I was feeling nostalgiac and listened to Fables of the Reconstruction coming home from work today. I like a good bit of REM from the late 80’s and early 90’s, but the band that really mattered to me was those first 3 albums. 4 if you count Chronic Town.
But then I was thinking that for a whole lot of people, when they think of REM, they think of the talented but mainstream band REM became in the late 80’s/early 90’s. Also, for them, Michael Stipe has always been bald.
So which REM is yours? The jangle pop college band or the rock stars?
I consider REM to be two separate entities: one with Bill Berry, and another one without. I’m in the jangle-pop camp, but really enjoyed all their albums up to Berry’s departure (yes, even Monster). The post-Berry stuff just doesn’t do it for me , although I did like the last album.
The first few - only, really. By the time they became MTV darlings, I didn’t hear it anymore. By the time Everybody Hurts came out, I just shook my head. Fine enough song if you like that type of thing, but from the band that did Pilgrimage? Harborcoat?
Definitely the first one. One of the very best concerts I have attended consisted of R.E.M. opening for headliner The English Beat at Vanderbilt University in spring 1983.
Sometime in th '90’s, Peter Buck (I think it was) said the band was considering disbanding on midnight of New Year’s Eve 1999. I think they should have done that, because from what I can tell they’ve put out boring dreck since then, and their relevance in the cultural scene is not what it was (except, I’m told, in Europe).
Anyway, IMHO they peaked around 1986 (Lifes Rich Pageant), with their jangly, “alternative” '80’s sound (alternative to the synth pop of the time), but also put out some delightfully tuneful, creative albums in the early '90’s, then started to lose their way just after New Adventures in HiFi.
In other words, I loved the “jangle pop era”, and I liked quite a bit the “rock star era”, up to Bill Berry’s departure.
I first came to know them with their Out of Time album, which I loved. This was junior/senior year in high school. Then I was in that horrible college-emo phase when “Everybody Hurts” came out, so that really spoke to me (I KNOW I KNOW). I did go back to some of their earlier stuff once I got to know them.
I do like their newer, rock-ier stuff (like Monster) and hell, I saw them last year at the Hollywood Bowl. But to me they are always the alternative band on the cusp of making it huge. My husband, on the other hand, never knew them before Monster, so he’s in the “they’re rockstars and he’s bald” camp. He’s only 2 years younger than I am, but apparently it’s a critical difference.
I got Chronic Town soon after it came out, and was immediately hooked (hell I have the original indie version single of “Radio Free Europe” somewhere). I more or less followed them religiously through Automatic for the People (a truly classic album by most any standard-good songwriting is good songwriting no matter what the guitar sound), but Monster pretty much turned me off to them, and of the albums which came after only the criminally-underrated Reveal really grabbed me.
True that. The 4 tracks I heard on the new album were not really bad, just nothing fresh and special. I’ll bet Bill is making tastier stuff on his farm these days.
Having been exposed to REM a couple of years before they became huge, I feel about them now the same way I did when all my friends were grooving on them from the college alternative station: Whiny, pretentious and over-rated.
fair enough. But i’ve always hated the term ‘over-rated’ when applied to any band. You either like the band, or some of their stuff or don’t. What does the fact that critics rate them higher than you do have to do with whether or not you like some songs?
I prefer the old stuff, I haven’t paid attention to the last 4 albums at all. I was hooked the first time I heard Radio Free Europe.Automatic for the People is a terrific album but if I had to choose a favorite I’d go with Reconstruction of the Fables.
I’m I the only one who thinks that New Adventures in Hi-Fi is also a great album?
It’s a funny mish-mash of their previous styles, from the early days right up through Monster. I think “New Test Leper” is a great song, but I wouldn’t call the album as a whole “great”, IMHO.
I just pretend Around the Sun didn’t happen, though. Up was very good in places, and Reveal was okay, but Around the Sun was just utterly unlistenable. Fortunately, Accelerate was great.
For background, Chronic Town came out a year before I was born. My mom’s been listening to them since about that time. I personally didn’t get into them until about a year after Bill Berry left the band. I’ve always been into the old stuff. My favorite song by them’s “Feeling Gravitys Pull.” But I also recognize that Automatic is a fucking brilliant album.
Some of their early stuff is, IMHO, not overly terrific. . .but a lot of it is really, really fucking good. The aforementioned “Pilgrimage,” for instance. My favorite album is Document.
At the first release of “Radio Free Europe” in the summer of 1981, I had just started summer classes in my first year of college and living in the dorms…our campus radio station played the tune almost hourly.
REM used to be one of my favorites but I’ve only seen them in concert once, in a 6,000-seat arena at a local college. It was about the time that some popular magazine (Rolling Stone?) put them on the cover with the caption “The World’s Most Important Band” (or something like that).
I got the impression they really didn’t want to be there. They had booked the tour when they were still somewhat obscure indie rockers but were performing as full-fledged pop phenomena who thought they could and should be somewhere better. Musically they were everything I expected, but Michael Stipe’s attitude between songs dripped with condescension and contempt for his audience. Obviously my impressions are subjective. Maybe he was always like that, or maybe he ate something for lunch that disagreed with him, but that concert has diminished my appreciation of their subsequent work.
(Not right away though. I was never a frequent concertgoer in my youth, and it wasn’t until I had seen the rapport that other performers had with their audiences that I looked back and realized just how unpleasant he had been.)
