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

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.