I really like Texarkana, too. I agree there are a couple of clunkers on Out of Time, but if I had to pick one early R.E.M. album to get rid of I’d join the anti-Green horde.
Some lunatic who later murdered an NBC stagehand. It entered pop culture as a great random moment, but it’s much creepier in hindsight.
I agree. Honestly, Out of Time is the album I don’t really care for. It has some good stuff, “Low” is probably my favorite, but it really never did a lot for me.
As for Green, I don’t know how anyone can dislike that record. “Stand” got incredibly overplayed at the time and I usually skip it but the rest of that album is fantastic.
I became a fan when I heard “Radio Free Europe” in 1983 when I was 14 and they were always one of my favorite bands although I didn’t keep up with them much in the later years. The last R.E.M. albums I bought were New Adventures in Hi-Fi and In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003.
I thoroughly enjoyed ‘Monster’ when it first came out, and still enjoy it some 15+ years after. I totally don’t get the hate. I guess I am smitten…
And WordMan, I’m surprised - I would have thought you would have savoured that incredible guitar tone to no end! Not to mention the solos where he sounds like he’s on the verge of dropping the instrument altogether.
Oh yeah, it sounds good - and I like Monster more than most other REM albums from that era. But tone isn’t everything (:eek:) and the songs haven’t really stuck with me. But, as we’ve seen in this thread, I’m a bit clueless about REM once the lyrics got intelligible, so I will humbly step back ;).
Again, Peter Buck is a great guitarist and typically plays and sounds great; the question is more about the songs…
For me, “Reveal” is the R.E.M. album that should never have been released. It has exactly ONE good song (“Imitation of Life”; JMS has never been in finer vocal form, either) and the rest is just…there.
Bingo. I was a pretty serious Metallica fan from roughly Master of Puppets forward, and the Black Album was kind of like a derailment. Good songs, and I liked it, but it wasn’t really what I thought of as Metallica. More like Metallica trying to do ballads or something. I wasn’t so much disappointed with the Black Album itself as I was with the album after, when they lost a lot of the harder sound I liked, and concentrated more on the melodic stuff. That was the point I quit listening to Metallica, actually.
I imagine for a lot of REM fans, it was similar- Monster was a change- well done, but a change, and then after that with the loss of Bill Berry and a change in sound, they were done with the next album.
I vehemently disagree-I think “All the Way to Reno”, “She Just Wants to Be”, “Disappear”, and “Saturn Return” all are the equal of anything else that they have ever done.
Not only do I NOT think Monster is a bad album, I would put it behind only Automatic For The People and Murmur as their best. I can’t quite put my finger on why, though.
Ditto. Most of the REM songs I like are on Monster and it’s the only REM album I own.
No, it’s one of their better albums
- Reckoning
- Murmur
- Automatic for the People
- Lifes Rich Pageant
- Monster