Stipe's voice sounds gorgeous on it.

That's fair, but there's something brilliantly transcendent about the looking-back-as-farewell on Collapse Into Now. That record is magic.

man,'Discoverer' popped up on shuffle this am and I am fully on board with this.

I only listened to all of these albums for the first time in the last year or so and collapse into now is definitely the one I've gone back to the most often

There are indeed some moments on "Reveal" where one admires Stipe being in fine vocal form and able to hit the high notes. And then you put on "Accelerate" where his singing has degenerated to a hoarse bark, and you wonder what exactly happened in his life in those 7 years to destroy his voice.

Their tours were fucking massive. But actually I don't know how they'd compare to other bands who did tours like that, but it must take its toll playing to huge audiences who mostly (?) want to hear radio hits.

Reveal has grown for me too. I agree "Saturn Return" is great and that "She Just Wants To Be" should have been cut.

We might have been over this before but were all the tracks recorded in acoustic? Because Buck said they had considered the idea of a whole acoustic album since some of the acoustic versions were so good.

I thought I had every R.E.M. album ever, but I guess I missed Collapse. I don't know--I must have been at least aware of it at the time. I've been reading John Giorno's autobiography, which led me to "We All Go Back to Where We Belong" (missed that too), which led me to Collapse, and a nearby store had a cheap copy in.

I've played it twice in the car. Most of the songs barely register--not awful, just nothing. "Überlin" feels like something.

I do like "We All Go Back to Where We Belong," especially the two videos, so I'll take that as a much better farewell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gdyd8PX7Oc

Don't seem to have Accelerate, either--that's the last one I need. (I mean, not really "need.")

Up deserved to win but Reveal deserved close second place, not distant second place.

I have the ten with Berry and Up, but I generally put on a homemade comp when I listen to this era:

1 Lotus 04:31
2 At My Most Beautiful [radio mix] 03:33
3 Daysleeper [single edit] 03:31
4 The Great Beyond 05:07
5 I've Been High 03:26
6 All The Way To Reno (You're Gonna Be A Star) 04:43
7 Imitation Of Life 03:56
8 All The Right Friends 02:48
9 Bad Day 04:07
10 Leaving New York 04:49
11 Electron Blue 04:12
12 Living Well Is The Best Revenge 03:11
13 Man-Sized Wreath 02:33
14 Supernatural Superserious 03:23
15 Hollow Man 02:39
16 Houston 02:05
17 Discoverer 03:31
18 Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter 02:45
19 Überlin 04:14
20 Oh My Heart 03:20
21 It Happened Today 03:48
22 We All Go Back To Where We Belong 03:35

I love "The Great Beyond" so much--I think it's very overlooked.

I probably would have simply because it's a soundtrack number, but fortunately it was on the first WB "best of" (and IIRC in a better sounding mix too - I think the soundtrack had a much narrower spread when I later compared the two).

I take that to mean you would have left it off...I was surprised there was no ILM thread for Collapse--I guess (understandably) nobody much cared at that point. Seemed to do okay on the Billboard album chart, #5, though not as well as the previous studio album. They must get approached constantly about getting back together for something.

Oh no, I think the song is great, but soundtrack-only items can slip through the cracks pretty easily unless they're a sizable hit or collected elsewhere.

Collapse is not their worst but it is their least impressionable. I like Discoverer a lot but I’m struggling to remember any of their other songs.

At some point a long long time ago (I guess before Collapse came out) I made an imaginary REM album that sequenced roughly 5 songs each from Around the Sun and Accelerate, and it wasn’t so bad. There are some great songs tucked into each album.

I think whatever discussion there was about Collapse was probably relegated to some general REM thread.

I recently noticed that they are pulling over 17 million monthly listeners on Spotify, so perhaps in addition to reunion offers, I can imagine how hotly sought after their publishing catalog is.

I didn't pay close attention to Collapse until later, but at the time of its release, what stood out was the videos - they made a ton of them and contacted a wide variety of high profile names to make them. The only one I really remember was made by Albert Maysles and Bradley Kaplan: it was for "Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I" and they made it out of footage that had been shot by Maysles for Meet Marlon Brando (a pretty great film in its own right).

I posted in some other thread when I first heard "Oh My Heart" last year thanks to The Bear, but it really was the first time I heard a late-period REM song that blew me away: the arrangement, the lyrics, the whole thing.

Yeah, that was an easy one to include on my comp (which I burned a while ago, well before The Bear). I regret not seeing them when they were still together - it was pretty foolish in retrospect to lose any interest in seeing them just because Berry wasn't there.

I've probably mentioned this: saw them in a club soon after Murmur for $5...Not explicit in the lyrics, but they must have had Neil Young in mind when they came up with "Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I."

"The Great Beyond" is terrific as a song, but -- here's a complaint I don't often lodge -- the production's thin on the ground.

sorry to fill sna with rem threads but i’m here to declare reveal their worst album

otm

the singles are awesome but the kitchen-sink production deprives the whole thing of oxygen. what if we layered every synth preset ever on top of every single track

around the sun, however tired, at least breathes (ventilator-assisted). actually think it would be much more fondly received/remembered had approx 15-20 minutes of it been cut