Feeling Gravity's POLL: REM's "Fables of the Reconstruction"

I've given this album more chances than most and it'll always be meh, but I do appreciate how the arrangements strive (and achieve) for a half-awake stumbling feel.

This may be their most criminally underrated album.

Embrace the murk, Soto!

At this point every R.E.M. gets called their most criminally underrated album.

Except in this case it's true

r.e.m. didn't put out a "meh" record until reveal

I feel like Maps and Legends should be higher than Green Grow the Rushes.

For me it probably would be Driver / Maps / Can't Get.

It is a pretty good record

I usually skip "Maps and Legends", too much of a drone. It's the song where I understand why someone wouldn't like this album, or even this band.

But those last three songs, or even the last four: building up to a final relief. maybe today I would rate "Auctioneer" the highest. they're songs of a band exhausted by the road that already an album earlier was at best viewed ambiguously ("another Greenville, another Magic Mart"). but rather than write about I dunno, Bob Segar style, they characteristically code their images. But they build and build, from frenzy to anxiety to a final passing.

counterpoint: not a drone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-2QlXO1SYY

And then there's "Life And How To Live It," maybe the last of their great skittery jittery rockers where it feels like the wheels are going to come off at any moment - the descendent of Chronic Town and "9-9." After this record they still did plenty of great rock tunes but they were more locked down somehow - don't quite know how to articulate this but there's a nervous energy that gradually gets concentrated into something more focused, not necessarily better or worse but different.

― Doctor Casino, Monday, October 27, 2008 11:23 PM (eleven years ago)

OTM on "Life and How to Live It". When Bill "Blue"Berry plays that disco-esque beat at such frenetic tempo (a la "Hyena", "Harborcoat", et al) it feels like a dangerously-fast downhill ride on an unfamiliar road. I also love the backup vox in the chorus, and those walk-up bass notes that precede it. "my CARPENTERS OUT AND RUNNING ABOUT!!!!..."

What's the deal with the liner notes and its listing of trakcs that aren't actually on the album ("When We Were Young")? Or did I hallucinate that like a "Wendell Gee" fever dream?