Re-examining R.E.M., part fifteen: "Collapse Into Now"

Bryce Napier April 2, 2018

by Tom Demi and Bryce Napier, first published January 17, 2016

Collapse Into Now

released March 8, 2011
Warner Bros. Records

“With the benefit of hindsight, it’s exceedingly easy to read the signs that this would be the last R.E.M. record.”

— Bryce

It's kind of a sad coincidence to be writing this in the days immediately following the death of David Bowie, since he recorded his Blackstar album knowing it would probably be his last, and so it was with R.E.M. and Collapse Into Now. The three official members—Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe (thankfully, all still with us in 2016, alive and well)—felt that they had gone as far as they could as a band by 2011. They had had a successful album and tour in 2008 with an aggressive, guitar-oriented approach, but what was next? Repeat the same formula and risk looking predictable or boring? Go electronic and risk looking foolish or out of their depth? And wasn't it a bit poignant to think that they were on the cusp of lasting longer as a band without Bill Berry than with him (and with less success)?

Their solution was to bow out with an album that largely paid tribute to the styles of music that had put them on the map musically. Acoustic guitars, layered harmonies, guest vocalists, and even mandolins made return appearances, but the challenge was to make an album that felt comfortable without being so familiar that it felt uninspired. To accomplish this, they brought back Accelerate's producer, Jacknife Lee, who, along with Stipe, aimed to get at the essence of the songs and make them feel as true as possible. By Lee's own account, this ended up alienating Buck and Mills to an extent, as he and Stipe edited and rearranged things rather mercilessly at times.

So, did it work? I would say mostly yes. Having recently obtained a vinyl copy of this album at last, I sat down to listen while reading the lyric sheet and realized—to my amazement—that this was actually the first time I had ever read the lyrics all the way through! Bryce has mentioned how certain R.E.M. albums slipped out of his consciousness soon after their release, but for me, this is the only one where this had ever happened. For the first three songs in particular, it was exciting to realize how playful and poetic some of the lyrics were, but I have to say that for some of the others, reading the words was a bit of a letdown. Also, there are definitely tracks that musically sound to me more like homages to previous songs than original ideas. On the other hand, there's a nicely broad overall palette, and there are more hits than misses.

Before I get into specifics, I'll let Bryce give us his initial thoughts.

We'd be deluding ourselves to pretend that it didn't settle in under most people's radars, whether they'd purchased it or not. While it would be poetic and heartwarming to think that the momentum they'd picked up from Accelerate translated into a cultural groundswell of support for this one, it just didn't—Collapse, in fact, ended up as their worst-selling record, at least in the US. For every copy it sold, they'd moved 25 units apiece of Out Of Time and Automatic For The People. To frame it another (depressing) way, only 4% of the people who bought those landmark records bought Collapse Into Now. (Admittedly, I do not know if/how digital sales figure into the tally.) I don't think it was rejected by the public at large as a disappointing record; folks just didn't know or care anymore that it even existed. I'm fairly certain I heard more off of this album in response to the press release that they were dissolving the band than I did when the actual record was released, and I don't recall how long it took me to get around to acquiring it.

So, yeah—we now get to ponder the album where the band were pondering their own legacy, as they prepared to pack it in. With the benefit of hindsight, it's exceedingly easy to read the signs that this would be the last R.E.M. record (Stipe himself pointed out that he was waving goodbye on the front cover). And whether or not we flatter ourselves as savvy enough to have interpreted the evidence before the official announcement came (six months after the release of Collapse Into Now), it was deliberately crafted as a swan song. That leaves us with two sets of the same music to consider. The first is a self-contained suite of songs to be enjoyed or dismissed on their own merits; the second, an identical suite carrying the burden of being R.E.M.'s last album. Several times over the course of this catalogue reassessment, I've noted the importance (for me) of separating an album from its critical and cultural context before I can enjoy it on its own terms. This might be the rare case, however, where an album is easier to appreciate with an understanding of the context, the backstory.

And that backstory is explicit in several of the songs: "Oh My Heart" is crafted as an epilogue to the previous album's rough-hewn "Houston," further exploring the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, even going so far as to nearly repeat a couple of lyric lines. "Every Day Is Yours To Win" feels like a sequel to "Everybody Hurts," "All The Best" seems to pick up musically where "The Wake-Up Bomb" left off in 1996, and "Blue" features Patti Smith in a role similar to that employed in "E-Bow The Letter," once again acting as the comforting, wise maternal figure reassuring a troubled soul as voiced by Stipe. Probably the song that breaks the mold most definitively is the manic "Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter," complete with the shouted harmonies of the young singer Peaches and a searing solo from Patti Smith's guitarist Lenny Kaye.

For this album, for the first time since the 1980s, there was no deluxe CD version released; instead, they made the deluxe version a digital download, through iTunes. Extensive liner notes were penned by Jacknife Lee, there are "live in the studio" bonus tracks, and one of those is a video of them performing "That Someone Is You." Most telling, though, are the photos in the photo gallery—whereas, in the past, any photos of the band tended to be oblique or random or somehow obscured, these are mostly very sharp, clear, posed shots of the three of them, as if to say, "This is the last time we're gonna do this, so let's do it sincerely and directly one time before we go."

Most of Collapse's songs feel like they were vying to be the closing track, so it's difficult for me to fathom why they went with "Blue," a drifting studio creation that grafted a Stipe recitation onto a leftover backing track. The tone of "Discoverer," which opens the album (and technically closes it as well, in a reprise dreamt up specifically as a workaround to prevent Patti Smith's voice from being the last voice you hear on an R.E.M. record), echoes the last words of the last original Calvin And Hobbes strip: "Let's go exploring!"—suggesting that the restless adventures will continue, even if we aren't there to witness them. "All The Best," in addition to having a title that sounds like the valediction before the signature on a letter, is both self-deprecating and defiant, as Stipe teasingly acknowledges that "it's just like me to overstay my welcome" to those fans who thought the band should have ended years earlier, while brazenly declaring they still had what it takes to "show the kids how to do it." They seem to be holding the baton out to the next generation in "That Someone Is You." A more general-purpose inspirational message is embedded in lullabye form in "Every Day Is Yours To Win." Myself, I would have voted hands-down for "It Happened Today." R.E.M. had a long history of ending their albums on an uplifting note, plus a notorious early history of being inscrutable, and so—regardless of the unspecified event referred to in the title—going out with an ebullient, hand-clappy singalong that melts into soaring, wordless harmonies for its final two minutes would have truly nailed the dismount.

I couldn't agree more about "It Happened Today"; I've had that same thought while listening to this album again recently. Yes, it ends with Eddie Vedder's voice dominating, but the song could easily have been mixed to emphasize Stipe and Mills at the very end. Together with Joel Gibb (of the Canadian group the Hidden Cameras), it's an absolutely beautiful and, yes, uplifting blending of voices, and it could have gone on even longer. As it happens, the band provided the tools for any qualified fan to do just that: They made available for download no less than 194 "stems" (all the pieces of the individual vocal and instrument tracks) for anyone to remix or re-edit as they pleased. I do wish there were more to the lyrics at the beginning of the song, both in quantity and substance, but it's still an exceedingly warm moment that would have been a fitting farewell.

Another song I wish were longer is "That Someone Is You," and it actually was longer originally until Stipe and Lee cut out a minute from the middle of it. I don't understand that decision at all, since it's the most catchy song on the album, for my money. Of course, "Mine Smell Like Honey," which was chosen as the U.S. single, is also quite the earworm, but it surely short-circuited the brains of many listeners with its stickily suggestive lyrics (and to think that "Tongue" seemed a bit TMI!). The major, fully realized standouts for me would be "ÜBerlin," which expertly sounds like classic early-'90s R.E.M. without directly aping anything from that era, and "Discoverer," a fantastic, inviting opening that announces itself with the drama and majesty of a huge, ancient church bell, and it is stirring in its reprise as well.

In the end, when R.E.M. did announce their breakup months later, they chose to punctuate it with a career-spanning compilation called Part Lies Part Heart Part Truth Part Garbage that also featured three even newer songs: the playfully Pylon-esque "A Month Of Saturdays," the dirge-like "Hallelujah," and, in a surprising nod to their Reveal days, the breezy but poignant "We All Go Back To Where We Belong." None of the three are classics, but it was nice to have one last burst of creativity to accompany their announcement. The year 2011 also marked the end of their annual holiday packages to the fan club members. They had been including some kind of single (one time as a VHS tape!) since 1988, and the final one was a CD single featuring 2008 live versions of "Life And How To Live It" and "Perfect Circle," as yet another way of wrapping up their legacy.

As a side slice of personal trivia, I relocated with my family yet again in late 2010, this time from Kansas to the western reaches of Philadelphia's Main Line. After knowing Tom as an online acquaintance for years, we were now living only an hour apart, so we met in person for the first time near the onset of spring in 2011. After tracking down the date, I've "discoverered" it was a mere 11 days after the release of Collapse Into Now. So the entire recorded output of R.E.M. (save for those three straggler tracks from Part Lies…) had just barely drawn to its conclusion before we crossed paths in real life. I imagine if we had known at that time that R.E.M. had just issued their last album, it would have been fresh enough in our minds to have brought it up in the ensuing conversation, but I have no specific memory of them being mentioned at all.

In any case, it's kind of fun to try to draw the parallels with their back catalogue. Is "Mine Smell Like Honey" referencing the lascivious swagger of Monster, or the feel-good guitar pop of Green? Does "That Someone Is You" try to recapture the joyous rave-ups of Accelerate, or the unruly garage punk of Reckoning? Do I detect Up's halcyon atmospherics in "Every Day Is Yours To Win," or is that mannered chamber pop straight from Out Of Time? Is that the travel-worn philosophizing of New Adventures In Hi-Fi resurfacing on "ÜBerlin," or the homesick misanthropy of Fables Of The Reconstruction? It's a fun exercise, sure, but it's also pointless—because, ultimately, the answer is always yes. They are all of these things. As a band, they were all of these things. They were staunchly anti-establishment for long enough to become the establishment. They were pioneers and stalwarts. Together, they authored a rock and roll story so archetypal it is extraordinarily unique.

Re-examining R.E.M., part fourteen: "Accelerate"

Bryce Napier March 29, 2018

by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published January 10, 2016

Accelerate

released April 1, 2008
Warner Bros. Records

“I suppose some fans were unsettled by the way this album seemed like such an obvious response to the criticism of their previous few albums ... but I think the results speak for themselves.”

— Tom

Holy smokes. R.E.M. come tearing out of the gate on their 14th release, Accelerate. I suppose an argument could be made that most albums are in some respects an answer to the previous album, but nowhere in the R.E.M. oeuvre is it more explicit than here. The lean, muscular "Living Well Is The Best Revenge" is their biggest flat-out barnstormer since… since "Just A Touch," from Lifes Rich Pageant, maybe? And several of the subsequent tracks attempt to kick it up a few notches from there.

An alternate theory concerning the disappointment of Around The Sun (and, in a more general way, the whole three-album McCarthy-produced arc): The members of R.E.M. are some stubborn bastards. While they did continue on as a threesome after vowing they'd never do that very thing, they never invited any other musicians into the official inner circle. There was a fairly bitter parting of ways with guitarist Peter Holsapple in the early '90s when he started wondering why he was a salaried employee of the band and not an equal partner getting songwriting credits and royalties. Scott McCaughey and Ken Stringfellow recorded and toured with the band for years (with McCaughey in particular being thick as thieves with Peter Buck, the two of them getting involved in all manner of side projects together, including The Baseball Project, The Minus 5, and in Robyn Hitchcock's backing band, the Venus 3) without ever gaining status beyond a listing as "additional musicians" in the liner notes. Likewise, Joey Waronker (Up and Reveal) and Bill Rieflin (Around The Sun) were brought in to play drums, but were never anointed as R.E.M.'s new drummer. According to Buck, he was already toying with the vintage drum machines and electronics that informed Up and Reveal when Bill Berry announced his intention to quit the band, so those albums went in a direction the band was headed anyway, perhaps just causing them to lean into it a little more. When the electronics receded into the background for Around The Sun, they were—consciously or not—still trying to honor Berry's departure, leaving the rhythm section hamstrung and ineffective. Rieflin served as little more than a capable timekeeper, and the songs were never allowed to take flight. It took the chip on their shoulder caused by the frigid reception of Sun—the burning desire to prove that they still had plenty left in the tank—to finally outweigh their collective loyalty to Berry. Rieflin is unshackled on Accelerate, allowing R.E.M. to bring it. And they bring it hard.

Yes, they do—hard and fast. Fast not just in tempo, but also in overall time. At about 34 minutes, it's about half as long as their longest album (and, as if to emphasize the "fast" aspect, the vinyl LP was packaged as a double, with each of its four sides playing at 45 RPM). Bryce mentions Lifes Rich Pageant above, and it's also an apt comparison to the way the albums begin—but whereas LRP slows down the high-speed train after two bone-rattling openers, Accelerate stretches that to three almost-seamlessly sequenced rockers before you get a chance to take a breath. And not only is Bill Rieflin let loose, but Mike Mills sounds much more engaged than he has in ages, with creative harmonies and countermelodies, not to mention muscular bass playing.

All true, Tom, but that breath only lasts about 30 seconds before "Hollow Man" properly kicks in, pouring more fuel on the fire (perhaps, in a bit of R.E.M.-appropriate left-turn wordplay, the album should have been entitled Accelerant). The only song-length attempt to decelerate on the whole album is "Until The Day Is Done," the largely-acoustic rambler at track 7.

I suppose some fans were unsettled by the way this album seemed like such an obvious response to the criticism of their previous few albums, as if someone else were controlling their destiny, but I think the results speak for themselves. They brought Jacknife Lee in as a producer, and they decided to stop fussing with the arrangements and just bash it out. In truth, this was the aesthetic of many of Buck's side projects mentioned above anyway, and he does seem to be the glue that holds together the best moments on Accelerate, surely also inspiring Stipe to let out the mighty howls that punctuate a number of songs.

Of course, the pace of these songs made them well-suited for the road. Having revitalized themselves with a residency of five shows in Dublin in 2007, they toured confidently upon the album's release in 2008. I saw them at an amphitheater in Philadelphia in June, where they were joined in onstage appearances by the Smiths' Johnny Marr (there also as a guitarist with Modest Mouse, who supported the bill along with the National) and, on "Begin The Begin," by Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder singing some of the lead vocals. Once again, it was an election year, and Stipe let his liberal feelings be known (to the chagrin of some of those around me), except this time his "campaigning" was rewarded with a win for Barack Obama.

Ooh, I like The National, and have a deep fondness for Johnny Marr (whose back-to-basics Smiths were, in some ways, the British equivalent to R.E.M.—beloved oddball outsiders offering a profoundly different sound from that dictated by the synthetic sheen of the 1980s—and who had my allegiance several years before I ever bought an R.E.M. record). That would have been a good line-up.

Those familiar with the long-term R.E.M. narrative might have detected a whiff of desperation coming from Accelerate's raucous thrashing, but beyond that, I honestly don't have any deep criticisms for this record. It's as absorbing as it is brief—the damned thing keeps ending while I'm still gathering my thoughts on it. (Each record so far has been averaging eight plays or so while I'm honing my evaluation; this one is closing in on 20 plays.) It speaks volumes, I think, that I keep getting lost in it once it starts playing. My song-to-song enjoyment varies slightly by degrees, but not a single track strikes me as a dud. I like the wheezing yawp of pipe organ that punctuates "Houston." I'm trying to catch all of the call-outs to their back catalogue in the lyrics of "Sing For The Submarine" (and thrumming along with the bass triplets, too). I'm very taken with the stately backing track of "Mr. Richards," juxtaposed with its acidic rumination on comeuppance (which makes me curious if the title character is someone specific, some ATF Agent or other W. Bush-era advisor actually named Richards, or an amalgam designed to avoid a defamation lawsuit). "Man-Sized Wreath," maybe the track I'm the most ambivalent toward, still has that fascinating crunchy-chord freak-out in the middle of the verses that is reminiscent of Jane's Addiction.

"Supernatural Superserious" strikes me as being in the "Everybody Hurts" vein, but with a particular (and unusual) vantage point: a look at teenage life from the perspective of a benevolent adult. Those pitfalls and humiliations are important (and don't let dismissive folks convince you otherwise), but they aren't the end of the world, and will help shape the adult you become. I like "Until The Day Is Done," too, though I'm aware how easily the desperado vibe could be paired with a Bon Jovi-sung lyric about sleeping around the campfire conspiring to get your horse back from the rustlers in the morning—in which case I probably wouldn't like it at all. It says something about my appreciation for both Stipe's voice and the kind of things he chooses to sing about that they are able to pull it back from the brink.

I'd be similarly hard-pressed to declare any of Accelerate's tracks a dud, although I know that others disagree. My biggest disagreement with you is that "Man-Sized Wreath" is probably my favorite song on the album: It's so filled with joy and verve, and I love the background vocals and the way they get layered in the chorus, from Mills's "aaahs" playing against Stipe's extra "kick it out"s to Stipe's low echoing mumbles of the lyrics. To me, "Supernatural Superserious" comes off at first almost like a coda to the previous song, but it does gather its own personality before long. I think maybe the odd title kept it from being a hit in the U.S., or maybe it was too directly aimed at young people, making them uneasy? Or, I suppose, radio programmers had long since abandoned R.E.M. anyway. (Fun fact: it hit #1 in Norway.)

I would single out the song "Accelerate" as another highlight. Despite the chorus's similarity to that of "Circus Envy," it chugs along at a nice clip (and is a better song), and its 3:33 running time makes it seem almost like an epic after the previous two songs. And that's a good setup for "Until The Day Is Done," which is even longer but doesn't overstay its welcome in the least. You mentioned the bass in "Sing For The Submarine," which I also find irresistible, "bum-bum-bumming" along to it almost unconsciously. "Horse To Water" is enlivened by Mills's tense harmonies in the chorus and Buck's Nirvana-like guitar snarls in the verses, and then "I'm Gonna DJ," with its deliberate cut-and-paste structure, keeps building energy till it ends up virtually accelerating right off a cliff edge to end the album.

It's interesting that they decided to end several songs with that abrupt drop of the microphone, underscoring their determination not let them last an instant longer than necessary. The rawness may have been a goal they were specifically trying to achieve, but it doesn't feel manufactured or fake.

Accelerate suffered the same fate as the rest of their post-Reveal albums in my collection. Without a lot of time or enthusiasm to devote to them, they got filed away before getting a chance to make an impression. That I couldn't find time to experience Accelerate chagrins me the deepest, in hindsight, because I am currently enthralled with this album. I can't seem to stop playing it. Even the reviews I read that praised this album as something of a late-career resurrection are selling it short, I feel, because they seem to appreciate it as a re-energized effort that aims to recapture the spirit of early R.E.M., but hasten to add that it isn't a patch on actual early R.E.M. I'm willing to say this is an impressive, rewarding record, without any caveats. And while I'm circumspect as to whether my eight-year-late gushing first impression will hang around as my long-term opinion, right this instant I'm ready to chuck it into my overall top five.

I think that, over the years, the motivations are forgotten, and it's easier to appreciate these albums for what they are, which is how I came to love Lifes Rich Pageant many years later. I suppose R.E.M. themselves fed into the comparisons to their early work by playing even more of it in their 2007–2008 live sets than they had in 2003–2005. In fact, in yet another reversal from their days with Bill Berry, they abandoned their long-held moratorium on live albums by putting out not one, but two live albums in the "aughts" decade: first R.E.M. Live (2007), culled from a date in Dublin in 2005 during the Around The Sun tour, and then Live At The Olympia (2009), compiled from those 2007 live dates mentioned above, once again in Dublin. There have also been some download-only live releases, plus full concerts with a few of the recent reissues of their eighties albums.

One more note on the 2007 Dublin dates: They used those dates to audition the material that was being recorded or considered for Accelerate, and the Olympia live album illustrates what got discarded. There was "On The Fly," a ruminative tune with a "Country Feedback" vibe that got repurposed musically into the future album track "Blue," and "Staring Down The Barrel Of The Middle Distance" was a mid-tempo rocker; both of these must have been nixed because they would have slowed down the pace of the album considerably, but the second one especially was a strong number (and it was played in Philly when I saw them). A third track, "Disguised," gained a new chorus and got revamped—and re-amped—as "Supernatural Superserious."

So, as with New Adventures In Hi-Fi, the songs on Accelerate were shaped largely on the road—and, in fact, their first four albums benefited from this approach in a less specific way, too. It was a method that worked exceptionally well, from my point of view, but this would be the last time that method would be tested, as 2008 marked the end of their touring days, unbeknownst to us at the time. But there was still one more album to come before they called it a day completely.

Re-examining R.E.M., part thirteen: "Around The Sun"

Bryce Napier March 28, 2018

by Tom Demi and Bryce Napier, first published January 4, 2016

Around The Sun

released October 5, 2004
Warner Bros. Records

“This record had obstacles stacked in front of it that it simply failed to clear.”

— Bryce

By the time R.E.M.'s Around The Sun album came out in late 2004, their home country had endured the trauma of the September 11th attacks and the subsequent start of two wars, the second of which being a war of choice in Iraq. As with many of their fellow musicians, they were unhappy with this latter military foray and decided to record a song, "Final Straw," to express their displeasure. Released as a free download shortly after the invasion began in early 2003, it was kind of a folky broadside addressed directly to President Bush. While it likely didn't change anyone's mind about the issue, it was an intriguing teaser for their next album. Would they continue in this political vein? Were we in store for a return to the fiery attitude of Document?

The answer turned out to be no. Aside from the above song and the related "I Wanted To Be Wrong," there was nothing overtly political on the album, and the overall mood was pensive, at times even tired and defeated. The political fire was instead reserved for the concert stage, as they joined a cross-country tour of shifting musical artists on the Vote For Change tour in October 2004, ahead of the presidential election. Unlike in 1992, the outcome did not tilt in their favor, but it did result in an impassioned performance when I saw them at the Wachovia Center in Philly, doing an abridged set to make way for their co-headliners, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (Bright Eyes and John Fogerty also performed). We sat behind the stage, but we could definitely still feel the energy of the crowd, especially when the artists mixed and matched on songs like "Man On The Moon" and "Born To Run."

This show marked my second R.E.M. show in as many years, after missing them ever since the Monster tour in 1995. When I saw them in 2003, touring behind a hits collection, they played two of the new recordings for that set, "Bad Day" and "Animal." The latter was a glammy rocker, while "Bad Day" was a fascinating reworking of an unreleased track from the '80s that would later evolve into "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" and shares its breakneck propulsiveness. One wonders what the subsequent Around The Sun would have sounded like if they hadn't relegated these songs to a compilation in the interim. But one thing was certain: They were beginning to reassess their place in musical history, letting a substantial number of pre-Warner-era tunes filter back into their live set for the first time since 1989. By this point, they must have concluded that their live audience in the U.S. consisted largely of hardcore fans once again, so they might as well please them onstage, even if their recent studio output wasn't doing the job as well as it used to, as evidenced by Around The Sun's lukewarm reception both critically and commercially.

There are stretches where I acquire more music than I have any real expectation of getting to know intimately. My first child was born 10 days before Reveal was released, so she was an attention-hoarding toddler by the time Around The Sun hit the racks. Plus, earlier in 2004, I'd moved with my family from Northern Virginia to Overland Park, Kansas. My plate was pretty full. I do read reviews, though, and when nothing at all caught my ear from this album (if I even ever gave it a serious listen, which I may not have), I think this may be one of those occasions when the consensus opinion about this album (that it fell somewhere on the spectrum from extremely disappointing to god-awful) became my default opinion, without the input of my own insight. I've yet to see a ranking of the R.E.M. discography that doesn't have this one in last place—whether they are championing or abandoning Out Of Time; defending or trashing Monster; crowning Murmur or Automatic or cheekily proposing a dark horse favorite for the top honor; whatever any given fan's predilections are for R.E.M., Around The Sun landed in the cellar on each and every list. Even the band members themselves were quoted disparaging it. Who am I to argue with that kind of universal agreement?

Part of me was dreading this entry in the project, having to actually listen to this terrible album and come up with things to say about it. How surprising, then, when I finally did take the plunge, to (mostly) find it quite palatable. I wasn't electrified, true. The mood is subdued, no doubt. Nothing rocks. The existence of the contemporaneous peers "Bad Day" and "Animal," as Tom pointed out, demonstrates that they hadn't lost their ability to rock. So the evidence points to a conscious choice to make their folkiest album since Murmur, an understandable impulse, considering the world events of the day. It's no more somber than Automatic For The People, though, which was hailed as a masterpiece. It has an Eagles vibe, to my ears, especially when Michael Stipe starts, at times, to sound a little like Don Henley (which, okay, might be anathema to the R.E.M. fanbase); the 1970s easy-rock of the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac that was too studiously constructed to ever transcend into blistering rock music, even when the tempos sped up. If one can absorb that vibe and accept the album on its own terms, I think there's quite a bit of rewarding material on Around The Sun.

I wouldn't call it unpalatable, just relatively uninspired, and most of that is the production, but also some of the performances. Even a folky album can have some "zing," but there's just very little of it here. There are barely any backing vocals, and they're almost completely done by Stipe, as if Mills wanted as little to do with this project as possible—and there's a lot of that "vocal fry" in Stipe's lead vocals that I find wearing. "Wanderlust" just feels flat, and it shouldn't, considering Stipe's vocal leaps and Buck's sprightly guitar frills. Something is missing.

After listening again, I've had some of these songs sticking in my head, though, and not in an annoying way. Actually, many of these songs came off much better live, as evidenced by the R.E.M. Live album, which came out a few years later and was culled from this tour. In any event, it's telling that they dropped Pat McCarthy as their producer after this three-album stretch that had begun with Up.

Sure, there's rewarding material: I do like "I Wanted To Be Wrong," with its spacey interludes and woodsy acoustic guitar rhythm. "Leaving New York" was a promising start to the album, but I still don't get the message—Why is it never easy to leave, exactly? Are we supposed to be thinking about 9/11, a romantic relationship, the stately beauty of the city, all three? I can never decide, although it is still somehow powerful. Similarly, the title song, which ends the album, really lifts off, and it has one of the more unusual musical structures in R.E.M.'s canon. "Electron Blue" is a great one, too, but the guest rapper (Q-Tip, of A Tribe Called Quest) in "The Outsiders" feels unnecessary, and in fact Stipe handled it fine in live performances.

The necessity of having a guest rapper is a totally different question, of course, but given that they decided to do it, I will say it works for me a hundred times better than when "Radio Song" did it thirteen years earlier, and that Q-Tip's chill is a much better fit than the militant and boisterous KRS-One. "The Outsiders" in particular is one of the songs that has been earning my attention. The clean, cosmic blooping is a nice change of direction in the electronic textures, which they had mostly been using to inject some fuzz and industrial grit into the mix. And in the vein of unusual musical structures, "Wanderlust" sports a 7/4 chorus (seven beats per measure, that is), and "Final Straw" threw me off course until I realized the verses have a 15-beat loop, which is ultra-rare experimental jazz territory.

This record had obstacles stacked in front of it that it simply failed to clear. The album art didn't look like R.E.M. The songs were gradually pieced together, and the emergent mood made the feistier tracks feel out of place, so they were punted to the best-of, or back-burnered until Accelerate. The release of the In Time retrospective, which, as Tom noted, the band chose to promote with a tour (successfully, as it achieved platinum sales in the US—the only post-Adventures release to do so), interrupted the recording schedule of Around The Sun. The delay hurt the timeliness of some of the subject matter, while simultaneously causing it to come too hot on the heels of In Time. And again, with the exceptions of "Final Straw" and "I Wanted To Be Wrong," it was more of an oblique mindset reaction to the state of world affairs than a direct shot across the bow. By 2004, the politically-agitated were ready to be angry again, not contemplative. In 2003, it was still taboo enough to undermine the intense national solidarity that took hold in the wake of 9/11 that Natalie Maines expressing a mild anti-Bush sentiment during a concert left the gazillion-selling Dixie Chicks reeling into a tailspin from which they did not recover. A year later, the greater public was ready to embrace the gloriously bratty vitriol of Green Day's "American Idiot." Meanwhile, R.E.M. and McCarthy had taken so long fussing over every detail that they lost the bigger picture, and ended up with an over-produced platter without a hint of spontaneity. It was more like an album they all contributed to, less like an album they made together.

The songs are there, though. In addition to those already mentioned, I feel that "Boy In The Well," "High Speed Train," and especially "The Ascent Of Man" could all sit proudly on a record that had a better overall sense of pacing. Really, only "Make It All Okay" and "The Worst Joke Ever" strike me as stinkers. I doubt that "tired and defeated" was what they were aiming for, and I don't disagree that it does sound tired and defeated—still, I gotta say, it kind of works for me. After all, my own sense of disgust with the political system (which too often feels like being forced to choose between Coke and Pepsi when what I'd actually like is a cup of tea) is more likely to manifest as discouragement and disenfranchisement than fuel for action. I seek refuge from the world deep in my own psyche, and this record is not half-bad as a soundtrack for that process.

Before we officially began this post, Bryce had written a note that I think referred to the cover of the album. I don't want to presume, but I will say I've always found it odd, kind of a cross between Radiohead's OK Computer and Genesis's We Can't Dance. I'll also add that, by the time this album came out, I had probably had my first interactions with Bryce, as we were both members of an online fan forum dedicated to the group XTC. It wasn't long before I noticed the similarities in our appreciation and analysis of music, not to mention the endless permutations of the songs in our collections, but I can't recall discussing R.E.M. specifically. And finally, more significantly, my boyfriend and I got a civil union in 2003, after four years together.

That's true, we had likely crossed paths by this time. XTC, a band that never reached beyond cult status in America, was not exactly a direct link to R.E.M. fandom, despite their mutual fondness for three-letter all-cap monikers. And since I'm not quite sure where else to put this, I'll add that it's been interesting to see that Tom, as a gay man, was more attuned to the questions surrounding Michael Stipe's orientation. It was nothing I had ever thought about or caught wind of in the press until I saw a shrugging acknowledgment by Stipe some time after there had been a more official announcement (maybe? it was presented in such an offhand way that it didn't seem like the first time it had come up); the "news" gave me a chuckle, as it seemed to belatedly answer the question of why Stipe and Natalie Merchant hadn't become an item all those years earlier, when they seemed like such an ideal—painfully earnest, socially conscious—match. Beyond that, I absorbed it and moved on.

As far as Around The Sun, however, put me down for "unjustly-maligned." Perhaps it's just the exact opposite of my early experiences with Murmur, where sky-high expectations led, for years, to an ambivalent reaction. My expectations were set so low here that familiarizing myself with it (again and for the first time) has been a pleasant surprise. If I were to do a ranking of the full discography, maybe it would still bring up the rear, I don't know. But I kind of doubt it.

Re-examining R.E.M., part twelve: "Reveal"

Bryce Napier March 27, 2018

by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published December 29, 2015

Reveal

released May 15, 2001
Warner Bros. Records

“It’s like a wooden box built by skilled craftsmen which demonstrates their skilled craftsmanship—precision cuts, tightly-fitted dovetail joints—that is still, in the end, a box.”

— Bryce

A couple of my personal rules concerning album buying: If I loved your last record, I'll buy the next one without hearing a note of it. ("Automatic," as they would say over at Weaver D's.) Conversely, if I'm disappointed by two albums in a row, then I'm done actively following you, and anything thereafter has to find me through happenstance and impress me enough to win me over on its own merits. "Daysleeper" had hit the radio just as the latter rule was invoked (though, as previously explained, I've had a big change of heart concerning New Adventures In Hi-Fi), forcing me to bring the boat back to the dock almost immediately after setting it adrift in the first place. Since I enjoyed Up tremendously—and certainly at a level out of proportion with much of the remaining fanbase—Reveal was the beneficiary of the former rule. I did see the intriguing clip for the new single, "Imitation Of Life" (the only R.E.M. video of the 21st century that I've ever seen, underscoring their dramatically-lower media profile in their final decade), which gave me confidence that there would be much to like. It retained the newer electronic flavorings of Up's more experimental moments while backtracking into a more comfortably familiar R.E.M. sound. I bought the record with great enthusiasm; the second honeymoon kicked off by Up was not destined to last, however.

I know that R.E.M.'s artwork has a long association with outsider art, especially during the I.R.S. years; a naive, unpolished look which is so ugly that it often achieves a kind of charming beauty. And unlike bands from The Beatles and Led Zeppelin to Blur and Nine Inch Nails, they never adopted an instantly recognizable logo/brand, so each record has a distinct visual identity, where even their name has never appeared in the same font twice. (Personally, I might have voted for the long, lean hand-lettering of Reckoning to hang around.) That said, Reveal has got to be their most unredeeming cover art. The washed-out photo of a distant line of ducks, with the shadow of the photographer (Stipe, I'm assuming) in frame, the sickly greens and yellows, two astonishingly repellent fonts for both the band name and title, the tracklisting in indecipherably tiny (on the CD, at least) writing in the top left corner. Hideous, all of it. Up's visuals had been saddled with a bland sort of conventionality, and they may have wanted to bring some personality back, maybe even trying harken back to the spirit of those early years. Whatever the reasoning, though, this is not a cover that has me chomping at the bit to play the music.

This gets me thinking. How much of what we like about music has little-to-nothing to do with the actual sounds emanating from the speakers? Suppose you gave someone unaware of R.E.M.'s existence their 15 albums to listen to with no context at all—no artwork, no career narrative, nor even the chronological release order; only the band name, and the titles of albums and songs—what would they gravitate toward? What would I gravitate toward? As tempting as it is to rank the albums in a countdown list (and for a music wonk like me, the temptation is mighty), that approach does the pure music a great disservice, as people will assume a bell curve even where none exists; people naturally figure the halfway marker (#8, in this case) is the line that separates the mostly-good from the mostly-bad, and I even start to look upon it in that manner myself; I subsequently feel a need to be slightly more critical to justify third place coming in behind second place, and fourth behind third, and so on. The point I'm waffling around, I guess, is that I'm not sure how I feel about Reveal, which is fairly easy for me to listen to, yet hasn't stuck with me at all. If I did rank the albums, Reveal would be near the bottom. Not because I believe it's terrible—I don't. I think, despite falling around #13 in my personal ranking, it actually serves the role of my hypothetical #8 as described above—it's the album that sits on the demarcation line that separates the mostly-good and mostly-bad. Which actually speaks highly for the consistency of their catalogue.

In short, I don't think it's a poor album, but neither do I think it's one of their better albums. There's something that turns me off about it, but it's not the songs. At least, I don't think it's the songs. But all of that is based on remembered impressions more than hard reasons I could give. What do you say, Tom—am I tiptoeing through my equivocations skillfully enough?

I suspect my scale is even more skewed than yours where R.E.M. is concerned, so that my #8 divides the outstanding from the merely great and good, and only one or two are actually disappointing to me. That said, Reveal is not disappointing to me. As you say, it's easy to listen to, but I go further, finding the synthetic summery sheen very appealing. Strangely enough, I even like the cover art. To me, it suggests an imminent and unexpected, well, "reveal" of a refreshing or invigorating summer moment. It seems the band were attracted to the retro idea of having the song titles on the front cover, yet chose a font that was deliberately difficult to read (especially at the size on a CD) just to confound expectations. And whereas Up's visual esthetic seemed to be pointing to a Mad Men-like New York of about 1960, Reveal was set around 1966 in intoxicating L.A.

Through the electronic haze of the album, 1966 does suggest itself aurally, too, particularly in "Beat A Drum" and "Beachball" and their echoes of Burt Bacharach as well as Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys. I get the strong sense that this retro/modern mixture was at least somewhat influenced by the band the High Llamas (one of my favorites), who received mountains of critical acclaim in the late '90s for music where banjos, lush strings, and electronic beeps and boops could coexist gracefully.

Before I dive further into the music itself, I feel it appropriate to mention that this was the first R.E.M. album truly of the Internet age, at least for me, as I had only acquired my first computer somewhere around the time of Up's release in late 1998. But now, in 2001, the landscape for everyone was changing quickly, and R.E.M. kept up with it. I can remember the first tease of Reveal's music (besides the single) being a several-second loop of the instrumental part of "Beat A Drum" that played on their website in the run-up to the album's release (I think the intro to "The Lifting" was also used), and then how it seemed such a big deal to be watching the "Imitation Of Life" video online (this is before YouTube, kids!). And I also found the fan-run murmurs.com website, which pointed to some, let's say, unauthorized extras from Reveal as well as the band's official remixes (dubbed r.e.m.IX) for the album, available to the public only as a download. But again, in the U.S., all this ended up impressing music geeks and tech nerds, but not much of a wider audience than that.

Similarly for me, my method of music consumption had begun to evolve by this time. I was mostly listening to music through the computer, via tracks ripped from the original CDs. Due to limited hard drive space, after a few spins of a new title, I'd select a song or three that stood out, upload them, and the disc would then get filed away. As such, "The Lifting" is the only Reveal track that didn't get mothballed for me after the introductory period. The buoyant bass, over a syncopated shuffle, pulls me right in. It's an impressive melding of Up's atmospheric ambience with the band's long-established songcraft, yielding something without an obvious predecessor in the R.E.M. catalogue, yet still manages to sound unmistakably like R.E.M.

A few years later it dawned on me that because I had shifted to listening to music almost solely through iTunes, the individual songs that didn't make the cut into the digital library (which amounted to more than 80% of the new music I was purchasing!) were being virtually abandoned, never getting another chance to catch my ear and win me over. I rectified the issue by getting an external drive dedicated solely to music storage, so I could put everything I had onto it, not just a couple of tracks per album. But Reveal's window had already closed. And so the six-to-eight times I've played each song this week during the reassessment period probably more than doubles the number of times I've listened to any of these songs (save for "The Lifting") in the past decade.

As a salvage mission, though, I may have hauled up some treasure. Two weeks ago, I wouldn't have recognized "Beat A Drum" or "Chorus And The Ring" as R.E.M. song titles, let alone been able to hum a few bars. Today, I'm intrigued by both of them. There are definitely some aspects of the record that, to me, stick out in a bad way—the gym whistle in the programmed beats on "Saturn Return," the mawkish chorus of "I'll Take The Rain," the heavy-handed '80s throwback beats that feel unnaturally (and unnecessarily) grafted onto "I've Been High"—but most of what bothers me comes down to studio choices, over-tinkering. Only "I'll Take The Rain" bothers me enough in its core songwriting (I can't stop imagining Celine Dion having a field day with that chorus) that I wish it hadn't made the record. In hindsight, a lot of Reveal feels like a precursor to the chillwave movement, ten years too early. It's… I still don't know, exactly. It's like a wooden box built by skilled craftsmen which demonstrates their skilled craftsmanship—precision cuts, tightly-fitted dovetail joints—that is still, in the end, a box.

I hear you loud and clear on the storage wars, if I may call it that. Over the past decade and a half, I've imported CDs, pared them down, and then reimported them more times than I can remember, though R.E.M. has never been dumped. I share your lack of enthusiasm on "Saturn Return," but mostly because it just goes on too long and the lyrics seem lazy. I disagree, though, on "I've Been High" and "I'll Take The Rain"—I love the atmosphere and singing of both, and the guitar riff that comes in toward the end of the latter song is a poignant accent, in my opinion. The guitar is also great, and quintessentially R.E.M., on "She Just Wants To Be," a song that became an enduring staple of their live act. "The Lifting" probably is my favorite overall, too.

Where this album does come up short for me is in the lyrics, though, and not just in "Saturn Return." It seems as if Michael Stipe just got tired of being direct and meaningful, and decided instead to throw random words and phrases around ("brittle as a stick," lists of obscure Middle Eastern cities) and engage in lame attempts at wordplay ("have done, will travel"). Since I tend to read along with the lyrics on the first listen of "major" albums in my collection, this made "Chorus And The Ring" especially annoying to me—although, listening recently, I found the song surprisingly lilting and affecting, and in fact the whole album (musically) floats along pleasantly for me, for the vast majority of it anyway.

The one song that breaks the mood most radically, I think, is the single, "Imitation Of Life." It was a huge hit in many other places around the world (I remember watching a local guide on a tour bus in Costa Rica joyously swaying along to it on the radio when we traveled there that summer), but it seems almost too specifically engineered to be a single—it feels a lot like a sequel to "The Great Beyond," which itself was a sequel to "Man On The Moon." I still like it, but it just feels unsurprising, and its follow-up single, the glittering "All The Way To Reno (You're Gonna Be A Star)," I found kind of pointless and, again, not as humorous as Stipe seemed to intend.

So, no, I would not put this album in the top half of their catalogue either, but despite the lyrical shortcomings, I can't help but find it a captivating listen, and I was very much anticipating whatever avenue they decided to explore next, especially in light of the world events that unfolded over the couple of years after this album's release.

Re-examining R.E.M., part eleven: "Up"

Bryce Napier March 26, 2018

by Tom Demi and Bryce Napier, first published December 21, 2015

Up

released October 27, 1998
Warner Bros. Records

“Over the years... I began to notice a certain luminous glow about the album that gives it a strange and compelling serenity.”

— Tom

Up was the album that—one might say—brought them back down to earth. There was much less media attention surrounding them by this time, and the little there was mainly focused on their new configuration as a trio, following Bill Berry's departure. The first time I heard "Daysleeper," it struck me that they chose a single that would sound immediately identifiable as R.E.M., and I was a bit trepidatious that perhaps they had decided to rely on tried-and-true styles from the past instead of move ahead. On that second count, I was certainly wrong, but "Daysleeper" failed to reignite their commercial fire in the U.S.

In our last post, Bryce recounted how that post's album, New Adventures In Hi-Fi, slipped between his fingers at first, only to be rediscovered and reassessed years later. Similarly, for me with Up, I found the sadness and stillness of the album off-putting, and the hardest rocking track, "Lotus," seemed too similar to rockers from the last couple of albums. And Michael Stipe sounded alone and disconnected, with much less emphasis on Mike Mills's voice and Peter Buck's guitar in favor of more electronics (I can still remember the hype that 1998 was going to be "the year of electronica"—that turned out to be about a decade and a half premature, but apparently R.E.M. got that memo and ran with it). Plus, the absence of Berry was just kind of a bummer.

Over the years, though, every time I came back to this album, I began to notice a certain luminous glow about the album that gives it a strange and compelling serenity. Stipe has said that every song on the album concerns a protagonist at some kind of crossroads, or experiencing some kind of epiphany or realization, and I think he handled that theme expertly. I should note that this was the first R.E.M. album that included printed lyrics for every song, and they were nice to have for this one. Even though I found an awkwardness creeping into Stipe's language around the edges, his grip on narrative was still secure for most of the songs.

Since Bryce has already revealed this album to be one of his top choices in the pantheon, I'll turn it over to him here to get into some of his thoughts.

"I'm outta here." Those are the last words uttered on "Electrolite," the closing track on New Adventures In Hi-Fi. They couldn't have known how precipitous the sales decline between Monster and Adventures would be at the time those words were recorded, but delivering the last album on their contract, was there any sense that they were ready to bow out? Drummer Bill Berry himself had long ago pitched the idea of playing a big show on December 31, 1999, then promptly announcing their retirement. Meanwhile, the band had also long claimed they would never continue if not as the original foursome. How strange a limbo must it have been, then, to negotiate a new contract prior to the release of Adventures for five more albums only to find that Berry, in his post-aneurysm soul-searching, had lost his taste for the rock and roll lifestyle and wanted out? And, further, that he wouldn't leave if leaving meant the band would break up, but would instead continue on like a loveless marriage? All in order to make an album for a rapidly dwindling number of fans under conditions that they vowed they would never permit? Such were the unenviable circumstances surrounding Up's creation.

For many people who saw R.E.M. as the indivisible line-up of Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe, the story of this band was now over—for some, to the point of denying any of the final third of the discography, beginning with Up, even counted as R.E.M. albums; that they were as much a sacrilege as when the Velvet Underground released Squeeze in a configuration that included neither John Cale nor Lou Reed. I scoffed a little when Tom previously suggested that the extraordinary terms they got Warner Bros. to swallow in order to retain them as label artists might have cost them fans. For a band that traded heavily on their credibility, though, Berry's departure was the perfect opportunity to go out in a manner resembling that which they'd always professed to want. Pressing on was easily perceived as a slap in the face to those loyalists who had long held them up as a paragon of integrity; easily interpreted as though they were in it for the money, and had well and truly sold out. (Full disclosure: I read an excerpt from the R.E.M. bio "Perfect Circle" during the interim between our previous entry and this one, and the fuller picture it provided of all the turbulence going at this exact moment, both at Warner Bros. and within the R.E.M. organization, is illuminating, and makes the idea of the revolt by deeply passionate fans much more understandable. While the viewpoint above is all my own, it is based, in part, on specific information that was not known to me before the past few days, and seemed worth noting here.)

Myself, I was never such a devoted fan that I was crushed by the news Berry had quit the band; in fact, the only thing I remember clearly about that time period is that R.E.M. and Peter Gabriel had both announced around the same time that their respective new albums would be entitled Up (though it would take an additional four years for the perfectionist Gabriel to stop twiddling the knobs long enough to release his album). What did I care? After two disappointing albums (or so I felt at the time), I was done with R.E.M. anyway.

But damn if "Daysleeper" didn't get me. For me, it was their best single since "End Of The World As We Know It." It straddles the line of character sketch and grand statement, using a loose picture of a trader who works nights to follow markets on the far side of the world to ponder a particular brand of modern isolation—the bleary, vague awareness of being profoundly out-of-sync with your world. It's a pretty song, too. It probably helped that I was a daysleeper myself during this time period. I worked at a big book store in Pentagon City, in Virginia, leading a small crew of shelvers who would straighten and restock the store overnight. We'd show up as the store was closing each night. Each of us would bring a CD or two to put in the 5-disc changer that provided the in-store music, hit shuffle, and go to work. There was a kind of camaraderie, but minimal conversation. It was very much a peaceful, sad, languid, otherworldly existence, captured beautifully by the song. I bought the new album almost in spite of myself and, as it turned it out, absolutely loved it.

At that time, I was also a "daysleeper" in my habits, as I was working a 3–11pm shift and often going out with coworkers afterwards. I mentioned earlier that the song initially struck me as a step backward but, as with "Fall On Me" twelve years earlier, it ingratiated itself and became a favorite. An immediate "grabber" for me was "Falls To Climb," which ends the album. It's yet another hopeful sign-off from Michael Stipe, awash in a sea of electronics and martial drums. "Walk Unafraid" became a live staple and really thrived in that context, but the album version itself is energetic, profound, and resolute. The song that took the longest to worm its way into my brain, though, was "Suspicion"—at first, I found it too spare in its instrumentation, but then I realized how apt the atmosphere was in building up the tension suggested in the lyrics.

I think it's very cool that Bryce's top three R.E.M. albums and mine are completely different from each other (Lifes Rich Pageant, Green, and Up for him; New Adventures, Murmur, and Automatic For The People for me). It's certainly evidence that this is a band that is both deeply loved and deeply respected, not to mention consistent over a long period. For me, though, the hour-plus-long Up has a few too many songs that just kind of sit there ("Diminished," "Parakeet") for it to be anywhere near the top of my list.

Maybe you can tell I've got some preemptive defensiveness over naming this as a favorite over the likes of Murmur and the rest. "Airportman" is a jarring way to signal the new sonic direction. All repetitive atmosphere and no hook, it plays a little like the aural equivalent of lying to your parents that you were kicked out of school, to soften (by comparison) your real news, which is that you're failing math. Because the rest of the album isn't that radical a departure from the R.E.M. sound. And yes, "Lotus" is a lot like a Monster outtake without the all-out assault on the senses—which is still an improvement, in my book.

The meat of this album, for me, is in the middle stretch, from "Suspicion" to "Diminished" (which does go on too long, costing the album its momentum—especially with the weird, long, freestanding coda—but is redeemed for me in the gorgeous "sing along" sections). The subdued prettiness of "Daysleeper" permeates this whole run, and this may indeed be their prettiest album. The delicate vocal harmonies of "At My Most Beautiful" recall a bittersweet Beach Boys song (and its simple piano-based arrangement makes me think of Ben Folds as well). "Hope" is delirious and buzzy (and an early standout for me). "You're In The Air" includes a eerily unmoored string arrangement. I confidently proclaimed that "Walk Unafraid," with its twitchy urgency and insistence that you let your freak flag fly, was the single that would reinvigorate their Billboard chart fortunes. However, like Tom's earlier certainty that "Revolution" would prove an asset to their portfolio (when in actuality it became a catalogue also-ran), my bold prediction was severely undermined by the fact that they did not issue it as a single.

Stylistically, the protracted sameness of Monster reappears on Up. Thematically, though, that pummeling sameness struck me as a liability on Monster, while it works for me on Up, as the woozily meditative mood helps me unplug from the world. It's good music for when I want something more than background noise, but want to give it something less than my full attention. I don't mind if it's cribbing from the Beach Boys, or from Leonard Cohen, or from Radiohead (whose longtime producer, Nigel Godrich, is here doing the mixing on about half of the tracks), or whomever else. I lose myself in it as one track hazily drifts into the next.

Somehow I forgot to mention "At My Most Beautiful," which truly is one of their sweetest songs ever. Perhaps I blocked it out because I was in an office job at one point that had music piped in, and I believe I heard that song almost every single day for a few years running. Notable to me is that this album's launch coincided with Stipe's definitive "coming out," ensuring that no one automatically assumed a female gender for the object of the song. And besides the presence of Nigel Godrich, this album featured a producer other than Scott Litt for the first time in twelve years (Pat McCarthy).

An addendum of sorts to the Up sessions (which I never realized were so fraught with bitterness and dispute until years later) was the late 1999 release of "The Great Beyond," from the soundtrack of Man On The Moon, the movie inspired by the R.E.M. song of the same name. It actually does function as a sequel to that song, and it features a similarly soaring chorus; while it didn't hit big on the American charts, it was all over the radio (and another mainstay of their live show), and it was a Top 10 success in the U.K. and elsewhere, further prompting R.E.M.'s migration to heavier touring overseas than at home. By the time of that song's release, my life had flipped around, as I was now working the day shift (and sleeping at night) and I had entered into a relationship with the man I'm married to today. He's not particularly an R.E.M. fan, but I figured that's a small price to pay for happiness.

Re-examining R.E.M., part ten: "New Adventures In Hi-Fi"

Bryce Napier March 25, 2018

by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published December 16, 2015

New Adventures In Hi-Fi

released September 10, 1996
Warner Bros. Records

“In music, both in macrocosm and with R.E.M. in particular, my tastes gravitate toward the poppy end of the spectrum, so it’s remarkable that I find so much to connect with here, their most straight-ahead rock and roll record.”

— Bryce

I picked up New Adventures In Hi-Fi, R.E.M.'s tenth studio album, out of the completist's sense of obligation. If the mid-'90s had proven a hotbed of new music I loved, I might not even have bothered; I had been so nonplussed by Monster a couple of years before that I had sort of given up on R.E.M. I've mentioned Nirvana a couple of times now, in previous entries to this series, but I haven't noted that I was ambivalent, at best, to their music. The landscape, as made over in their wake, kicked the idiosyncratic power pop that I personally love the best back out to the fringes. My favorite groups at the time, Crowded House and XTC, had stopped making music (the former disbanded, the latter went on strike for eight years against their label to be released from their contract). It would be another year before Ben Folds and Radiohead pulled my attention back toward current music, so during this period most of my music purchases were either expensive imports to secure listening rights to obscure b-sides from long out-of-print singles, or back-catalogue reissues to fill the gaps in the discographies of bands I'd been following since the late '80s. But it's a kind of sickness that collectors have, that compulsion to buy the new material even if they no have particular interest in it, so yes, I bought it and gave it a couple of cursory spins.

The lead single, "E-Bow The Letter," made no impression on me, and vanished from the airwaves within weeks. The opening track of the album, "How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us," was a slow simmer like "Drive" or "Low" from previous records, which had never been my favorite of the band's modes. I could hear the music was more accessible than Monster had been, but I had little inclination to put in the effort to get to know it better. I shelved it, and forgot it.

Behind the scenes of our discussion of Monster in the last installment, I talked Tom out of detailing some of the background information that makes this such a unique title in the R.E.M. canon. Thus, I'll turn the floor over to him, that he may do so now.

It surely is unique—and not only for the fact that I usually cite it as my favorite album of theirs (Murmur is the closest challenger)—but because of the way it came together. R.E.M. fans were well aware that the plan during the Monster tour was for the band to not only write and work up brand-new songs on the road, but record them, too, until they had a complete new album by the time the tour ended. As fate would have it, though, a string of medical emergencies afflicted the members of the group throughout the tour, and their songwriting momentum got derailed. Still, they knew they had some great performances of the handful of songs that did get finished, so they decided to make the album a studio/live hybrid.

What sounds in theory like an awkward plan somehow worked beautifully. The live songs had tons of energy, and the quieter studio tracks benefited from the intimate atmosphere—a 20,000-seat arena is not ideal for conveying subtlety—and the transitions between the live and studio tracks were handled with creative masking and effects to transform the audience cheers into otherworldly white noise. And not only that, but unlike on Monster, there was actually respite from the savagery and cynicism dripping from tracks like "Leave" and "Binky The Doormat." The empathy and open spaces of Automatic For The People return to balance things out, and my opinion is that there's a better balance here, as Automatic had only one all-out rocker, while New Adventures has at least four, depending on your definition.

This album was also unique at the time for being the longest R.E.M. album to date—at over 65 minutes, it was sixteen minutes longer than the previous champ and twice as long as some of their others. Was it the sprawling nature of this album that doomed it to only middling success? Or was it, as some posited at the time, a backlash against the extremely lucrative new contract they had just signed with their label? It sure didn't help that they picked the ominous "E-Bow The Letter" as a single—though it did very well in the U.K., it was too much of a downer to catch on in the U.S., as Bryce's initial reaction typifies. (I like the song a lot, actually; it's like a better-realized version of "Country Feedback.")

I would think it weird for people to write R.E.M. off at this stage due to their payday. I acknowledge that there is a certain breed of fan who will abandon their fandom at the drop of a hat once they feel too many people have wrested away "ownership" of a band. It's hard to feel on the leading edge of what's cool if your mother can sing along with it, too. But I'd imagine those fans chose to disembark after the chart success of Document. As for "E-Bow The Letter," perhaps the vocal presence of Patti Smith—a mentor/hero of the band, and Stipe especially—elevated it in someone's mind to single material, but it defies radio wisdom by resisting a hook that'll leave you humming it after it's stopped playing. And it has a peculiar title, which can be off-putting. (I'm looking at you, too, "Binky The Doormat." As someone who orders the Moons Over My Hammy any time I go to a Denny's, I can tell you there's a deep sigh of hesitation before letting a cringe-inducing name like that pass my lips.) In my personal ranking of the songs from Adventures, "E-Bow" wouldn't make the top half of the list.

There's no way to move forward without getting ahead of myself for a moment, so suffice it to say that I enjoy Up—a lot. I liked it enough when I first got it that it reignited my interest in R.E.M. as a band, and I went back to re-explore some of the older titles that I'd written off, including this one. That time around, I found quite a bit to like that had previously fallen on deaf ears. Alas, the goodwill generated by Up couldn't rehab my opinion of Monster, but I'm pleased that it rescued New Adventures In Hi-Fi from the scrap heap, because I'd now put it among my second-tier favorites (after the triumvirate of Pageant, Green, and the aforementioned Up).

The first songs to (belatedly) grab my attention were "The Wake-Up Bomb" and "Leave." Ironically, these two songs in particular illustrate the album Monster could have been. In "The Wake-Up Bomb," Stipe professes his desire to "practice [his] T.Rex moves and make the scene." This is the synthesis of R.E.M. and the sexy swagger of glam rock that "Crush With Eyeliner" aimed at and (in my view) missed. It would have been my choice for the lead single, had anyone called me two years after the fact to ask for my input. And "Leave"—at seven minutes and eighteen seconds, more than a minute longer than any other song on one of their studio albums—features a screaming electronic pulse that runs through the song like a dentist's drill, from the moment it comes in (about the one-minute mark) all the way to the end. But I like how it keeps me on edge, refusing to let me completely settle into the groove of the song, or letting it be too pretty. Still, if this had been the Monster aesthetic, the noise would have been brazenly heaped on top of the rest of the song, burying a strong melody and making it an unbearably grating listening experience; New Adventures lets it sink down in the mix (you almost have to listen for it during the chorus to realize it's still there) only to periodically roar back and reassert its menacing presence. (By contrast, a slower, electronica take on "Leave" made it onto the bonus disc of the special edition of their 2003 In Time retrospective—by way of, I believe, the soundtrack for the film A Life Less Ordinary.)

I find "Leave" very compelling, too, and I do believe that Scott MacCaughey had to be manually toggling that switch back and forth to make that noise for the entire six-ish minutes you hear it—for me, it's funny that even when it's audible, it seems to disappear after a while. "The Wake-Up Bomb" did seem like the obvious single—in fact, they played it live on the MTV Awards a year before the album came out, so maybe that's part of the reason they didn't pick it: it was already "old"? In any case, this was a tricky album to pick singles for: "Bittersweet Me" had an absolutely classic R.E.M. sound, but it had that prominent "chew my leg off" line in the chorus that probably didn't help its fortunes. For some people, "Electrolite" may have echoed "Nightswimming" too closely in its piano riff (plus it was just too late by this time), but I think it's a glorious song, superior to its predecessor and a perfect way to end the album, hopeful and gently playful. I'm flummoxed as to how anyone would think that "How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us" was single material; it's effective as an album opener to set the mood, but too muted and "hazy" to be commercial, and then that whacked-out piano solo, cool as it is, was not radio-ready either.

This album is just so rich in contrasts, and hooks pop up to enliven songs in unexpected ways. That dissonant piano to punctuate the end of the chorus of the kinetic "So Fast, So Numb" always gets me going (and it also became a live favorite over the subsequent years), and the sympathetic backing vocals really lift it up, too. "New Test Leper" is a marvel, not only for the incredible, insightful lyrics and vocals, but for all the little instrumental flourishes—the descending bass riff, the tremolo guitar, the feedback—that never overwhelm the song or make it feel too tightly packed. "Be Mine" is captivating from beginning to end, from Peter Buck's scraping guitar rhythm rising and falling to the E-bow solo that perfectly complements the bittersweetness of Michael Stipe's twistedly romantic devotion.

Whatever intangible attributes might separate one's personal definition of "pop" from "rock"—the sheen, the length, the structure, the attitude, the instrumentation—this record falls pretty clearly on the "rock" side. Underscoring R.E.M.'s potency as a live unit, this is a supremely satisfying effort, and I understand why songs like these would be more fun to play on the road. It makes me surprised that more bands don't take this live/studio hybrid approach to capture their slightly-out-of-control energy in all its shaggy glory. I love how "Undertow" is driven by the laid-back smarm of Mills's bassline. I like the big riff at the heart of "Departure." I even enjoy the two-minute mental beach vacation of "Zither." In music, both in macrocosm and with R.E.M. in particular, my tastes gravitate toward the poppy end of the spectrum, so it's remarkable that I find so much to connect with here, their most straight-ahead rock and roll record. In fact, thinking about it now, "How The West Was Won" and "E-Bow" might be the only two songs on the record that don't do anything for me.

I'm badly overrunning my allotted word count on this entry (and then using even more to acknowledge it—vicious circle!), but maybe I can excuse it as some sort of tribute to their longest-ever record. I agree, essentially, with what you say about the songs above, especially regarding "New Test Leper" and "Be Mine," so I won't expound on them any further. But I can't let a discussion of New Adventures In Hi-Fi go by without talking about one of my dark horse favorites in the entire R.E.M. canon: "Low Desert." It's easy to overlook, coming as it does as the next-to-last song on a long record, and rather than making a big declaration of its presence, it insinuates itself in a much more low-key way. There's a growl to it that I don't normally associate with R.E.M.; a lascivious brew of glam and Southern rock that swaggers and struts very effectively. It's also the song that pairs best with the album cover art. Good, good stuff. An adventure well worth taking.

Well worth taking; I heartily agree, and 1996 was also a year of new adventures for me in my personal life: I had switched jobs at the end of 1994, but now I moved full-time from proofreader to graphic artist; I had honed my guitar-playing and performing skills over the past few years enough that I now felt comfortable playing full coffeehouse gigs a few times a month (and "Be Mine" became one of my favorites to play); and I finally ventured out into the gay nightlife and started having relationships again. I had a boyfriend with me at my beloved Final Vinyl used-record shop for an album-release party for New Adventures In Hi-Fi, at which I won the limited edition CD package in a trivia contest. And as that album's campaign (and that relationship) ended, I found myself moving from New Jersey to Pennsylvania: a definitive departure from my youth.

And now R.E.M. was forced to grow and change as well. After the album's "sad parade" on the charts came to an end, their drummer, Bill Berry, announced in 1997 that he was leaving the band—having suffered a brain aneurysm on the Monster tour, he decided to reassess his priorities in life and take up farming. His only condition to his bandmates was that they promise not to break up just because he was leaving. They heeded his wishes and decided to stay together as a threesome. Bryce has already offered a preview of the results of that decision, and I will weigh in at length in our next post.

Re-examining R.E.M., part nine: "Monster"

Bryce Napier March 22, 2018

by Tom Demi and Bryce Napier, first published December 11, 2015

Monster

released September 27, 1994
Warner Bros. Records

“Stipe took the concepts of jealousy and obsession to the nth degree, penning what for my money are his most visceral and confrontational lyrics ever.”

— Tom

The "monster," according to the lyrics of "Circus Envy," was jealousy, as found in an obsessive relationship, but it was also certainly a cheeky allusion to the fame and influence R.E.M. had amassed. What do you do in 1994 when you've got the world's ear? Make Important Statements, like the U2 of the late '80s? Or maybe send up the concept of success itself in a loud, glitzy spectacle, like the U2 of 1993's Zooropa album and subsequent tour? With Monster, R.E.M. chose the latter course, which dovetailed conveniently with the buzzing guitars of the now all-encompassing grunge movement, not to mention their previously stated pledge that they would not tour again until they had "arena-ready" music. And here it was.

It may have struck some observers as bandwagon-jumping (akin to 1978–79, when everyone from Rod Stewart to Ethel Merman to the Muppets was "going disco"), while others may have been blindsided by the abrupt change in style ("We threw out the mandolins for this one," said Peter Buck), but it can't be denied that R.E.M. dove into this project with purpose and focus. Even nerdy Mike Mills reinvented himself, with a wild rock-star frizz of hair and spangly new threads. The result was a bold and brash album full of hooks but very little of the empathy and warmth of much of Automatic For The People. In their place, Michael Stipe took the concepts of jealousy and obsession (reportedly from his own romantic experience) to the nth degree, penning what for my money are his most visceral and confrontational lyrics ever.

Many of the songs are come-ons or brush-offs ("Call my name, / Here I come," "Don't fuck with me"), and high drama abounds ("These words, / They haunt me, hunt me down, / Catch in my throat, make me pray / To say this love's confined") with very little resolution. The album even ends with the suggestion that the singer has moved on to a dangerous new obsession and, listener, watch out: it may be "You." In between, thankfully, are moments of humor ("I've got my telescope hid in the haystack," "she's a sad tomato," not to mention the whole idea of devoting a song to the newsman Dan Rather's bizarre "What's the frequency?" encounter), and Stipe gets playful with the media's own obsession with his still-unconfirmed sexuality ("I'm straight, / I'm queer, / I'm bi").

The problem, though, is that this guitar barrage starts to become a tad relentless by the time you're in the second half of the album, and musical ideas begin to repeat themselves (Is this "I Took Your Name" or "Crush With Eyeliner"?). It's true, these songs played great onstage in arenas, but I wonder, Bryce, if you find the album experience a bit of a test of endurance.

I'd like to think that, if I'd been involved in the creation of Monster, I would've allowed Peter Buck one song—"Crush With Eyeliner," perhaps—to muck around with the delay pedal with impunity. Then I would have confiscated the damn thing. It is an endurance test for me. However, it strikes me more as glam than grunge. And glam would have been an intriguing new avenue for them to explore, if only the whole thing wasn't so inhospitable. Annie Lennox is the only artist I can think of who can pull off icy and passionate simultaneously. Well, maybe David Bowie. Not so much R.E.M., though.

I remember it as a pummeling record, but with the exceptions of "Star 69" and "Circus Envy," the tempos are shockingly sluggish. Yet it's also their longest album to date. If they'd kept it a blitzkrieg blast, or toned down the blown-speaker sonic assault, or permeated it with some warmth, or taken an incrementally different approach on any of those aspects on a track-by-track basis, it could have been incredible. Accelerate is the template for the album this should have been, in my opinion. Even "Tongue," the one departure from the barrage of guitar noise, distorts from my speakers like it was miked too close during recording. How do you crank this music up to rock out to it when it sounds like a buzzsaw even at low volume?

This leads me to my longstanding theory regarding Monster: R.E.M.'s fame and influence is the titular monster, as you suggest, and it's a beast that has gone out of control. I know that the party line was that they wanted a "rock" record to take on the road, but it feels to me like an exercise in dismantling their pedestal; unburdening some of the pressures of fame by shedding a large percentage of their fanbase. It was an uneasy accord they had reached with stardom that remained just this side of acceptable as long as the people seemed to be enjoying it for what it was. When the first real signs of audience fatigue and backlash reared up in the long-term response to Automatic, the band's response was to record a loud, long, cold, fuzzy, abrasive, sleazy, sneering, disaffected album, so that you'd hate it, and then you'd fuck off, and then they could finally get back to making music that didn't have to be beloved by everyone in possession of a radio. That's my theory, anyway.

Whether or not my theory holds water, it's more or less what happened. Monster moved units comparable to their previous two records (over four million in the US), making it the number three bestseller of their career, but not so many of those discs sold remained in their buyers' collections. Used record stores could have re-wallpapered their interiors in out-of-focus-bear-head motif with all the copies of Monster that got returned. And their next record would sell but a quarter of those figures, officially ending their heyday in the American market.

Fair enough about the record being more glam than grunge, but the grunge movement did give them carte blanche (carte blange?) to explore the loud guitars, or so they assumed anyway. Whether or not they were actually trying to piss off the general public is a trickier question, but it did have that effect on their singles sales in the U.S., as only "Bang And Blame" even reached the Top 20, ending up as their last-ever U.S. Top 40 hit. So, yeah, so much for radio songs, and I noticed those used CD racks bursting with orange, too. Elsewhere, though, it did much better, giving them two Top 10s from an album in the U.K. for the only time ever ("Kenneth" and "Currencies"), while "Bang And Blame" hit #1(!) in Canada. In any event, they were still big enough to warrant a hugely profitable contract when they re-signed with Warner in 1996.

The tour in 1995 was a smashing success, partly due to the fact that it had been six years since their last one, but it was not without its setbacks: Berry, Mills, and Stipe each had medical issues overseas that caused many reshufflings of tour dates. But the tour rolled along, and I saw them in October at the CoreStates Spectrum (as it was then known) in Philadelphia. As I suggested in an earlier post, the audience here seemed like they could have been watching any number of big-name musical acts; they were enthusiastic, but it just didn't have the same feeling of connection as before. To maintain the energy level, the band's setlist focused on the most recent material, completely ignoring the first three albums and barely brushing even the late '80s. For me, the most exciting aspect of the show was hearing them debut a handful of brash, brand-new compositions, including "Revolution," which I was sure was destined for future success (oh, well, it only came out on a soundtrack album, with minimal impact).

Meanwhile, my personal life was tracking with Stipe's, insofar as experiencing romantic drama—after years out of the swim of things, I suddenly found my gay self in a relationship with a woman. There were high highs and low lows, and it had the ultimate effect of focusing my attention on the gender I was born to be attracted to (i.e., not hers). This may be the reason I find the lyrics on this album particularly resonant, although I still defend them to this day as some of Stipe's most astute and inspired.

In spite of the snark I've laid down up to this point, I was not one of the people who turned in his copy of Monster. As a work of art it is fascinating, if not a lot of fun to listen to. Counterintuitively, the one song from the album that I bought into completely was the most amorphous blob of the bunch, "Let Me In." It's a cathedral of guitar noise that never lets up, and stays with just guitar and voice until the second run through the chorus, when a tambourine played halfway down the block from the recording studio enters to whisper a hint of a beat. The guitar is later reinforced by some plaintive organ, but it never switches gears. It's like Stipe's voice is caged within this wall of noise while he paradoxically begs for someone else to open up to him. I find it touching. (And, in a longer aside, my approach to this project has been to fact check the things I think I know, to ensure that I actually do know them. Beyond that, I let my conjecture and opinions roam free, because the whole point of this endeavor, for me, is to see how my memories and impressions of the music have evolved over this particular band's long career, not write a term paper about them. So I don't want to pretend that I know more than I actually do, because I'm no authority on R.E.M. Anyway, I always knew about Stipe and Cobain's mutual admiration, and I always liked "Let Me In." What I didn't know until a couple of days ago, while fact-checking Stipe and Cobain's relationship, is that Michael had seen his friend Kurt shutting down, and tried pitching a collaboration project to get him out of the house and thinking about something other than his own misery. He failed. "Let Me In" was written by Stipe in response to Cobain's suicide, which gives new depth to a song I already liked.)

Listening now, I can hear the album ends strong. After "Let Me In" comes "Circus Envy" and the sinister stalk of "You." I believe I'd enjoy both songs a lot under a less My Bloody Valentine production method. The Monster-ization of them tempers the enthusiasm, but I do think there's interesting music under all that feedback. And there's interesting experiments that also get lost beneath the noise, like Stipe's falsetto on "Tongue." Taken one at a time, two-thirds of the album is actually quite listenable. As a beginning-to-end experience, though, it's arduous. Very arduous.

Lastly, a fun fact (for the general populace, if not for Tom, who surely already knows this): The East Coast leg of tours almost always sees consecutive stops in Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, or vice versa. I was living in northern Virginia by this time, and I saw them on this tour—the only time I've ever caught them live—at USAir Arena (as it was then known), erstwhile home of the Washington Bullets (as they were then known). It was because, as Tom mentioned above, opportunities to see them live had run thin, not because I was anxious to hear the new material live, and so it was a late decision for my wife and me to go. Unfortunately, that meant we got seats in the stands behind the stage. But not even directly behind the stage. On a clock dial, if they were performing toward 12 o'clock, we were in crummy seats with a crummy view at about 7:30. And holy crap, it was loud. All the songs sounded like "Let Me In" to my fragile ears. It was only the second big arena show I'd ever been to (the first being a Peter Gabriel show while we were still in Michigan); tellingly, I've never been to another indoor concert of that scale since. In any case, even though Tom and I wouldn't cross paths for the better part of another decade, I now know we were both at R.E.M. shows within a couple of days of each other in 1995, which is kind of cool.

Re-examining R.E.M., part eight: "Automatic For The People"

Bryce Napier March 21, 2018

by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published December 9, 2015

Automatic For The People

released October 6, 1992
Warner Bros. Records

“...a note-perfect culmination of everything that R.E.M. had evolved into while staying true to their own artistic vision. I’m not sure if it’s baffling or inevitable that backlash would ensue.”

— Bryce

So now we arrive at the pinnacle of R.E.M.'s presence in the global consciousness. It sold big (it went Platinum five times over in the US), critics loved it, old fans embraced it, new fans were won over by it. The record garnered nominations for a handful of Grammys (though won none) including Album Of The Year, making it their second album in a row to receive that industry honor. They'd shaken off the frivolities of "Stand" and "Shiny Happy People" and turned in a mature, somber, reflective masterpiece. They were on the precipice of world domination, challenging U2 for Biggest Band In The World status. That's the context of Automatic For The People in 1992. It was a note-perfect culmination of everything that R.E.M. had evolved into while staying true to their own artistic vision. I'm not sure if it's baffling or inevitable that backlash would ensue.

Some of this might be due to the upstart third entrant in the Biggest Band sweepstakes: Nirvana. After all, R.E.M. had been going about their business for over a decade now, and the sweeping-out-of-the-old brought on so suddenly and forcefully by Nevermind at the tail end of 1991 included them, at least to a degree. If "Shiny Happy People" seemed frothy as a freestanding entity, it was downright ridiculous when compared with "Smells Like Teen Spirit." As a frontman, Michael Stipe fell somewhere between the extremes of Bono and Kurt Cobain. He was not the misanthrope Cobain was, suffocating on unwanted popularity, but Stipe always came across like a private person—one who got accustomed to the spotlight with little relish for it. Nevertheless, he had also adopted some of the outsized rock star tropes of Bono; I think there comes a point when self-parody is the only route left available to demonstrate that, hey, come on, I don't take myself that seriously. But U2 seemed to exist from the beginning as a platform for Bono's Very Important Things To Say, and Bono appears to crave the attention of stardom; Stipe, by contrast, appeared to only slowly realize that he held the respect and admiration of a sizable audience. Understanding that, and being a socially-conscious person, he felt it was a responsibility to use that mantle to talk about things that were important to him. (And counted among those that respected and admired him was Kurt Cobain himself, but we'll touch on that again later on.)

All of this has very little to do with the actual music, however. My point with all of this is that cultural context can sometimes overshadow the merits (or lack thereof) of the art itself, and it's particularly difficult to separate Automatic For The People from its moment in history.

I agree with everything you say there, Bryce, but while R.E.M.'s U.S. popularity began to suffer, their stature overseas continued to increase. Beginning with this album, they stopped having Top 10 hits in this country (and had only a handful of Top 40 hits here for the rest of their career), but in the U.K. they had Top 10 hits from every album through 2004, and many other places (Canada and Norway, in particular) were hotbeds of fame for them, too. But at this moment, in 1992-1993, R.E.M. was about as relevant as a group could be, their every move tracked by the rock/alternative press. They played only one full concert to promote this album, and that was to support the environmental group Greenpeace. By continuing to eschew touring, a mystique was building up around them, heightening interest even more.

Part of that interest was due to their political views, and for this album, the political statements that had been almost entirely absent for the last two albums returned, first in the single "Drive," with its line about being "Bush-whacked," but especially in "Ignoreland," the one full-on fiery rocker on Automatic that seems to criticize the voting public for electing Republicans to the presidency in 1980, 1984, and 1988 and cautions that it could happen again here in 1992 (in the end, Clinton won, and Stipe and Mike Mills performed at his Inaugural Ball).

It's almost more bewildering that this record came out 23 years ago than it is that Murmur is over 30 years old. My first thought on cueing up "Ignoreland" for the first time in a long time was that he was indicting Clinton and the Democrats equally with that "'92" tacked onto the list of elections he felt we'd screwed up; like it was all going to be more of the same without some fundamental changes. It only dawned on me later that the album came out prior to the election, when most pundits were still assuming that Bush would be reelected for a second term. It's also interesting that he couches the sentiment at the end, singing, "I know that this is vitriol/No solution…But I feel better having screamed."

"Drive" was an odd choice for a single, though: ominous, lacking a chorus, mostly played on one chord—it was an effective album opener, inviting the listener on a journey that promised many moods and styles, but on its own, it apparently felt too unresolved, unfulfilling to the average consumer. On the album, the tension begins to lift on track two, "Try Not To Breathe," a lilting 6/8 charmer that nonetheless has dark undercurrents ("something to fly over my grave again"). The mood brightens considerably on "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite," an ersatz tribute to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and, as I think about it, probably the last time R.E.M. ever allowed themselves to be truly silly on an album track, underscored by Stipe's unrestrained giggling after mispronouncing "Seuss" in the lyrics. At this point, the setup is perfect for "Everybody Hurts," a straightforwardly empathetic and lush track with quirky turns of phrase ("Don't throw your hand") that keep it from getting maudlin. The band allows you to ruminate on this through a noirish instrumental track before giving you the gut-punch of "Sweetness Follows," a meditation on loss awash with swirls of guitar feedback.

The tension continues to re-mount with the spiky, slightly Eastern "Monty Got A Raw Deal," culminating in the howling "Ignoreland" before dissipating somewhat in the seedy tremolo twang of "Star Me Kitten." The feelings of suspicion and mistrust underlying these three tracks then hit an anthemic peak with "Man On The Moon," a song that would soon become their signature live track and also inspire a major film about the song's main subject, the maddeningly unpredictable and provocative comic Andy Kaufman. The final two tracks of the album ease the listener back toward a feeling of comfort, easing from the surreptitious pleasures of "Nightswimming" into a hopeful but tentative communing with nature in "Find The River." A calmly pulsing keyboard dotted with a gentle acoustic guitar figure takes us to a satisfying conclusion.

I don't know who's responsible for selecting the singles (I read a quote recently from Peter Buck that suggested it was the label), but you're right, Tom—"Drive" was definitely a puzzler, one of many confounding singles put out during the Warner era. Leave it as a mood-setter opening, but lose the strings (which undermine the late-night, lonesome vibe, to my ear) and you've got something. "Everybody Hurts," a message song framed with tranquil arpeggios and something of a gospel feel, was an obvious single. It's a beautiful song, though it was also strangely polarizing. Plus, that video, revealing the thoughts of motorists stuck in traffic together? It was manipulative as hell, but damn if it didn't move me. Though there was some definite overexposure to it, I personally never got sick of it. It seemed to solidify the view (among those who perhaps were predisposed to disliking him) that Stipe was a blowhard that just needed to shut up. Ironic, considering his long history of inscrutability. There's a big string arrangement here as well, but this one feels like it can support it, and more: I would've liked to hear an actual Southern gospel choir vocalizing during the outro.

In fact, for something that was largely viewed as image reclamation for them, it's surprising to be reminded how far this is from the bare-bones sound of early R.E.M. The organ seems to have taken over during this mid-period, often relegating the guitar to texture in the mix. It's less polished than Out Of Time, but still screams "big budget." I'd forgotten how much I like the band working against the dramatic, churning cello on "Sweetness Follows"—a definite highlight. "Nightswimming" is lovely, with a beautiful lyric, but that countermelody of descending notes on the piano is repeated just a little too frequently for my tastes, and it wears on me. Much more successful, in terms of long-term listening, is "Find The River," which balances on the razor edge of quiet meditation and epic sweep—no small feat. My favorite from the record, though, both then and now, is "Try Not To Breathe." I like a song that feels a little angry, a little sad, a little heart-on-sleeve, but downplayed as matter-of-fact. I like that it affects me because I decided for myself that there's a kernel of something I can relate to, and not because it's a song created with the explicit goal of throttling listeners' emotions.

Overall? Automatic For The People probably deserves its vaunted place in the R.E.M. canon. Even the forgettable "Monty Got A Raw Deal" is a pretty good song (by "forgettable" I don't mean "worthless," but that it gets lost in the middle of the record, and I literally can't recall how it goes if it isn't currently playing). It's big songs on a big stage, delivered impeccably. Definitely worth revisiting if, some time in the past two decades, you've developed an overarching opinion of the band that colors your ability to hear the music behind the legacy—or perhaps can no longer even remember the time when they were one of the biggest acts in the world.

It was quite a balancing act, but they did manage for a time there to be hugely popular and largely immune to negative criticism. I've mentioned that they had a mystique, and part of that was in their choice of song titles: you tended to read them for the first time and either think "How could there even BE a song with this title?" (e.g., "Try Not To Breathe") or "Oh, this sounds boringly obvious" ("Everybody Hurts"), but then the song itself would surprise you with its catchiness or its emotional impact.

Speaking of the latter, I bought a new (used) car in the fall of 1993. Car shopping was a process I really abhorred in those days to begin with, but then the next day at work, my co-workers convinced me that I got a raw deal, so to speak. So I went back to the dealer with my "game face," declaring that I didn't want this car at all if they couldn't adjust my interest rate. They declared in no uncertain terms that this was not an option, and I felt utterly defeated and left. I got into the car and as I drove away, "Everybody Hurts" came on the radio, and… let's just say it was a very, very emotional moment. Flash forward to the spring of 2001, and the British music magazine Q was having a contest where you had to submit a meaningful anecdote related to an R.E.M. song to win the deluxe version of their latest CD. I submitted this story and, to my shock, I won the contest. Take that, Toyota!

My fandom had taken another step up the year before Automatic For The People came out: I joined the fan club (still $10 a year), mostly for the annual holiday singles that were unavailable any other way. The 1991 single included the hilarious "Christmas Griping," but in 1992, they covered an obscure punk-era tune called "Where's Captain Kirk?"—this devoted Star Trek fan was bemused but pleased. Considering this, and the quality of their latest album, and their fame, and their critical standing, I looked forward to their next move, wondering if they could possibly get any cooler.

Re-examining R.E.M., part seven: "Out Of Time"

Bryce Napier March 20, 2018

by Tom Demi and Bryce Napier, first published December 6, 2015

Out Of Time

released March 12, 1991
Warner Bros. Records

“The band insisted that this new music was not ‘arena-ready,’ and instead was meant for intimate listening.”

— Tom

When Out Of Time came out, I was primed for it like never before. First of all, it had been nearly two-and-a-half years since R.E.M.'s previous album, which was an eternity compared to their usual pace of just over a year between releases. Second, their reputation had solidified, as had the stature of Michael Stipe in the music business, aided in no small part by his guest appearances and production work for a variety of respected artists, including Indigo Girls, 10,000 Maniacs, and the Golden Palominos—his peers and the critics were heavily anticipating his/their next move. But finally, in my case, I now had a part-time job at a rock music trade magazine, doing data entry and some writing, and a Warner Bros. Records representative had stopped in to give us a preview of their new album, in the form of its lead single, "Losing My Religion."

The Warner rep was a bit taken aback that my immediate boss bluntly declared its similarity to the last album's "World Leader Pretend," but there was no doubt it was a captivating song, taking the mandolin that had floated through a few impressionistic tracks on Green and pairing it with an insistent beat, a yearning vocal, and lyrics that were slyly provocative but just ambiguous enough to feel universal. It was clear that the label was banking on this big-time, and a slew of media appearances was scheduled—but no tour. The band insisted that this new music was not "arena-ready," and instead was meant for intimate listening.

To that end, as I dutifully picked up the LP and CD on release day before my second-shift job, I couldn't listen till after midnight, so it seemed appropriate that my first listen was in headphones, and I chose the CD. On first listen, I was enraptured by the beautiful guitar tones, the richly layered vocals, and the lush but not overdone string and horn arrangements. I heartily approved of the guest vocals of the B-52s' Kate Pierson, particularly on the miraculous "Me In Honey," and I felt an underdog's pride that Mike Mills got to sing two lead vocals on the album. To top it off, they even successfully employed a rapper on the album's opening track. I could feel that they had really "arrived," and they were in fact rewarded with a #4 single and a #1 album in short order, not to mention positive reviews.

First off, I feel compelled to point out that my wife took exception to my memories regarding Reckoning. I had claimed that she only contributed that one R.E.M. title to our newly-integrated CD collection. While that might be accurate in the strictest of terms, she says she had much of their catalogue—more than I did, in all likelihood—a fact tidily swept from my consciousness because they were otherwise all on cassette, a format we officially booted into obsolescence when we moved in together. How does any of this relate to Out Of Time? Well, I relocated from California to Michigan at age 19 to move in with her, with the intention of—eventually—getting married. The actual move took place in the fall of 1991, but the plans were in place almost a year in advance. According to her, we had come to an agreement to trade off purchases of albums that we would both be interested in to avoid pointless duplicates after moving day finally arrived, and Out Of Time had gone to me, leaving her with just the one R.E.M. disc to her name to contribute to the pile.

In any case, the title Out Of Time was struck upon at the very last minute by the band, under extreme duress from Warner Bros., who had artwork and everything else ready to go, but needed a name to push the album into production. It had always bothered me how awkwardly the title sits in that curvilinear banner on the cover; after hearing that story, I assumed about thirty seconds was given over to typing and centering it before rushing it off to the printer. And though it was literally running out of time that spawned the title, it obviously dawned on someone that the phrase also means "apart from time," an apropos description of the lavish chamber pop that populated much of the album. (We should probably all be thankful it wasn't called Cat Butt, one of the potential titles pitched by Michael Stipe.) Despite the precedent-setting time lapse between Green and this new release, though, it also feels like music that wasn't quite ready to be born, and that they could have used some extra time in its creation.

To describe it as uneven would be inaccurate. "Uneven" suggests, to me, that there are high highs and low lows. Really, though, on this record I even like the songs I don't like that much. There's just some hard-to-define quality that's slightly off about it all. I was having great difficulty diagnosing it, but I think Tom may have stumbled upon it for me. There's two Mike Mills leads on the album, two de facto instrumentals, and, for the first time, guest vocalists. Was Michael Stipe encountering some writer's block? Did he fear he was reaching the public saturation point of their appetite for him? Was taking a step back from prominence his way of participating in the shifting musical roles (with Berry playing some bass, Buck playing some mandolin) that had begun on Green? Was he concerned about turning into Bono? Because even though his voice is on every song, Stipe feels strangely absent for about a third of the record. And maybe that, in turn, makes the album feel slightly incomplete.

I've never cared much for the album title or cover, to be honest. I much prefer the rough version pictured in the CD booklet. Absolutely yes, it does feel like Stipe is trying to disappear into the background to avoid oversaturation. But that strategy certainly didn't carry over into their media appearances: the video for "Losing My Religion" was the first of their videos to feature him lip-syncing ("So. Central Rain" had him recording a new vocal on top of the other one), and he was definitely putting on some intense rock-star poses in the video as well as in TV performances of the song. And then for "Shiny Happy People" (the video and especially the Saturday Night Live appearance) he was exaggeratedly bouncy and smiling. Sure, it may have been ironic, but the general public ate it up and gave R.E.M. yet another Top 10 hit. The song has a fascinating structure, with unexpected shifts in time signature, but it's just so relentlessly catchy that I think it somehow burned America out on the group, because they never had another Top 10 hit here.

As for the incompleteness of the album, it does feel that way in places. That slow-burn in "Low" takes way too long, in my view; there's just not enough happening for most of the song. Where the album really takes off for me is in the pairing of "Belong" and "Half A World Away," which are among the most gorgeous songs they ever did—the bass line and the harmonies on the former are captivating, and Stipe's vocals and lyrics on the latter are some of his most affecting. It's worth noting here that the band was beginning to stretch out to a five-piece, with the addition of the dBs' Peter Holsapple on guitars and bass for several tracks, the first time a non-member was so prominent on one of their albums. His presence does add textures that enrich the overall sound, but of course a lot of credit should also go to their producer Scott Litt, who had joined them for Document and had a keen ear for ushering them through many changes in their music.

I didn't find the cross-pollination with KRS-One all that successful, nor do I think "Radio Song" was a worthy single. But I don't feel like it's a terrible or embarrassing song, just one they tried a little too hard to make over into something it wasn't. "Losing My Religion" was a very worthy single… that completely wore out its welcome. The good news is that I couldn't tell you the last time I'd heard it before spinning it this week for this review process, so it was like running into an old friend—pleasant company, as long as it doesn't suggest we should start hanging out again. In fact, a lot of what bothers me about the record could be put down to overextension. It's weird that this is the R.E.M. that racked up all the industry accolades. For all of their landmark records, this is where their Grammys were collected. If the industry knew what was coming down the pike, I doubt they would have hitched their trailers to Out Of Time.

But then, how many of their albums pitched two songs into my personal R.E.M. top ten list? Just Lifes Rich Pageant and this one, I suspect. I love the melancholy yearning of "Half A World Away" (and I'm a sucker for a 6/8 time signature, as ever). And "Me In Honey" is probably my favorite album closer from them; it bears a passing resemblance, structurally, to another song I love, Marshall Crenshaw's "Someday, Someway," with its simple, looping two-chord riff running almost unchanged through the entire song. I agree with you that Kate Pierson's vocals send it somewhere transcendent. And lovely harmonies are all over the record. The spoken word portion spoils "Belong" for me just a little, but the intertwining howl of Berry, Mills and Stipe on the wordless chorus moves me deeply—plus, it's fun to try to find a complementary tone while belting along in the car.

The flugelhorn-infused cocktail music of "Endgame" would be a lovely intermission in the sequence of one of the longer albums that were coming up on the distant horizon, but it feels a little like a stall-out here. (Out Of Time was their longest record since the debut, but still in the low 40-minute range. It was on the early end of the trend of albums gradually stretching ever longer through the '90s—doubtless due to the available space on compact disc versus that on vinyl—that culminated in the full-on sprawl of New Adventures In Hi-Fi.) Again, I like it on its own merits, but it feels unnecessary. "Near Wild Heaven" is likewise largely pleasing, but for the "bup-bup-bup-bah-bah-bah" backing vocals. It's a litany of things like that, things that don't quite fit together seamlessly, that make this easy to listen to, likable from song to song, yet vaguely dissatisfying overall. What I like and don't like about it overlap so tightly, it may be their only album where my opinion of it during a play-through would depend entirely on my frame of mind in the moment.

Tom Demi (far right) insinuates himself into a photo-op with Peter Buck and Mike Mills in 1991

It was an album of high peaks in many ways for the band, but also for me personally, because soon after its release, we were visited at my rock-magazine job by none other than Mike Mills and Peter Buck themselves, the only time I've ever met anyone in the band. Mike was clearly the businessman of the group, gamely discussing their promotional plans and their producing gigs (particularly the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies), while Peter kind of stayed in the shadows—I approached him and expressed my love of their music as calmly as I could, but I also asked him, "Why is it always you and Mike doing all the interviews?" to which he replied, "Ya know, I don't know, really." ("Uh-oh," I thought.) I got their autographs on a postcard from the limited-edition set of Out Of Time, and I even jumped into a photo op with them and our senior staff ("That took moxie," my boss said afterwards)—that's me on the far right in the shot. And Mike did confirm that they would be going back into the studio very soon to record their follow-up album before deciding whether or not to go out on tour again.

Great story, and very cool photo. I have nothing constructive or comparable to add, so I'm happy to let that be the last word.

Re-examining R.E.M., part six: "Green"

Bryce Napier March 18, 2018

by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published December 3, 2015

Green

released November 8, 1988
Warner Bros. Records

“A lot of Green feels like a recalibration to me, looking inward once again—but this time, with the awareness that a lot of other people are looking at them as well.”

— Bryce

I suppose it's impossible to discuss Green without mentioning the big behind-the-scenes move: R.E.M.'s signing to Warner Bros. To my mind, this was a rare example of the system working flawlessly. A band releases records on a small label, tours constantly, develops their identity, builds a grassroots fanbase, generates buzz and, eventually, sales; then, once that contract has run out, they sign a new one with a label that has the resources to guarantee them financial security and a muscular promotional department while retaining creative control over their artistic decisions. That's my take, anyway. Others saw it as a simple sell-out. The title, Green, was (in part) a playful wink to their lucrative new record deal. Just as playfully, the actual album art was orange. Tom, your right-margin commentator, has referred to their sense of humor in previous entries. This album is the first time I can clearly see it bubble to the surface. Green takes a big step away from the rabble-rousing politics of Document, and even appears to acknowledge as much in the (again, playfully) generically-titled opener, "Pop Song 89." Stipe sings, "Should we talk about the weather? Should we talk about the government?" over the amiable guitar riff. It almost feels like a teasing half-apology for Document's heaviness.

Have R.E.M. gotten happy? What do you think, Tom?

Green was definitely a conscious attempt by the band to lighten up. I had been experiencing their humor via their B-sides ("King Of The Road," "Voice Of Harold," "Toys In The Attic," "Burning Hell"—"Women got legs, / Men got pegs") and in their album artwork and credits (each album's LP labels had creative ways to denote Side 1 and Side 2, as in Reckoning's L and R, for "left" and "right"), and Green continued those traditions (conflating "4" and "R" in the track listing and on the front cover of the LP). But never before on an album had they purveyed a track as outwardly goofy as "Stand" or a "breakdown" as psychedelically loopy as the one in "Get Up."

The initial marketing of the album took a grim angle. Released on Election Day 1988, the album was previewed by the track "Orange Crush," with its war-allegory video shot in black-and-white and its machine-gun opening drum riff. In fact, it was so grim that in the U.S., their new label opted to let the song stand as a "radio single" only, not putting out an official single till the new year, when "Stand" took the country by storm, becoming their second Top 10 hit.

When I first heard the new album, what struck me initially was not the absence of explicitly political lyrics, but the similarities of certain songs to those of the previous album. Wasn't "Turn You Inside-Out" just "Finest Worksong" in different clothing, and ditto for "I Remember California" compared to "Oddfellows Local 151"? And weren't the two new mandolin-based songs too similar to each other?

Listening now, however, I really feel the lightness, almost weightlessness, in many of the tracks. I also notice the gorgeous evocations of childhood—"the smell of swingset hands" in "The Wrong Child," the sights and sounds of lying in the back seat of a car being driven by your parents in "You Are The Everything." And at least this time they knew well enough to follow the lugubriousness of "I Remember California" with a track that—although unlisted and untitled—ends the album on a gently bouncy note of hope and connectedness.

By 1988, I had discovered a strong affinity for music with an absurdist bent, stuff that could make me laugh while still having some substance. I had found They Might Be Giants through 120 Minutes, the first time in my life that I knew about a band before any of my friends, and I was the one who got to say, "Come here, you've got to listen to this." It felt good. Another such artist I started actively following at this time (and who was also making the big transition to a major label, though he would prove to be a less comfortable fit) is Robyn Hitchcock. To that end, the first R.E.M.-related purchase I ever made wasn't an R.E.M. album at all, but Hitchcock's Globe Of Frogs. Peter Buck guested on a couple of tracks, most notably doing a spot-on Peter Buck impersonation on 12-string guitar for "Flesh Number One." Buck and Hitchcock have maintained a long working relationship ever since, with Buck even touring with Hitchcock in the 2000s as part of his backing band, the Venus 3.

A cassette copy of Green was also the first R.E.M. to cross my palm, though I wasn't the one to buy it. My high-school girlfriend picked it up, out of the blue. (A quarter-century later, I honestly can't recall if she bought it as a gift for me, or if it was for herself and I just became acquainted with it through her.) It surprised me, as I had never even seriously considered R.E.M. a band I was interested in getting to know better, and she generally enjoyed music on the more psychedelic end of the spectrum (she was a big fan of early Pink Floyd, which I could never get behind). But for me, someone nurtured on British pop sensibilities, the fairground organ and effervescence of "Stand" turned out to be a perfect entry point. I suppose I can grudgingly see how a longtime fan who regarded "Talk About The Passion" as an emotional roadmap might have been aghast when confronted by, say, Uncle Roy, teasing, "Hey, aren't those them sensitive deep-thinkers you love so much, leaping around like idiots on the TV?" It'd be mortifying. And while the sound of the record is lighter and leaner, I suspect the bighearted goofiness of "Stand" (and its accompanying video) might unfairly overshadow people's memories of the rest of the record. Because it isn't a silly record.

I'd say that even the song "Stand" isn't completely silly. It's actually kind of empowering: Don't just sit there, stand! And that can easily translate to "Stand for something," in the context of the band's by-now obvious political and social views, not to mention the antecedent of Sly and the Family Stone's hit of the same name. But of course the "silly" tag stuck to this track, and after the Green tour, it was more or less permanently retired from their live set, Peter Buck in particular expressing embarrassment over it. And while it shot up to #6 as a single to become their biggest hit so far, the album's fortunes may have suffered a bit by association (it failed to hit the Top 10).

I'd definitely agree that the song isn't truly silly. In the narrative of their career, I'd say this is a band that started off mumbling (or murmuring) to themselves with little regard for anything beyond their own thoughts; five albums later, they're unleashing outspoken protests against the ills of the world. A lot of Green feels like a recalibration to me, looking inward once again—but this time, with the awareness that a lot of other people are looking at them as well. This kind of meta-introversion is apparent to me in "Turn You Inside-Out," where Stipe ruminates on his influence in what seems like a cautionary tale. He doesn't want to tell you what to think, or desire to be anyone's leader. R.E.M. are not aspiring megalomaniacs, they're a rock band. That's why they open the album deflating their own sense of importance with the wry wink of "Pop Song 89." In place of political diatribes, they maybe attempt to inspire people into action in a more upbeat, broad-based manner. Thus, "Stand" is like a rephrasing of the famous Teddy Roosevelt quote: "Do what you can with what you have where you are." Meanwhile, "Get Up" is a variation of the encouraging sentiment later expressed in "Everybody Hurts."

As They Might Be Giants were successfully demonstrating, you can delve deeper into heavy subjects if you approach them less reverently, with a light touch and a sense of humor. Document came on pretty strong. I think Green has something to say, but doesn't beat you over the head in order to say it.

I, too, was discovering both Robyn Hitchcock and They Might Be Giants at this time, all while shakily entering the CD era. I had finally bought a CD player in the fall of 1987 (Murmur was one of the first few CDs I bought, along with the obligatory The Dark Side Of The Moon and a few others). I loved the convenience of CDs, but it still felt that if I didn't buy my favorite artists' music on LP, my collection was somehow fractured. By early 1989 I was mostly won over, and I'm sure that R.E.M.'s embrace of the format influenced me: "Stand" came out as a 3″ CD single (a format that soon failed in favor of the 5″ CD single) and they also put out a promotional CD version of the Green album in a cloth-bound package with typically elaborate artwork inside. Still, on Green's release day, I bought the vinyl LP.

R.E.M. spent the vast majority of 1989 touring to promote the new album, and while the new songs weren't as overtly political, Michael Stipe made up for it in his stage patter and presence, which were vastly transformed from the man I had seen four years earlier. I saw them on this tour in Syracuse, New York, while visiting my sister and brother-in-law, in an arena known as the War Memorial. Stipe took note of that name and also offered pointed political commentary between songs, lamenting the outcome of the recent presidential election and prefacing "Orange Crush" with an a cappella "Be… all that you can be… in the Army" that blended into the song's intro. His stance onstage was confident and resolute, shimmying through "Pop Song 89," forcefully tapping the mike stand with a drumstick during "World Leader Pretend," and breaking out a megaphone for the choruses of "Turn You Inside-Out." It was all rather surprising to me, but this little mumbly, ragged band had successfully made the transition to being a true powerhouse live act.

And yet, at the same time, the album itself dove into intimate depths that Stipe's lyrics had never explored so fully before. In between the exhortations to act came reflections on the person Stipe had become and the child he had been. He was still years away from publicly addressing his sexuality—at this point, he seemed closely connected with Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs—but the temptations and access brought by his fame surely led to much experimentation as well as introspection in the age of AIDS and the continued demonization of gays in our society. In that year, I had my first relationship and my first trip outside the U.S., visiting my boyfriend in London (long story!). By the time Green came out, that relationship was over, I had moved from my mother's house to my own apartment, and I could now certainly feel a kinship with Michael Stipe as he looked back to the childhood comforts expressed in "You Are The Everything" and the anxiety and isolation of "The Wrong Child." "World Leader Pretend" (instantly my favorite song on the album) clearly dealt with feelings of identity and, in a first for R.E.M., the lyrics were even printed inside the album, underscoring their significance to Stipe. Also, "Turn You Inside-Out," aside from being a rumination on his public influence, could be read as an expression of angst in the midst of a personal relationship gone awry. But by the final, untitled song, he seems to want to reassure everyone in his life that things are going to be okay. "Hold her, and keep her strong…. Hold him, and keep him strong."

I always thought they put the "World Leader Pretend" lyrics in to clarify the instances of "raise the walls/raze the walls" that came up over the course of the song, although I couldn't fathom why such clarification would suddenly be important. "The Wrong Child" might be the first time I think Stipe's voice should be pushed down in the mix, but other than that, I love this record. Its playfulness, its gentleness, its optimism, its naiveté (another deliberate allusion of the deceptively simple album title). If I had to pare my R.E.M. collection down to three titles, Green would definitely make the cut. Copping to this being my first true R.E.M. experience might explain some of my longtime difficulties ingesting their back catalog, and why it has taken me three decades to do so in a meaningful way.

Lastly, this new beginning as a global act also marked an ending: every year since Murmur was released in 1983 had seen a new R.E.M. studio album. After an exhausting world tour in support of Green throughout 1989, they rarely ventured out of the South during 1990 before convening in New York late that year to finally deliver the follow-up, which wouldn't make its way into record stores until the spring of 1991.

Re-examining R.E.M., part five: "Document"

Bryce Napier March 17, 2018

by Tom Demi and Bryce Napier, first published November 30, 2015

Document

released September 1, 1987 I.R.S. Records

“...a couple in front of me were having a manically good time ... wagging their forefingers and their butts at ‘And I dee-cline!’—I think that was the moment when I decided I had totally lost ownership of this band.”

— Tom

Tom here, starting off this post. With Document, R.E.M. continued their push into the mainstream, but mainly on their own terms. They actually risked having the album overlooked, coming only a few months after their Dead Letter Office B-sides-and-rarities compilation, but they were still able to build on the momentum of the previous studio album, mainly on the strength of Document's first single.

I can clearly remember the first time I heard "The One I Love." I was in a record store called Final Vinyl, a place that had become virtually my second home over the previous year, and it so happened that the owner, Joe, was an R.E.M. fan, too. I mentioned in the last post that this place specialized in used LPs (and, increasingly, CDs), including "used" promotional records such as the 12-inch single for "I Believe" I had bought there. So Joe was well aware that I would want to hear their brand new single when I walked in one day in August 1987. He played it, and I knew right away that this was the hit single they'd been waiting for: a killer intro, an instantly memorable melody, powerfully buzzing guitars, simple but edgy lyrics.

Like most people, I kind of blipped over the word "prop" in the lyrics ("a simple prop to occupy my time"). I was so used to Michael Stipe's history of quirky and unintelligible words that it didn't matter much to me what it was, and the song was ridiculously catchy. Soon I understood, but it's always been amusing how so many people see the song as some kind of tender dedication—it could hardly be more visceral, in reality. So, with a bit of disbelief but also validation, I watched as "my band" suddenly had a song in the Top 10, blaring out of everybody's radio that fall. The album hit the Top 10, too.

I always felt that they had earned their success. Besides the quality of the music itself, they had toured relentlessly for years, engaged with fans on a personal level (including a tiny but legendary acoustic gig at McCabe's Guitar Shop in May of that year), and exuded a consistently arty charm with their album covers and promotional materials ("MAMMOTH HUGE COLOSSAL UNDERSTATED" went the tagline for their previous album's campaign). The new album marked that progression and sense of purpose by opening with an undeniable call to arms. At this point, I'll let Bryce expound further on the album itself.

You definitely were not the only one to blip over "prop." Even in a brilliantly succinct ode to insincerity and disaffection, Stipe was destined to be misunderstood. Like the Police's "Every Breath You Take," Pet Shop Boys' "Opportunities," and Springsteen's "Born In The USA" before it, once "The One I Love" broke, it became a dedication/anthem to a legion of listeners who weren't paying close enough attention to sense the darkness at its heart.

Document serves as a jarring reminder that all of R.E.M.'s output up to that point had been released during the Reagan era. After four albums that were top heavy with impressionistic swatches of words (and near-words) that addressed nebulous ideas via glancing blows, we're suddenly thrust into Cold War paranoia. The earnestness and timelessness of early R.E.M. has made room for a heavy dose of cynicism and of-the-moment social commentary. I imagine there was an acute awareness on Michael Stipe's part that a segment of their fanbase was beginning to look upon him as their voice. Poised to capture a much wider audience, he may have decided it was time to have something declarative to say.

Even though "The One I Love" became their breakthrough single, it's the other charting single from Document that has endured. Of course, I'm referring to the manic karaoke dare "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." The rapid-fire verses and cathartic chorus captured—especially in hindsight—the 1980s like no other song. Although bursting with indictments, apocalyptic imagery, and cultural references, it isn't the breakneck history lesson that Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" is, despite the two songs often getting lumped together thanks to their outward similarities. For me, it's a stream-of-consciousness interpretation of the sensory overload in the 24-hour CNN news cycle feeding us fear and mistrust of the Soviet "evil empire." It's life under the looming threat of nuclear annihilation in the nascent Information Age. The flipside is that the '80s are remembered as perhaps the most frivolous decade in living memory. Movies were unapologetic popcorn fare, television was complacently formulaic, music was dominated by bland corporate rock and hair bands. Ask someone to give their impression of the decade, and you're much more likely to hear about Aqua Net and off-the-shoulder neon sweatshirts than the ever-present threat of World War III. This bizarre dichotomy of impending death and "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" explains how one could feel fine at the end of the world, and how R.E.M. could deliver an infectious rave-up in response to it. And that's just one possible take on the "feeling fine" punchline. Mostly it's strange to be made aware that the band was manned by humans living in the same world as the rest of us, and not just a sonic apparition that occasionally appeared in introverts' bedrooms. In any case, if I had to pick just one song for the '80s time capsule—by any artist —I think this would be it. I wouldn't necessarily call it their best (though I like it very much), but I would call it the quintessential R.E.M. track.

Quite true, "End Of The World" has endured, and not only in the public consciousness, but it found a more or less permanent place in the band's live set through the rest of their existence. The main exception was the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but eventually that catharsis won out once again. Clearly, the irony in this song was much more apparent than in "The One I Love," and… you could dance to it (I remember their performance on the Monster tour, during which a couple in front of me were having a manically good time singing along to it, turning to face each other at the "Offer me solutions, / Offer me alternatives" lines and wagging their forefingers and their butts at "And I / dee-cline!"—I think that was the moment when I decided I had totally lost ownership of this band).

I didn't see them on this tour, however, and I had even skipped the Lifes Rich Pageant tour. Since I had seen them twice in 1985, I figured that the set list couldn't have changed all that much, and they were also starting to play larger venues. I had heard how they felt and looked kind of lost when they played stadiums opening for the Police, so I was wary about losing the sense of intimacy that I had experienced on the Fables tour.

The record has some of the ponderous tone of Fables, as well as the heaviest subject matter in their entire catalogue. Yet it shoulders all that weight admirably. "Exhuming McCarthy," in addition to being one of the most evocative song titles of all time (and one of my wife's favorites from the band), is a taut, poppy tension-breaker, and could have been a single. "End Of The World As We Know It," of course, rips the roof off the joint. And weirdly, one of the lighter moments is a cover of Wire's "Strange." The original is a creeping, ultra-heavy plodder that seems to be considering the supernatural. Within the context of Document's song cycle, however, its paranoid assertion that "there's something going on that's not quite right" gets repurposed as a suspicious appraisal of the government, and plays as a rollicking barroom stomper, replete with handclaps and a piano glissando.

I had read quite a bit about Wire by this time, and R.E.M.'s cover pushed me in the direction of seeking out their albums. I was surprised, too, at how slow and spooky the original was, but it turned out that quite a few of Wire's other tracks do have the upbeat energy of R.E.M.'s cover, and they have become one of my favorite bands.

Over the years, I took a number of cues from R.E.M.'s influences. By the time of Document, I had caught up with the entire studio catalogue of the Velvet Underground, having been entranced by the three Velvets tunes R.E.M. had covered on B-sides. But as you say, R.E.M., and Stipe in particular, were using their platform to try to influence people's opinions on political matters, too, and "Exhuming McCarthy" was a major highlight for me as well. If only Mike Mills's "sign of the times" vocals were beefed up with double-tracking or something, it would be absolutely perfect, in my view, but that escalating energy that amps up through the "sharper than stones" and especially the "vested interest" sections make this song a classic.

Document has long been an album of moments for me. Four moments, specifically: the three singles ("Finest Worksong," which kicks off the album in style, did not succeed on the radio the way the other two singles did, but still managed to find purchase in my brain) plus "Exhuming McCarthy." Other songs left vague impressions—I could have sung along with lyrical snippets like "crazy, crazy world" or "standing on the shoulders of giants" without being able to tell you the name of their songs ("Fireplace" and "King Of Birds," respectively), or even the album from which they originated. It surprises me when a Red Hot Chili Peppers album suddenly breaks out at track nine. (I kid, but Mike Mills does give his best Flea impression on the bass-slapping "Lightnin' Hopkins," which is about as funky as R.E.M. has ever been. It took a few passes at it to readjust my expectations, but I like it.)

I would quibble with the sequencing at the end. "Oddfellows Local 151" feels like a leftover character sketch from Fables (which, admittedly, does it no great favors in how it hits my ears), and overstays its welcome by a minute or two before randomly fading out. Album over. The solemn "King Of Birds" is clearly the closer here. (I'd almost make an argument for the sweetly nihilistic "Fireplace," where first the rug, then the floor, then the chairs, and finally the walls themselves get successively swept into the fire in preparation for dancing. Its simplicity and hypnotic 6/8 swirl would have made a fine ending note; however, introducing a saxophone two minutes before the end of the record would have been a disorienting left turn to make at the finish line.)

It's funny you mention that about the sequencing, because this is one R.E.M. album that I always thought could use a major overhaul in its song order. Somewhere I have a tape of my own sequence; I don't remember for sure, but I think I put "End Of The World" at the end. I do know that I placed "The One I Love" as track two, keeping up the momentum from the fiery opening of "Finest Worksong." "Welcome To The Occupation" feels a bit flabby in that spot. I absolutely agree that "Oddfellows…" goes on too long and is too much of a throwback to Fables; "King Of Birds" would make a fine ending—stately and timeless. I would add that I've always been drawn to the anthemic "Disturbance At The Heron House," too—like the last album's "I Believe," this song was promoted as a "radio single" to rock radio stations in between officially released singles, and for me it embodies a Who-like quality of suspicion of authority that R.E.M. seems to have internalized for this album.

The inherent problem with acquiring a sizable chunk of an artist's back catalogue in a condensed time frame is that the albums can lose their individual identities. It becomes an exercise in cherry-picking: this song stands out, that song maybe sounds promising—and the rest just melt together into one giant morass of song. Spinning through Document in its entirety a half-dozen or more times has restored its individuality for me. It's not a concept album, but there is a thematic cohesiveness that definitely makes a statement. Perhaps their only album-length statement that is something beyond "We are R.E.M., and we're going to keep you guessing."

Re-examining R.E.M., part four: "Lifes Rich Pageant"

Bryce Napier March 16, 2018

by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published November 22, 2015

Lifes Rich Pageant

released July 28, 1986 I.R.S. Records

“I don’t think they could have unleashed pinpoint-accurate missiles like ‘These Days’ or ‘I Believe’ before this point.”

— Bryce

Now we're talking. Lifes Rich Pageant isn't the album where I started buying R.E.M. (that was still a couple of years away), but it is where they first arrived on my radar. I was 14 years old by this time, actively seeking to expand my musical palate—both for my own sophistication and to fit in with the music geeks that I'd begun to realize were probably my natural crowd. More accurately, the first R.E.M. that caught my attention was "(All I've Got To Do Is) Dream," their slightly-renamed cover of the classic Everly Brothers hit "All I Have To Do Is Dream." The song appeared on the soundtrack of a 1987 documentary covering the music scene from which they'd emerged, called "Athens, Ga. Inside/Out." Its video started popping up on 120 Minutes, MTV's Sunday late-night program dedicated to underground and alternative music, which I had started watching as part of my musical vision quest. It was not long before I'd connected it to the video for "Fall On Me." That one—with its grainy upside-down black-and-white footage of nothing in particular serving as a backdrop for the lyrics (presented one word at a time, in large orange type)—turned into a 120 Minutes staple, as it showcased the exact brand of outsider inscrutability that the show favored.

My family returned to the states in the summer of 1984, after six years of living in England. I found that I had begun to gravitate toward the edgier side of US Top 40 radio after realizing that the acts that were mainstream in the more adventurous and style-obsessed UK were classified as something else in America. These were bands I had largely scoffed at while actually living in England—the New Romantics, the mopey goths, the ska revivalists that somehow made a Jamaican music form into the sound of working-class Britain—but I found I missed them once they were gone from my radio. Trading Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Adam and the Ants and Madness for Night Ranger, Foreigner and REO Speedwagon felt like a crappy deal. Hacking into the jungle of indie rock for the first time was very intimidating, confronted as I was by acts with names like Throbbing Gristle, Thrashing Doves, Killing Joke, and Swinging Pistons (not to mention a host of bands that didn't have Verb-ing Noun moniker constructions). It felt like trying to scale walls that were specifically put up to keep uncool people like me out, because I wouldn't "get it" anyway. And at first, I didn't get it. The large orange type in the "Fall On Me" video may as well have been flashing KEEP and OUT over and over. Regardless, I was listening primarily to reconnect with the Brits, for the occasional Cure or Depeche Mode track that would crop up. Bands that were peddling American versions of the same discontent, like R.E.M. or the Replacements, did so with stripped-down roots rock that, at the time, held no appeal for me. Thus, that largely-forgotten Everly Brothers cover was actually a significant track in my evolution. As a familiar tune I could pick out amidst the often-overwhelming onslaught of new information, it helped R.E.M. stand out as a specific entity in this new world of music.

(Once again, while I serve as your loyal left-alignment commentator, Tom will continue to man the right-hand margin. And hark! Here he is now.)

I was also a fan of 120 Minutes, pretty much from when it started in 1986, just weeks before R.E.M.'s new album came out, and weeks after I'd graduated college and taken the first steps into my own life. I had my first full-time job ($4 an hour, whoopee!), and some extra cash, as I was still living at home. But I also learned how to be frugal, finally embracing the concept of the used record store (I still didn't have a CD player), opening up worlds of new music I never would have sprung for before. And these stores also tended to have promotional records that weren't actually supposed to be sold, but were like manna to compulsive collectors like me, and one thing R.E.M. knew how to do was feed that promotional machine, knowing they were the darlings of the music industry.

I'm getting slightly ahead of the story, but for now, the band had taken another swerve after the sludgy but still satisfying (to me) Fables Of The Reconstruction. To open things up, they chose the producer of the moment who scored big with a bright, direct approach that had catapulted John Cougar Mellencamp to his highest commercial and critical acclaim with his Scarecrow album. Don Gehman brought these same trebly drums and shimmering tambourines and crisp guitars to R.E.M. and… at first, I thought, "But this isn't R.E.M.'s sound!" and it kind of bothered me. It also bothered me that I knew that a couple of these songs had been bouncing around their live set for years, and then here's a throwaway track, and here's a cover to end the album. Were they out of ideas?

But as the years went by, the answer to that question became irrelevant, because it can't be denied that this album bristles with energy and verve. They took the aggressive guitars of their B-side throwaway "Burning Hell" and fashioned it into probably their most powerful opening track ever, "Begin The Begin." They quite blatantly stole the sonic signature of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" and morphed it into a re-Reconstruction classic, "Swan Swan H." They crafted an idea about the betrayal of American Indians into the towering anthem "Cuyahoga." And in one instance, they even managed to build a song from a rather clunky and awkward couple of verses into a deeply affecting piano-and-electric guitar fueled rocker in "The Flowers Of Guatemala." And then there was "Fall On Me," which, to my ears initially, seemed a bit by-the-numbers R.E.M., but its sheer beauty soon won me over and catapulted it into the upper echelons of their catalogue.

I wouldn't have been aware of this at the time, but with the broader perspective of their entire oeuvre, something gelled with Pageant. They didn't sound like folk-rock or garage rock or art rock, the way they did through their first three records, respectively. They sounded like a rock band. A rock band that could deliver folk-rock like "Swan Swan H," or garage rock like "Just A Touch," or art rock like "Underneath The Bunker" (which, if you switched the guitar lead for a violin, could pass for a Camper Van Beethoven tune from the same era), because they had range. But I don't think they could have unleashed pinpoint-accurate missiles like "These Days" or "I Believe"—two of my very favorite songs in the R.E.M. canon—before this point. "Superman" is a bit of an odd bird, especially as an album closer, but I do like it; it points the way toward the guitar pop of Green, an album I happen to enjoy very much. The experiments of Fables, both sonically and structurally, have been sharpened and focused, and the impeccable production meshes everything into unified, lockstep attack. Sometimes a slick production removes the rough edges, leaving an album pretty-but-lifeless. That's not the case here. "Bristling" is a great description of the sound.

It is an unabashed studio album. Even the squall of feedback that opens the record is controlled and folded tunefully into the mix. But the newly-incorporated studio indulgences make a lot of sense: the organ on "Begin The Begin" and (more subtly) "Fall On Me;" the accordion on "I Believe;" the evaporating haze from around the lead vocal, coinciding with Michael Stipe's willingness to address subjects more directly (though that particular aspect wouldn't make its quantum leap until the next album). They've even decided to use a band photo for the album cover, albeit in their typically abstruse manner: That's drummer Bill Berry's face peering over those washed-out buffalo. Half of his face, anyway.

I can understand how this record might have raised eyebrows amongst the band's earliest fans. One might suspect that Gehman was brought in to help shape R.E.M. into a commercial force, to exploit their innately American sound to become a John Mellencamp or a Tom Petty, capable of working the rock idiom with enough satisfying pop hooks to reliably launch big-selling singles to the upper reaches of Billboard's Hot 100. And hey, they're probably right. However, he also distilled their sound into a fantastic record. It has been settled in as my favorite R.E.M. album for a long while now. The band was firing on all cylinders: spirited performances of great songs poured into 40 cracking minutes. The only thing lacking is an apostrophe for the title.

I do love "These Days" and "I Believe" as well. That one-two punch of "Begin The Begin" and "These Days" to open the album is one of the best sequencing decisions ever. And oh, yes, "Superman" is lots of fun. I'm guessing that it may have been intended for a B-side, but it came out so well that it warranted a place on the album. The other cover that was a B-side, Aerosmith's "Toys In The Attic," is spirited, but I suppose putting an Aerosmith song on the album would have been kind of damaging to their reputation—hidden away on the back of a single, it's charming. Speaking of charming, you mentioned their Everly Brothers cover from the "Athens, Ga. Inside/Out" doc—a great example of how the voices of Michael Stipe and Mike Mills blended so well and helped to define the R.E.M. sound (with Bill Berry's husky tones adding another layer at times). With this album, they continued to stretch their musical and lyrical boundaries, and that tendency would persist through almost every album afterwards, but hearing those two voices complement each other was always close to the core of their essence and always brought you "home," as far as I'm concerned.

In 1986, there was an unmistakable energy welling up, mainly from Thatcher-era British artists, as you mentioned earlier, but that energy was beginning to spill over into Reagan-era American music. The discontent of the Godfathers and The The and Billy Bragg was largely political in nature, but the American version (the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies), added in heaping helpings of boredom and alienation. With Lifes Rich Pageant, R.E.M. aggressively began to bridge that gap, and suddenly it seemed plausible that nerds and geeks could actually lead the charge toward social change. It sounded exciting, at the very least, and R.E.M.'s imminent commercial fortunes would go some distance toward bearing that out.

Re-examining R.E.M., part three: "Fables Of The Reconstruction"

Bryce Napier March 15, 2018

by Tom Demi and Bryce Napier, first published November 17, 2015

Fables Of The Reconstruction

released June 10, 1985 I.R.S. Records

“This album... had been recorded during particularly dreary weather in London, with an unfamiliar producer, and I think you can sense that unease.”

— Tom

Whereas their previous album took me by surprise, being released only a few months after I acquired their first album, by June of 1985 I was fully primed for their third album, Fables Of The Reconstruction. During the intervening fourteen months, I had collected nearly every scrap of music that they had released (with the notable exceptions of the original "Radio Free Europe" 45 and the re-recorded version that accompanied Murmur), and I had also made a connection in my junior year at Rutgers with a couple of guys in my dorm named Steve and Joel who also adored the group. These guys had a friend from back home who was even in the fan club—the perks of which sounded cool for $10 a year, but the requirement to mail in a money order to join seemed odd and forbidding and, okay, geeky to me at the time.

R.E.M. had already played Rutgers in the fall of '83, before I was a fan, but in the spring of '85 they returned for a free outdoor concert at the engineering school's campus across the river, performing in a large, flat field. Steve and Joel and I went, and two of my friends from my hometown also came up and joined us. We knew the new album was coming, so it was an Event, and R.E.M. treated it that way: the show started with the sound of an oncoming train and the sight of smoke enveloping the stage. Then came those pealing guitar notes that introduce "Feeling Gravity's Pull" (here's where they started leaving out apostrophes, but I'm including them anyway); it sounded utterly unlike anything they had done before, and I was thrilled that they were branching out. I was also thrilled with the entire concert, and pumped by the new songs they played.

Five or six weeks later, the album appeared, and once again that opening was arresting and invigorating. The single, "Can't Get There From Here," had already come out, but I knew right away it was not destined for chart success—in its way, it was as catchy as a lot of their stuff, but the clunky rhythm, the horn section, and the falsetto screams were completely unsuited to the current chart landscape, and it also confounded people's expectations of what R.E.M. was "supposed" to sound like. Many of the album's tracks did have their signature jangly sound, but now that "heavy blanket" from Murmur seemed to have been thrown over them again. This album, in fact, had been recorded during particularly dreary weather in London, with an unfamiliar producer (Joe Boyd, known for producing Fairport Convention in the '70s), and I think you can sense that unease.

Still, the songs' hidden layers emerged with a few listens, and the magic was still very much there for me. Several songs were character studies of people the band members knew from their home of Athens, Georgia, in portraits that were obliquely rendered, but these carpenters and dog catchers and auctioneers conjured up a world that was fascinating. Most captivating of all to me was the album's final track, "Wendell Gee," with its plaintive banjo and violin and the gorgeous blending of overlapping vocals that bring the proceedings to a satisfying emotional resolution.

I'm curious to hear how this album struck Bryce upon hearing it so many years later, by which time the band had changed drastically.

I'll just tuck right in to the music, then, because I don't have any anecdotal associations with Fables. This is a tough one for me to get behind, due in no small part to the fact that I don't care for the opening track, "Feeling Gravity's Pull." Those "pealing guitar notes" that open the album sound like a radical deconstruction of "Pop Song 89" (yes, I'm reverse engineering here, because in my personal timeline of the band, Green predates Fables). Putting it right up front feels like a bold declaration that this is not your father's—or, more aptly, not your dorm mate's—R.E.M. The song structures of the first two albums are straightforward—the sort where you can envision someone yelling out chord changes on the fly being sufficient for the rest of the band to keep up. By contrast, most of the songs on Fables Of The Reconstruction seem like someone trying their hand at Songwriting (note the capital S). Plus, Peter Buck has either bought some new guitars (and a banjo) or become very interested in the processes available to change a guitar's sound. I agree they were trying to stretch themselves artistically, but it feels self-conscious to me; the pressures of follow-up syndrome finally catching up with them for their third album.

"Maps And Legends" is less of a departure than the opener, but the combined effect makes "Driver 8," at track three, sound positively nostalgic. I'd be curious to learn how much of the new direction was a band decision, and how much could be put down to the new producer and environs—though I might argue that the decision to go with a new production team in the first place indicates they were explicitly seeking something different. It's always commendable for an artist to strive to stay one step beyond their comfort zone, and I think this strategy would bear fruit on Lifes Rich Pageant and Document. Here, it feels forced.

The most successful synthesis of old and new, to my ears, is the next track, ambitiously entitled "Life And How To Live It." The 20-second intro almost tricks me into skipping it, but once the song proper kicks in, it's a natural groove, Stipe really cuts loose on the vocal, and it sounds like they're having an unabashed good time. The final standout for me is "Auctioneer (Another Engine)," another one with a driving tick-tock beat for the verses, but with a steep drop-off in the chorus into heavy dissonance both in the vocals and the chiming guitar. It's nearly a disaster, but I think that it's just hypnotic (and brief) enough that they pull it off. I could see "Wendell Gee" growing on me, but it's a bit of a slog for me to get all the way to the end of this album, so it hasn't gotten the exposure necessary for that to happen.

Once upon a time, I had a strong preference for "Can't Get There From Here" over "Driver 8"—the two US singles from the album. I like horn sections; I like choruses I can holler along with; I like Mills's melodic bass line through the verses. Still, that opinion may now have flipped. "Can't Get There" was probably, as you suggest, a little oddball even in its day, yet it still has aged poorly for me. "Driver 8," on the other hand, now slides on like broken-in shoes. It's the one song on the record that would not have felt out of place on one of the first two R.E.M. albums, and its ambiguous melancholy is comforting.

I certainly never noticed the similarity between "Feeling Gravity's Pull" and "Pop Song 89," but you're absolutely right. For me, though, it's the opposite impression and, not to get too far ahead of the story, I found much of Green to be derivative of their earlier work. (More on that later.) Funny you should say that about Songwriting with a capital S, since one of the B-sides from this era, "Bandwagon," is described derisively by Peter Buck as a song they tried to jam as many weird chord changes into as possible, just for the sake of it. "Driver 8" had, in fact, been around since at least the tour for the last album (as evidenced by its live B-side version), but that is another favorite of mine, definitely in their comfort zone in a good way.

Since you bring up "Life And How To Live It," I might as well mention here that after seeing the band for the first time in the spring of '85, on their "Preconstruction" tour, I saw them for the second time only a few months later, on the "Reconstruction" tour. My dorm friends Steve and Joel became my roommates for my senior year; my previous roommate Rich had moved into his fraternity and the rest of us got locked out of the housing lottery, so the three of us got an apartment together. It so happened that R.E.M. was playing Radio City Music Hall just a few days before the fall semester began, so Joel and I moved in early and made the trip to New York. "Life And How To Live It" really came alive onstage there, with bright flashes of light punctuating those beats after "barking in the street" and all of those similar lines.

I'll also mention that it occurs to me now that "Can't Get There From Here" kind of takes elements from Prince's catalogue and recombines them, albeit awkwardly.

R.E.M. and Prince, heh. There's two artists that don't overlap in the music genome project too often.

They appear to be playing with notions of circularity. They've trumped the pliant song titles of Reckoning by not even committing to a firm title for this album, which the world agrees is called Fables Of The Reconstruction yet is listed on the spine of my CD as Reconstruction Of The Fables, and whose booklet can be flipped—with one side emblazoned with Fables Of The, the reverse with Reconstruction Of The—to create a choose-your-own front cover. I don't know if the original vinyl release similarly kept it in the air by having those two images be the front and back (or back and front?) of the sleeve. I wonder if there was deep meaning to the Möbius strip of the title, or it was just something someone thought was clever.

And I may be way off-base on this last thing, but a realization has been gradually dawning on me while listening to these early albums. Did they take a page from the Ramones songbook and jettison the solos? I've tried to specifically listen for guitar solos, but I can't keep my mind from wandering (or just getting drawn into the music) for long enough that I can definitively answer the question. I just know one hasn't caught my ear yet. I've been so deeply immersed in each record, trying to triangulate an opinion, that I have no time to look ahead; I'm trying to think of Buck solos from later albums, and I can't do it.

Yes, the vinyl LP was just as confusing with its cover and title. Whichever way you turned the cover, it didn't really make sense: if you lined up the spine text with other albums in your collection, the Fables Of The (or front) side was upside down and the Reconstruction Of The side was sideways. And then of course the list of song titles inside shows a song with the title "When I Was Young," a song which does not appear on the album but possibly was the working title of the next album's "I Believe."

And it's true, R.E.M. had very few solos in their songs. Probably another reason I was drawn to them (same with Elvis Costello). Peter Buck was as likely to slip a solo of sorts into the bridge of a song ("Bang And Blame," "Walk Unafraid") as anywhere. Truly, he's always had a love for big, dumb, grungy chords, as in another Fables-era B-side, the faux heavy metal "Burning Hell." And on the subject of B-sides, I should interject here that their cover of Pylon's "Crazy" is certainly one of their most sublime outtakes, largely due to Buck's guitar, which rings out much more fluidly than in the original. Also, I totally forgot to mention "Pale Blue Eyes," from the Reckoning sessions, which is a bit sloppy in the guitar department, but it's quite a tender and affecting rendition, drastically stripped down lyrically from the Velvet Underground original.

Both Murmur and Reckoning saw a big uptick in my esteem for them as the result of this undertaking, the reconsideration of their catalogue. Fables is a case where a closer look reaffirms my previously-held opinion. This may be sacrilege, but I'd put it down as their weakest album of the 1980s, and maybe a bottom three overall. A significant evolutionary step for them, perhaps, but that doesn't make it any more fun for me to listen to.

A deep collection of R.E.M. on vinyl, from Chronic Town to Collapse Into Now, with plenty of ephemera sprinkled in. But can you spot the missing studio album?

About the "Re-examining R.E.M." series

Bryce Napier March 13, 2018

In the fall of 2015, my friend Tom and I were invited to be contributors to a now-defunct website. It was ostensibly a group of six to eight creative, music-loving types, who could perform deep-dives into whatever topics inspired us. In the end, none of the other contributors came through with a single post, and the site was ultimately abandoned.

My inspiration for this specific series came in the form of hearing some old R.E.M. singles on satellite radio; songs that sounded good to me in the moment, taken from albums that I have owned for decades—that nonetheless felt like they were hitting my ears for the first time. This was already a few years after R.E.M. had thrown in the towel, so I started considering their catalogue as a whole, its idiosyncratic impact on me as a music fan, and the potential for rediscovering music that I had never fully absorbed.

I have a healthy dose of skepticism for reviewers who deliver their opinions as somehow more definitive than yours. Because I'm a big believer that our opinions of art are deeply informed by our own experiences and who we are as people, I wanted to write a series of essays about R.E.M. from my point of view, about how they've loomed large in the pantheon of bands-who-make-the-kind-of-music-I-like without ever rising to become one of the bands I'd list among my favorite artists. At the same time, I wanted to listen to each album anew, to challenge my pre-existing notions of their high and low points, good and bad albums, and dig out all the gems that had gone unmined (by me) over their three decades of output.

To provide a counterpoint, I invited Tom Demi—who I knew to be a dedicated R.E.M. fan from nearly the very beginning—to take the journey with me, which he graciously agreed to do. I set the format: We'd compose a post for each of their studio albums, 15 in all. We'd take turns writing for a bit, then, at an appropriate point, turn it over to the other to continue forward. The tone was to be conversational, and neither of us would argue against the other's opinion (though we were free to disagree). Finally, for context, we would each inject a little of ourselves into each post, be it the circumstances under which we encountered the music, or just where we were at those given points in our lives. I've dubbed this format autodiscography—a casual blurring of autobiography and album review. Fortunately, Tom fully understood this approach, and between November 2015 and January of the following year we cranked out our posts, amassing well over 30,000 words on the albums of R.E.M. (each entry aiming for around 2000 words, but usually spilling over).

This new venture, Tremendous Views, may or may not have a longer shelf life than that original site, but I thought this would be a chance to rescue these essays from the trash heap of internet history, and to seed my new site with something more interesting than an "under construction" page. I hope you enjoy them.

Quick links: Murmur (Part One); Reckoning (Part 2); Fables Of The Reconstruction (Part 3); Lifes Rich Pageant (Part 4); Document (Part 5); Green (Part 6); Out Of Time (Part 7); Automatic For The People (Part 8); Monster (Part 9); New Adventures In Hi-Fi (Part 10);

Re-examining R.E.M., part one: "Murmur"

Bryce Napier March 13, 2018

by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published November 10th, 2015.

R.E.M. was an institution for nearly 30 years, through a career that ran the classic arc of underground adulation to commercial mega-success to audience ambivalence to being re-embraced as elder statesmen. They announced their retirement as a recording band following the release of their 15th studio album, 2011's Collapse Into Now. As a collector, I bought all of the albums. As a listener, however, I was a laissez-faire sort of R.E.M. fan: I liked them, but they were never my favorite band. They did their thing, and either it appealed to me or it didn't. My own reasons and circumstances dictated whether I made time for newly-acquired material (and I did not follow them from the outset, so that acquisition process was not strictly chronological). If I'm honest, my initial impressions of the albums have gone mostly unchallenged, and the ones that didn't resonate with me right away have never been afforded the opportunity for re-assessment. Until now, anyway.

We fired up the Sirius satellite radio in the Mazda a few months ago. As a child of the '80s, the First Wave station (featuring the alternative music of that decade) became a staple. For whatever reason, they seemed to have a proclivity for the lesser tracks in the R.E.M. catalog (defining "lesser," for my purposes, as "not appearing on the Eponymous collection," which is what stood in for their earliest works in my collection until the early 1990s). Out driving one afternoon, one of these songs caught my attention in a pleasant way. The car's radio display informed me it was "7 Chinese Bros," from 1984's Reckoning. I began to mull over, in equal parts wonder and dismay, how this was a song I'd had immediate access to for more than two decades, yet it was almost completely unfamiliar to me. I was already aware how I'd purchased-then-ignored their latter-day records. Now that their body of work has reached its presumptive conclusion, I thought it might be interesting to re-evaluate the output of R.E.M. with fresh ears. To that end, I have invited Tom to travel through their discography with me. He is also an avid music fan, but, unlike me, has been following the band from the beginning. I thought that the differing perspectives of an early and a late adopter—and the manner in which our ages and circumstances have informed our individual experiences of the music of R.E.M.—would make for an entertaining dialogue. This is not an attempt to definitively rank their albums, though comparisons are likely inevitable. Nor is it an attempt to define their legacy, nor to argue whose opinion is "correct." Each album will get its own post to be the primary object of discussion.

It seems to me that, as the one who was there from the get-go, Tom should introduce their debut, so I'll turn it over to him. (And we'll right-align his text to help keep the authors clear.) Are we ready? Okay, let’s do this thing.

Murmur

released April 12, 1983 I.R.S. records

“...the album quickly cast a spell: the ringing guitars, the brief snatches of meaning discernible in Michael Stipe’s vocals, the hints of dark humor...”

— Tom

I'm sure the first time I ever heard of R.E.M. must have been during my freshman year at college ('82-'83). Having been born in 1964, I was at just the right age to be bombarded with the rush of punk and new wave in the late '70s and early '80s. I had close friends who got deeper into the aggressive stuff (Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Stiff Little Fingers, Ramones) than I did. As a Beatles freak, I leaned toward the more melodic and experimental end of the spectrum: Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, XTC, and the Clash, when they started to branch out stylistically.

The only magazine I subscribed to at the time was Rolling Stone, and I devoured their record reviews with every issue, also keeping up with whatever hip new music they saw fit to mention. Certainly by early 1983, R.E.M. had to have been mentioned, but it's also quite likely that my first exposure to them was via the video for "Radio Free Europe" on MTV. I was intrigued by the song and the video, and by the fall of 1983, they dominated discussion in music circles. They even came to play at our student center at Rutgers, and a friend in my dorm asked me to go, but I just wasn't ready.

Then for Christmas, a friend of mine back home gave me the Murmur LP, completely unsolicited. He said he was torn between that album and Aztec Camera's current one, and kind of chose at random. The first time I listened to it, I thought it was cool but thought that nothing really stood out. So I listened again, and the album quickly cast a spell: the ringing guitars, the brief snatches of meaning discernible in Michael Stipe's vocals, the hints of dark humor, and the layers of instrumentation that revealed themselves further with each listen.

Various editions, from vinyl to deluxe CD. ©Tom Demi

My favorite track early on was "Shaking Through," with Stipe's slow, keening vocals stretching over that jaunty country-ish rhythm, reaching a fever pitch in the nearly wordless bridge underscored by bright piano chords (an R.E.M. trademark they would return to many times). I was captivated by the way the vocals built up in layers only to suddenly disintegrate and drop you perfectly back into the verse structure again. It's hard to pick out other standouts, because I came to love every song unconditionally except perhaps "9-9" and "West Of The Fields," but I think only because they featured an aggressiveness that seemed out of character at the time (though that would certainly change!).

So in early '84, I was listening to this album nearly every day, only vaguely aware that they had released an EP in 1982, not to mention the original "Radio Free Europe" single from 1981. Full immersion lay ahead in the very near future for me, but it wouldn’t happen until their next new album came out and sealed the deal.

Rolling Stone named it their album of the year in '83, I believe. I was in elementary school (not to mention living in England) when the record came out, so it flew nowhere near my cultural radar. By the time I got around to listening to Murmur, it was already considered a sacred text, the jumping-off point for the alternative radio of the 1980s. As such, it didn't occur to me to approach it as simply an album's worth of music. The baggage brought by "importance"—which operates on a different plane than a straightforward assessment of whether or not a piece of music is an enjoyable listen—usually weakens my experience of a recording. I feel primed to be blown away; to learn a whole new language; to have my life course-corrected by wisdom and insight I'd never be capable of on my own. When it inevitably fails to clear that ridiculously high bar, there's a letdown that is incommensurate with the quality of the music, and I seldom return to it. I suppose it's easy to forget that if there was a new language being invented, being introduced to that album after that language had been learned and incorporated by subsequent bands dilutes the impact.

Maybe the most surprising thing, listening to it now, is that it's pop music. Pop music with a heavy blanket thrown over it, perhaps, but pop music nonetheless. I found that the simple act of turning it up brightens it considerably. In my reductive memory, it was a downbeat record, but that's not really the case at all. It's downcast, certainly—it's insular, as it appears to pay no attention to the trends of the era (which is probably why it’s so easy to describe as "timeless"); musically, however, it's quite sprightly. Rootsy. "Shaking Through" has emerged as a gem for me as well, 32 years later. The sore thumb for me, stylistically, is "We Walk," which sounds like a cover of a Lesley Gore song. Not that it's a bad thing for a song to conjure mental images of a teenage girl in a poodle skirt and saddle shoes clasping her wrist behind her back as she wistfully remembers that unrequited summer love; it just doesn't seem to fit in with the other songs to my ear.

You've already alluded to the most notorious thing about this record: Michael Stipe's murky, enigmatic vocals. There are dual layers of opacity there. First comes the struggle to discern the actual words he's singing, followed by the struggle to interpret what those words are about. Even when his voice is relatively clear in the mix, what it sounds like to me makes me doubt I'm hearing it right. "Eleven gallows on your sleeve" (from "Perfect Circle")—is that right, Michael? For how many years did I say "Call me in to talk" while singing along with "Talk About The Passion" before I found out it was "Combien de temps"? And those were the easy ones. I have my doubts he's singing about a "…sieve we could gather throw-up in" (early on in "Sitting Still"), yet I could explicate that into something (a sieve would be an inadequate container for vomit, as some of it would leak through; just as we can't completely contain unpleasantness in our lives, because it will always seep into our worldview, or something like that) that I can't with the gallows line. I'm pretty sure he's not singing love songs, not visualizing dystopian robot futures, not exhorting us to dance. There's a sense that he is singing about profound concepts that can only be presented in puzzle form, because one has to piece these great truths together for himself to fully appreciate their depths. Which is probably nonsense, but another aspect of my expectations while taking on a work where "masterpiece" is the consensus.

What's your take on the difficult nature of the lyrics?

I certainly put myself through some mental gymnastics trying to figure out those lyrics. I did find out about that French phrase in "Talk About The Passion" while I was still a college student, because I remember writing an English class paper about rock lyrics and using that as an example. As for "Sitting Still," I always imagined those two lines as something like, "We could find a nemesis / We could gather, throw a fit." In the end, it doesn't really matter, I think, partially because Stipe has admitted that some of those early lyrics weren't necessarily real words anyway, but also because the mystery and the varying interpretations are what give the songs deeper resonance, every listener bringing a unique perspective that can't fully be put into words.

Tracklisting on the vinyl inner sleeve. ©Tom Demi

That’s funny what you say about "We Walk." I suspect that your impression of that song's atmosphere may have its roots in those woozy Julee Cruise retro-'50s tunes from Twin Peaks (maybe?). From that perspective, I can see that, but for me, hearing it in 1983, I just found it playful and joyous and childlike in the best possible way (and it's also cool that those thunderclap-like noises were actually the sounds of colliding billiard balls being recorded from another room in the building).

And yes, Rolling Stone and many other magazines picked Murmur as their top album of the year. Interesting that the U.K. had such little exposure to them at the time, and that didn't really change until the Warner Brothers record deal and Green in 1988, but that's another story! Meanwhile, Murmur remains my favorite album of theirs… except for one that was released many, many years later.

John Mellencamp (as John Cougar) had a chart hit in the UK with "Jack And Diane" in 1982, but it was almost viewed as a novelty record by British audiences. The UK was waist-deep in the New Romantics at the time, and not remotely interested in Americana. And there's something deeply American about Murmur. Not flag-waving American, or self-conscious pastiche of American musical styles, but it sounds like the Georgia swamp from which it hails (aided, no doubt, by that cover art). Going back to it for this project has raised my estimation of it considerably. Instead of feeling like a dose of medicine that needs swallowing to bolster my understanding of music history (which is where I started, and where I've been for 20 years), I can appreciate it for itself. Ironic that it takes unburdening the album of its towering stature to allow me to enjoy it as a great record, but there you have it. It probably won't break into the ranks of my established R.E.M. favorites, but it has asserted itself as something I might choose to put on, not as homework, but as music. That's something.

It looks like we're all wrapped up here, so let's move on to Reckoning.

Re-examining R.E.M., part fifteen: "Collapse Into Now"

Re-examining R.E.M., part fourteen: "Accelerate"

Re-examining R.E.M., part thirteen: "Around The Sun"

Re-examining R.E.M., part twelve: "Reveal"

Re-examining R.E.M., part eleven: "Up"

Re-examining R.E.M., part ten: "New Adventures In Hi-Fi"

Re-examining R.E.M., part nine: "Monster"

Re-examining R.E.M., part eight: "Automatic For The People"

Re-examining R.E.M., part seven: "Out Of Time"

Re-examining R.E.M., part six: "Green"

Re-examining R.E.M., part five: "Document"

Re-examining R.E.M., part four: "Lifes Rich Pageant"

Re-examining R.E.M., part three: "Fables Of The Reconstruction"

About the "Re-examining R.E.M." series

Re-examining R.E.M., part one: "Murmur"

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