i still think fables of the reconstruction is their best album: an aggressive, tuneful, weird-america take on gothic southern rock.
and to me this is their most turgid.
― Anakin Ska Walker (AKA Skarth Vader) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 29 September 2011 01:56 (twelve years ago) link
New Test Leper could have worked as a single. It's easy to envision an alluring video at least.
― Euler, Thursday, 29 September 2011 01:57 (twelve years ago) link
Maps & Legends was a very bad choice for song 2. It drags the album down.
― Euler, Thursday, 29 September 2011 01:58 (twelve years ago) link
kind of agree with this ^^^^
― Daniel, Esq., Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:00 (twelve years ago) link
mm Q gave it 5 stars and there were good reviews but it kinda sank without trace and the singles were a bit 'grim' (Bittersweet Me, E Bow especially) in light of Britpop being in it's absolute pomp. in Dave Cavanagh's excellent look-back review in the Q REM special (c. 2000) he described it as being like "Nico had wandered onto Live And Kicking" (Live And Kicking was a loud colourful Saturday morning kid's telly show). next thing you know Bill's left etc.. but then about 5 years back it started getting CRAZY good raves from fans on forums etc. you see folk on Drowned In Sound etc say it's their fave REM album and no-one bats an eyelid. i mean it's a fucking excellent record (that could lose a good 15 minute chunk but hey).
― piscesx, Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:01 (twelve years ago) link
UP is the only REM album not on Spotify. what's with that?
― piscesx, Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:03 (twelve years ago) link
"Wake-Up Bomb" would've been a great 2nd single after something less Monster-ish to set the tone/bring back old fans but not as uncommercial as "E-Bow" -- maybe "New Test Leper" or "Leave." then maybe "Bittersweet Me" and "So Fast, So Numb."
― wes2gully (some dude), Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:07 (twelve years ago) link
fables of the reconstruction
i don't think it's their best album by any means, but having listened to it less i now go back to it more often
plus, kohoutek
― mookieproof, Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:09 (twelve years ago) link
i think the overtly, overly sentimental be mine would have been a nice single.
oh!, i kept referring to this as you and me above.
― Daniel, Esq., Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:10 (twelve years ago) link
gesundheit
― Anakin Ska Walker (AKA Skarth Vader) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:10 (twelve years ago) link
lol Tim if by "compact" you mean "shriveled."
― Anakin Ska Walker (AKA Skarth Vader) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, September 28, 2011 6:27 PM
No. I'm talking about classicist songwriting, Alfred. Even a deep cut like "Wanderlust" on Around the Sun has really nice aspects of this.
― timellison, Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:10 (twelve years ago) link
i love "Be Mine" and agree it would've been a good single but considered it maybe redundant if that had happened fairly soon after "Strange Currencies"
― wes2gully (some dude), Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:12 (twelve years ago) link
Oh yeah def "Be Mine" but perhaps as final single (replacing "Electrolite"?).
― Tim F, Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:12 (twelve years ago) link
yep
― Daniel, Esq., Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:13 (twelve years ago) link
This is where you and I differ. I lose interest in songwriting if the performance doesn't catch my ear.
― Anakin Ska Walker (AKA Skarth Vader) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:14 (twelve years ago) link
i see where you're coming from, but be mine is so much more raw and direct than strange currencies
― Daniel, Esq., Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:15 (twelve years ago) link
i vaguely remember being amused/annoyed by Stipe seeming to give very similar interview soundbytes in the '90s about different songs being "the first love song i've ever written" re: "Be Mine" and "Strange Currencies" and possibly one or two others
― wes2gully (some dude), Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:15 (twelve years ago) link
At My Most Beautiful also
― Euler, Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:18 (twelve years ago) link
I have zero problem with the performance on "Wanderlust."
xpost to Alfred!
― timellison, Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:18 (twelve years ago) link
i think joe keyes (emusic) did a nice job defending monter.
There is no way to overstate how passionately some people hate this record. Arriving on the heels of the dignified Automatic for the People, Monster was a hand job in a seedy theater, and the album that got R.E.M. out of the cabin and back into the arenas, and asserted their place among the legions of grunge bands they'd inspired. It is, as Stipe put it at the time, "a dick record," leering and lascivious, unsafe to take on an unchaperoned date. If Big Black hadn't already nicked the title, they could have called it Songs About Fucking. Before this (and, one could argue, immediately after), the group provided the po-faced template for Conscious Rockers, so self-serious that they were on speed-dial for things like Greenpeace benefits and the Clinton inauguration. Monster proved that if they couldn't be bipartisan, they could at least be bi-curious. Buck takes a lot of flak for his overuse of tremolo on this record, but the intention was to make everything on Monster of a single, snarling piece. The seasick swoon of "Crush With Eyeliner," buttressed by backing vocals from Thurston Moore, finds Stipe sarcastically sneering "I'm the real thing," a line that handily sums up the entire affair. Monster is full of personas, a meditation on self-invention in which Stipe turns himself inside-out and shines a light on his darkest corners (the Fun House barnstormer "Circus Envy" starts with him lamenting "here comes that awful feeling again" like a man turning into a werewolf). For an album hailed as the group's "return to rock," it's loaded with lovely slower moments, too. Though they burned the same chord progression on the tender "Everybody Hurts," "Strange Currencies" ranks among the group's finest compositions, a song of raw, pained longing. Monster also contains one of the best R&B songs of the 90s, the perverse and poignant "Tongue." Stipe has rarely been so unabashedly feminine, singing from the perspective of a lonely high school girl and using a triple-X framing device to describe emotional abuse. How many songs this heartbreaking feature the lyric "Anybody can get laid?"
hardly my favorite rem record, but not as bad as many people say. in fact, it's mostly very good, for what it is. a lot of my negative feelings toward it comes from my seeing 15 copies of it in every "used CD" bin everywhere.
― Daniel, Esq., Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:24 (twelve years ago) link
Monster is full of personas, a meditation on self-invention
That's how I've listened to it -- it's the band's Roxy Music record.
― Anakin Ska Walker (AKA Skarth Vader) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:28 (twelve years ago) link
"Let's go shopping for personae -- anything, anything that allows me to stick my tongue in your mouth."
Monster doesn't feel especially sexy or sexual to me, even by REM standards
― wes2gully (some dude), Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:29 (twelve years ago) link
most of those Keyes reviews are excellent. Thanks, Daniel.
― Anakin Ska Walker (AKA Skarth Vader) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:36 (twelve years ago) link
monster was the last record i *really* listened to
i think it stands up *much* better than the rep it got at the time. nevertheless i don't think it is 'sexy' nor were band members' insistence that it was 'punk' convincing
― mookieproof, Thursday, 29 September 2011 02:36 (twelve years ago) link
amused by the recherche focus on latter-day albums people don't like. shallow figured, winners' page
― reggie (qualmsley), Thursday, 29 September 2011 03:04 (twelve years ago) link
I think it's very sexy---"Bang & Blame" is the band's "Let It Bleed", & you can hear the same vulnerability, openness. I hesitate to speculate this way since I'm hetero, but I hear it as a very beautiful homosexual song, about a kind of maleness I can't experience but find understandable & fascinating.
― Euler, Thursday, 29 September 2011 03:04 (twelve years ago) link
"camera" is sexy too
― reggie (qualmsley), Thursday, 29 September 2011 03:06 (twelve years ago) link
qualmsley's constant griping about the line of conversation is so funny i might start discussing Up at length soon. fyi divisive later records make for more lively conversation than the canonized 80s.
― wes2gully (some dude), Thursday, 29 September 2011 03:10 (twelve years ago) link
it seems so shallow, and low
― reggie (qualmsley), Thursday, 29 September 2011 03:12 (twelve years ago) link
i am totally in favor of a lengthy discussion of up
― call all destroyer, Thursday, 29 September 2011 03:14 (twelve years ago) link
it feels much more bloated/overlong than New Adventures at the same length, but there are some moments i really enjoy on it, definitely could edit it down to a lovely little record
― wes2gully (some dude), Thursday, 29 September 2011 03:16 (twelve years ago) link
yeah it's not like the songs are indistinct but it could be edited pretty easily. like i said earlier my main problem is that it's pretty much an arrangement nightmare--i guess the late 90s were the last time it was cool to use "primitive drum machines"? (i guess moon safari did come out in '98). anyway, a song like suspicion is actually a really nice little song that has a good melody and good chord changes but it's totally sedated to death.
― call all destroyer, Thursday, 29 September 2011 03:19 (twelve years ago) link
Up is overlong but I like its three-part structure & think each works on its own. I'd cut Parakeet as redundant.
― Euler, Thursday, 29 September 2011 03:23 (twelve years ago) link
The "I'm the real thing" line in "Crush w/ Eyeliner" is among Stipe's more annoying deliveries. Thinking about Monster, I just didn't believe any of it -- the lyrics, Stipe's delivery, the guitar -- the whole thing struck me as fake. But not just a put on, a bad put on. That coming from a band that always did sincerity incredibly well. The show I saw at the (then) Rosemont Horizon sucked. Flat out sucked.
I dunno, I still own it, which is as more a function of resale market dynamics (scanning the used bin, I'd see like 8 copies in a row) than ever going back to it. Maybe I'll take it to work tomorrow and give it a listen.
The comment above about New Adventures being what Monster wanted to be or should've been, otm. Maybe they just got better at bombast over the course of that tour...
― john. a resident of chicago., Thursday, 29 September 2011 03:26 (twelve years ago) link
qualmsley's constant griping
A blue jay hectors from a felled catalpa tree.
― timellison, Thursday, 29 September 2011 03:27 (twelve years ago) link
the dragonflies are trying to lecture me
― reggie (qualmsley), Thursday, 29 September 2011 03:32 (twelve years ago) link
"new test leper" was released as a promo and has a video
― mutant slow drum (BradNelson), Thursday, 29 September 2011 07:00 (twelve years ago) link
New Adventures best potential singles, I reckon = New Test Leper, The Wake-Up Bomb, Be Mine, Electrolite. So Fast, So Numb would probably have gone down really well in that era too.
I think I remember reading an interview where they said they considered releasing Be Mine but were nervous about it becoming an enormous ubiquitous radio ballad that everyone got sick of. I've always loved that song.
― Matt DC, Thursday, 29 September 2011 10:04 (twelve years ago) link
Still find it amusing how much of an after thought New Adventures felt, if not to critics but in the kind of media and places REM would be found 2 or 3 years previous
Less than a year on from the end of the gaudy Monster tour, the Nico/L&K line is good but it seemed to happen so quickly, as if their fanbase average age suddenly jumped 10 years. Then again, an album in 1991, 1992, 1994, and year long world tour in '95, there must have been an element to some of 'just fucking go away for your own sake', they almost seemed to know it going by the NAIHF cover.
New Adventures is the last great REM album cover IMO, everything since has been poor to horrible. Some of those 80's covers are beautiful.
― Master of Treacle, Thursday, 29 September 2011 11:35 (twelve years ago) link
New Adventures is also, I think, the only album where the idea of REM as a stadium rock band feels like a great one. Monster is kind of forced, the earlier Warners albums a little too low-key.
― Matt DC, Thursday, 29 September 2011 13:05 (twelve years ago) link
Wasn't that fabled 96-97 span when even Sub Pop was signing bands like Saint Etienne?
― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, 29 September 2011 13:14 (twelve years ago) link
yeah it's definitely true they were over exposed in that early 90s era. re: their audience's age, they managed to get a much younger audience along for the ride with the oldsters, up until Monster but the Monster tour did a very good job indeed of baffling/disenchanting the new more mainstream audience they picked up. the night i saw it they played nothing before Document, played a LOT off Monster itself and threw in THREE brand new tracks. don't think it did them any favours.
― piscesx, Thursday, 29 September 2011 13:16 (twelve years ago) link
I seem to recall from interviews that until that 2003 tour, there were a lot of old songs the band simply forgot how to play. Though really, how hard could it be for R.E.M. to relearn R.E.M. songs? #lazyrockstars
― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, 29 September 2011 13:18 (twelve years ago) link
How would playing nothing before Document put off a newer more mainstream audience?
Dunno, the night I saw them, Milton Keynes in August 1995 (Radiohead supporting), they killed it, even if there was quite a lot of Monster in the set it was very hit-heavy as well.
― Matt DC, Thursday, 29 September 2011 13:19 (twelve years ago) link
They were one of the bands who ran into a juggernaut of UK jingoism very shortly afterwards as well, that needs to be factored in.
― Matt DC, Thursday, 29 September 2011 13:20 (twelve years ago) link
well i dunno it just lacked variety. it just lacked.. the magic, instead we got long LONG versions of Departure and Circus Envy and gawd knows what.. oyyy. Revolution sounded pretty good that night i recall mind.
― piscesx, Thursday, 29 September 2011 13:26 (twelve years ago) link
mm every britpop band supported on that tour. Blur, Echobelly, Oasis, Sleeper.. Dodgy? a shedload anyroad.
"Suspicion" is a good song from Up.
― dog latin, Thursday, 29 September 2011 13:37 (twelve years ago) link
xp The covers of the 00s albums are distressingly bad. Around the Sun was at least a fair advertisement for the music - three boring, indistinct figures. There was such a strong sense after Berry left that they never knew what the hell to do next.
― Science, you guys. Science. (DL), Thursday, 29 September 2011 13:47 (twelve years ago) link