POLL The Way To Reno: REM's "Reveal"

I remember liking "Chorus & the Ring," though I can't remember how it goes (lol). "I'll Take the Rain" is dire. Overall, I'd say Reveal is about 60% Classic but, yeah, its high points are pretty obvious. Lifting or Reno for me. We'll see..

Hotboxing in my friend's car parked in his dad's backyard in high school, the chorus of "Beat a Drum" used to seem revelatory, vague as it was. Listening to it again now, it sounds way more cheesy than I remembered. Still, I voted for it, for nostalgia's sake. My next vote would have went to "All the way to Reno", which has a great verse, but is held back by a "chorus" that never sounds like one.

never heard this album. in fact, the last album i heard was Monster and that put me off REM forever. saw a very bloated peter buck doing an imitation of even older fuck from The Who during their set at Bumbershoot in 99? or so and vowed not to part with another dollar for REM. it's not really REM without Bill Berry and i was deeply invested in the band perpetuated myth that they'd play their last show on NYE 1999 then break up. they should have done that.

in fact, the last album i heard was Monster and that put me off REM forever.

Fair enough, but this album - and even more "Around The Sun" - has been critiziced for being basically the opposite of what "Monster" was critiziced for being. :)

So, a lot of people are fairly unenthusiastic, which isn't surprising (this isn't like a widely-hailed album or anything) but I'm curious - is it the songs, the sound, or the performances? Like, could they have saved this material through some kind of editing and a different approach? Or did it just need to percolate for a while longer?

I say this as somebody who DOES like a number of these tracks but finds it hard to really get through the entire record attentively. On some songs the hooks don't seem to be there but on others I think they're there but kind of adrift. It all comes together on the great tracks (I'd list "Imitation," "The Lifting," "Beat A Drum," at least) but then you have something like "All The Way To Reno." Which - I mean when I try to picture it in my head I come up with some great-sounding stuff, good lines by Stipe, neat twangy bits from Pete Buck, the general soaked and surfy production.... it's just that the chorus sort of lets it down and the bridge is REALLY dull.

(I think in general bridges have been a stumbling-block for late-period R.E.M. - "Supernatural Superserious" is a great example, just kind of odd and off-sounding, not much imagination, awkward.)

The main stumbling block for me with this album, and the boring stretches of Up, is the tempo: so many mid-tempo, plodding songs. Bill Berry could have helped, maybe. I also wonder to what extent the label pushed them into a sound like this, since they'd invested so much cash in the band. Maybe on their own they would have found a more interesting sound, even without Berry. But that's just speculation.

That's interesting but kind of odd - I'm trying to picture the record company suits in 2000 saying "Guys, guys, more dreamy Pet Sounds stuff! More vibrating synths!"

If anything, the label-pushed bandwagon-jumping album would have probably been more interesting - duets with Ja Rule, a Strokes pastiche...could have been great.

Agreed totally on the tempo though! They seemed to be willing to do one or two uptempo things as "ok, needs a single" but their hearts weren't in it. I guess credit to them for sticking with their interests...

yeah I don't know, I wasn't sure who to blame when they went suddenly lame (besides Bill Berry :( ), and so I've always harbored suspicions against some label people who said, "mid-tempo is the way to Garth Brooks' fanbase" or whatever.

Yeah, "Imitation of Life" was a point on initial listen where my ears perked up again, after a long dreary stretch, just because it sounded like it had a bit of life. So naturally it's the single.

So, a lot of people are fairly unenthusiastic, which isn't surprising (this isn't like a widely-hailed album or anything) but I'm curious - is it the songs, the sound, or the performances?

REM fucked up by including a lyric sheet. As a decided non-fan of lyrics, I paid special attention to these...and they were pretty good! Except for "The Lifting," the melodies and arrangments didn't live up to the best of them. Like Us, Reveal sounds like a band's tepid experimentation with sounds in which it would have expressed little interest if they weren't in such desperate straits.

Like Us, Reveal sounds like a band's tepid experimentation with sounds in which it would have expressed little interest if they weren't in such desperate straits.

You mean, Peter Gabriel's last solo album was "a band's tepid experimentation with sounds in which it would have expressed little interest if they weren't in such desperate straits"? :)

Hmm. No, not the last. The second last :)

Peter Gabriel's last solo album was a piece of shit.

Shania Twain's Up! VS R.E.M.'s Up VS Peter Gabriel's Up VS Right Said Fred's Up VS Russ Meyer's Up!

the main problem with R.E.M. nowadays is that the vocals are mixed about 50,000 times louder than everything else.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

!!!! Silent majority strikes! Posters here would suggest "The Lifting" had this one in the bag.

Next poll up shortly, thanks again everyone...

who the fuck voted for "Saturn Return"?!

Would really like to see some voters come out of the woodwork here and make their cases! I don't actively hate these songs - it would just be great to hear some discussion of them by the fans who love 'em.

I'm more amazed at 2 votes for "I'll Take the Rain". That is the worst R.E.M. song of the decade.

Lurkers voting for the hit single as usual.

Yeah, agreed that's a trend across ILM, but these REM polls have been surprisingly free of that, I feel. "Kenneth" won the Monster poll but plenty of people showed it love on the thread, and the #2 was a really respectable showing by "Strange Currencies." This is a bit more dramatic. And mind, I think "Imitation of Life" is a strong contender for best song on this record - just didn't see it getting talked up much.

I think for the final ultimate poll the pool will be drawn from all #1 and #2 finishers, plus some wildcards, maybe anything that did better than the average score of all #1s. I strongly suspect many, many songs are going to poll more votes than, say, the best-loved song on Around the Sun. We'll see...I want to keep the nominee pool reasonably sized to control vote-splitting, there aren't THAT many REM fans on ILX after all...

Yeah, agreed that's a trend across ILM, but these REM polls have been surprisingly free of that, I feel.

You may be right. But I believe, in this case, it is due to a lot of people actually not having heard this album at all. So they will just go for the one song they are actually familiar with.

If there is ever an "Around The Sun" poll, I am pretty sure "Leaving New York" will walk it to an even larger extent. Although that is also because it is by far the best song on that album. :)

the BEAT A DRUM demo which came out on a b side is amazing. reveal sucks though basically.

Geir - there will be an Around The Sun poll but I keep procrastinating it because, um, I haven't listened to the album yet. The one great gap in my REM fandom!

Have heard "Imitation of Life" both of the last two times I've been to the grocery store. It sounds really good through the fog of background noise; listening to it by itself, it's...thinner than I remember. Wonder if that's just a general dating of turn-of-the-millenium sound; I feel that way now about a lot of big pop hits from that time, which sounded super massive to me at the time. Still a decent tune, but a bit rote and undercooked I think, with production flourishes coming in as sonic Zap-a-Gap.

"Imitation of Life" is one of the best singles of their whole career. I don't care if it's 2001 production and it's thin - all digital sound is thin. It's also full sounding in its own way.

You may be right. But I believe, in this case, it is due to a lot of people actually not having heard this album at all. So they will just go for the one song they are actually familiar with.

I bought this album when it came out; the single is considerably better than any of the other songs on it, like almost to a "these other songs are only there so there'll be an album to put around the one really great song" degree

There's also something about the use of the drum kit in this period of R.E.M. that might contribute to the sense of the sound being thin. It would have been fun to try to produce these records with no drums at all, in my opinion.

I don't know if Bill Berry had better solutions in some of the softer stuff immediately prior to it or if Bill Rieflin had better solutions on Around the Sun either.

I'll be the first person to admit that I didn't like this album at all when it was first released, but I've been re-listening to the R.E.M. catalogue quite a bit recently, and I've found Reveal to have grown on me quite a great deal. I'm beginning to feel like its quite possibly my 2nd favourite post-Bill Berry album, after Accelerate. I'm finding myself cooling on Up with each passing year, and I've never liked Around The Sun.

Listened to this again this morning and found myself agreeing with Mike Mills when he said it was one of R.E.M.'s most underrated albums. As I said above, Reveal wasn't really an album that I thought much of when it first came out. For one, I used to think the production of the album was way too cluttered, but this time around I found that was one of the things I most enjoyed about the record. 'Summer Turns To High' and 'Beachball' have grown on me quite a great deal as well, and I used to think they were kinda nothing-y.