Analogies are tricky, but I'm going to try to make one here: R.E.M. are the Beatles of alternative rock. It's not just because R.E.M. has roughly the same number of studio albums (depending on how you count all those US Beatles releases); it's the sheer breadth and quality of their catalog, the trailblazing trajectory of their career, the willingness to push simultaneously challenging and pop-oriented sounds. If nothing else, R.E.M. pretty much birthed the entire alternative rock genre in the early '80s alongside post-punk and new wave in much the same way that The Beatles helped to invent the British brand of the "white man" rock 'n' roll and R&B. This much is also for sure: R.E.M.'s streak of greatness, running (in my book) from 1983's Murmur through 1998's Up, is a feat of consistency almost without peer in rock history, with the closest analog being the career of the Fab Four themselves.
So, wherever R.E.M. ranks among my personal canon, there's no question in my mind that they are among the greats. In honor of that (and the fact that I just recently purchased the last album I needed to have the band's entire discography), I thought I'd rank all of R.E.M.'s studio albums from most-favorite to least-favorite. I've already blathered on for a while, so let's jump right into it. Enjoy!
I realize that part of the secret to making a good list is the ability to make bold choices, ranking in ways that are surprising but well-reasoned. Well, folks, I just couldn't do it with this album. R.E.M.'s thirteenth studio album, per its reputation, truly is the rear end of their discography. The record's biggest sin is just that it's boring. Soooo boring. It's here that the emotional complexity and studio trickery that propped up the previous two post-Bill-Berry albums fall away entirely, and we're left with the form of a late-period R.E.M. album without any of the content. 56 somnolent minutes of it, no less. It's not all bad: "Leaving New York" is pretty, and "Wanderlust" gives a welcome flash of mid-album energy in what's otherwise an apathetic outing. But these highlights are fleeting and wouldn't even rank as highlights at any other point in R.E.M.'s career. Around the Sun is really no good, y'all. So let's move on.
And now we have Reveal, which still isn't that good. But it's better! At the very least, though, it has some major cracks showing—like its immediate successor, Around the Sun, it's far too long (what was it with R.E.M. and these 50+ minute albums?), and it's sorely lacking the energy that invigorates better R.E.M. albums. But unlike Around the Sun, there's actually some good ideas, both musical and philosophical, within these twelve tracks, which does help keep the air in recordings a bit. The electronics are livelier and often lush, which gives even the more mundane moments (and there are plenty here—Reveal is no masterpiece) some spark. A motif of flight runs throughout the album, too, from the opening "The Lifting" (a plane is lifting off, get it?) through the flying beachball in the closing track, and while that's not the greatest theme to center a record around, it's not bad either, especially when it leads to the disaffection and melancholy of songs like "Disappear" and "Chorus and the Ring." In the face of how horribly human beings sometimes treat each other, even things as magical as flight or interplanetary bodies seem hollow. This idea comes to a head in the gorgeous "Imitation of Life," the album's high point and sole bona fide classic. The rest of Reveal runs the gamut between "meh" and "good enough," but "Imitation of Life" is really something else, proving that even on a minor work, R.E.M. can bring their A game out for a song or two.
I don't love Accelerate (obviously—look at that ranking), but it's miles ahead of both Around the Sun and Reveal, if only for two reasons: 1) It rocks, maybe harder than R.E.M. ever did elsewhere, and 2) It's only 35 minutes long. The first reason is mostly self-explanatory, though it's worth pointing out that while a lot of the band's '80s output was played with more vigor, Accelerate is the only of their albums to adopt a modern rock style of production, which gives it considerably more punch. The second reason may sound like I'm damning the album with faint praise, but I'm really not. Upon its release, Accelerate was heralded as a return to form for R.E.M., but something that people don't talk about enough is the pure pleasure of seeing this band (whose first six all clock in at robust 40-ish-minute runtimes) rediscover the art of self-editing. Coming right on the heels of Around the Sun, the album is still haunted by the specter of form-over-content; there's a song about Hurricane Katrina ("Houston") and another one about the exploitation of religious experience ("Supernatural Superserious"), but these have the feel of token nods to a few of the band's pet themes more than any real statement. Basically, this album doesn't have an "Imitation of Life," which is a shame. But what it does have is a sense of fun, almost as if Stipe and company (staunch leftists, all) are shaking off the malaise of the Bush era and roaring out of the gate for an election-year romp (this album came out early 2008). And fun is something that counts for a lot in my book.
If Accelerate toys with the idea of R.E.M. as a band playing at its past identity with songs like "Houston" and "Supernatural Superserious," then Collapse Into Now takes that idea and blows it up into full-on concept album levels. On their fifteen and final record, R.E.M. is paying homage to itself, and wrapped up in its 41 minutes (thanks again for learning that a CD doesn't have to be a full hour, guys) are allusions—mostly musical—to the band's diverse history, especially its fat, mainstream radio years of the late '80s and early '90s: "All the Best" is straight out of Document; "Oh My Heart" wouldn't feel out of place among Automatic for the People's dark-night-of-the-soul tracks; "Blue" has the fuzzed-out guitars and ragged mourning of New Adventures in Hi-Fi (and also a Patti Smith guest vocal, not seen since that album's "E-Bow the Letter"); "Überlin" even has the almost-spoken-word "Hey!" hook from "Drive." The band never quite recaptures the greatness of those earlier moments, but we're in solidly "very good" territory here. Collapse Into Now is R.E.M. making their very own tribute album, and on those terms, it's a great success. If nothing else, it's a fitting sendoff to this dearly beloved band, one I'm glad we got.
There's a blog post out there that I can't find right now, but the gist of it is that the author points out how R.E.M.'s Monster is basically guaranteed to be taking up space in any used/bargain CD bin you come across. I've rummaged through a lot of used/bargain CD bins in my time, and that blog post is totally on the money! It's everywhere, and it usually costs no more than $5 (my copy came from Wal-Mart and ran me about $4). Monster is certainly not the R.E.M. album with the best reputation; bargain bin presence notwithstanding, there's a feeling of disappointment surrounding this album among fan circles, the original critical reviews, and even more recent retrospectives. And I guess that's understandable. It's no Automatic for the People, the blockbuster that this album had the misfortune of having to succeed in R.E.M.'s discography. Then again, it's not trying to be a sequel to Automatic for the People—an album that was itself a sort of sequel, the Empire Strikes Back to Out of Time's Star Wars, if you will. That Monster tried something different and isn't simply the Return of the Jedi of this period of R.E.M.'s career is admirable, and in fact (if I'm going to belabor this analogy), it's more like if Return of the Jedi had taken the Jabba's Palace segment and stretched that out into a feature film. From the sexuality of the lyrics to the fuzzy, warbling distortion that warps every track (even prettier balladry like "Strange Currencies"), Monster is a colorful, bizarre album unlike any other in the band's repertoire, and I love that. R.E.M. was never much for Bowie-like shifts in identity, but this album stands as their one experiment in that arena. Michael Stipe (and really, the band as a whole) is playing dress-up, trying on what it feels like to be a grunge band by way of Ziggy Stardust, and it's through that level of distance that the band somehow manages to craft some of its strangest, most intimate songs.
There are few albums in R.E.M.'s discography that are more significant than Green. I'm not talking about quality; I mean how much this album provides a road map for the rest of the band's artistic pursuits. Green is a transition album in almost every sense—their major-label debut, having moved from I.R.S. to Warner Bros., whom they would stay with the remainder of the band's existence; their commercial breakthrough, solidifying that the chart presence of Document's singles wasn't a fluke; and, most significantly, their biggest stylistic shift yet at the time, diversifying the college rock sounds of their first five albums by adding mandolin, strings, and accordion to the mix and adopting a decidedly poppier approach to songwriting. Without this album, there is no Out of Time or Automatic for the People, no R.E.M. as world-conquering stars, no Bill Berry leaving, no Up nor any of the somnolent work that followed. So yeah, this is a big 'un for the band, and like a lot of transition albums, it's got a frustrating mix of greatness and not-so-greatness. I am staunchly in the anti-"Stand" camp; it's one of the most inconsequential, irritating songs the group ever made, and I can't stand (ha...) it. I have similar, though less passionate, feelings about "The Wrong Child." But then you've got "Pop Song 89" and "Get Up," which are fantastic and the cream of all R.E.M.'s nakedly pop music. "Orange Crush" is also next-level, of course, and the lovely "Hairshirt" is another highlight, a quiet moment on an album full of loud statements. So I'm splitting the difference here and putting this right at the fringe of the band's top 10.
Up is a depressing record for a number of reasons, both textual and meta, but here's the one that sticks in my craw the most as I do this writeup: it's the last R.E.M. album to come within spitting distance of greatness. In fact, scratch that: it is great, the last great R.E.M. album, though by most accounts, its greatness is a small miracle. Bill Berry, the band's longtime drummer, had just left the group, knocking a leg out from under R.E.M.'s equilibrium, and what with the concert fatigue afflicting the remaining members and the spiritual and existential despair present in the album's lyrics, it seems like c. 1998 was a dark time for our heroes. Wikipedia even informs me that the band "came close to breaking up while recording the album." Well, thank goodness they didn't, or we wouldn't have gotten this gem. Up is R.E.M.'s most personal album, eschewing the usual third-person commentary of their lyrics for first-person introspection, creating songs about frustration and alienation with a pathos that rivals Automatic for the People in emotional resonance. With songs like "Hope" and "The Apologist" and "Daysleeper," this is definitely a Doubt record, at once R.E.M.'s Achtung Baby and their Kid A[2], the tortured, weird sibling to the band's more commercial work. It's compelling, complicated stuff that makes the album's few moments of catharsis all the more resonant. "I've found a way to make you smile," Stipe sings on "At My Most Beautiful," the album's crown jewel of a song, the band's very own "Strawberry Fields Forever." Ain't that the truth.
And now we're into full-blown classics from here on out. Any one of these top 8 albums I wouldn't hesitate to put among my personal top 100 albums, so it's a tough task for me to rank them. Still, I'm afraid I've got to give Murmur the boot, so to speak, and knock it down to the least of R.E.M.'s masterpieces. It's not that I don't like it—I do, very much, and it's a testament to how ridiculously great R.E.M. is that I'd put an album I like this much in the bottom 50% of their discography—but the album does suffer somewhat from its station as the first R.E.M. full-length. The performances here are slightly more mannered here than the band would develop in the following years, for one, and the bass has always struck me as somewhat awkwardly incorporated into the rest of the sound of the album. Honestly, it's probably the production, which is significantly thinner than even Reckoning, the band's 1984 follow-up. But let's not nitpick; Murmur is an astoundingly confident, accomplished work, both as a debut (one of the best in rock history) and as an album, period. It's got a fascinating tension between light and dark going on, where the melodies are bright and inviting (along with the chiming lead guitar) but seem kind of murky and mysterious by the same token. It's rare that music this outwardly effervescent and light can also feel dangerous, but R.E.M. does it somehow. Just look at the second track, "Pilgrimage," where the muttered, ominous verses break into the pop bliss of the chorus on the turn of a dime, and you'll see what I mean. And this is just the beginning.
R.E.M. have always been a political band on some level (you don't just name one of your albums Fables of the Reconstruction for a lark), but they really take it to the next level here. Released in 1987, right at the tail end of the Reagan years, Document is sort of R.E.M.'s state of the union address, and, being the lefties they are, the outlook isn't good. "Michael's nervous," Stipe sings here on "Strange," changing the lyrics from Wire's original version to ensure that we know: the world is ending, and R.E.M. isn't really feeling fine. And oh, it's deliciously vicious how they cope with it, comparing '80s America to McCarthy's senatorial tyranny on "Exhuming McCarthy" and proclaiming that "what we want and what we need have been confused" on the blistering opener, "Finest Worksong." Then there's "Welcome to the Occupation," the brutal critique of America's foreign policy: "Listen to the Congress where we propagate confusion, primitive and wild." On a personal note, this album played a pretty big role in the transformation of my own beliefs from thinking of the '80s as "that decade with all the bad hair" to "that decade with all the troubling legislation (and bad hair!)." It's a punk album in everything but musicianship, and even then, it's R.E.M.'s loudest collection of songs until Accelerate, twenty years later. Even if the politics don't match yours, there's still plenty to enjoy, from the bitter good riddance of "The One I Love" to the very early-'80s-R.E.M. "King of Birds" to, yes, "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." Come for the message, stay for the music. Or the other way around, if you want.
This is the album that tends to get lost in the shuffle when R.E.M. conversations pop up. It's not groundbreaking, it's not an auspicious debut, it's not a new direction for the band, it's not a blockbuster; it's simply just another fantastic R.E.M. album in the sea of fantastic albums R.E.M. put out in the '80s. If R.E.M. is the Beatles of indie rock, then this is their For Sale—caught between milestones, its only claim to fame being that it's really great. If it sounds like I'm damning with faint praise, then allow me to redirect: Fables of the Reconstruction is also notable for being the last of R.E.M.'s murky, mysterious albums. Their subsequent records embraced a much cleaner, more arms-wide-open sound, but Fables of the Reconstruction is still very much in the spirit of Murmur, where each song has dark, ominous corners that refuse easy interpretation. For all the sweetness tied up in the Peter Buck's guitar and Michael Stipe's voice, this is a prickly album, as menacing as its title's allegation of institutionalized historical fiction. We're still a few years out from Document and R.E.M.'s most overtly political years, and on the whole, the band here is more interested in existential refraction and sonic haze than political statements, but there's something unmistakably conceptual about Fables, something that I find difficult to put my finger on, but it's there, somewhere, shifting in the brambles. The genius of the album isn't its clarity; it's the shifting, mirage-like qualities that defy fact. It's the fable.
After the success of Green, R.E.M. doubled down on the mandolins and mainstream sensibilities and came out with their definitive pop album, Out of Time. The songs are brightly produced, clearly enunciated, and melodic, and for some reason that has always eluded me, this makes for one of the most divisive records in the band's discography. Some people seriously hate this album, and in certain circles, it's a kind of shibboleth for R.E.M. fans. At the center of this vitriol is "Shiny Happy People," the jaunty, chamber-poppy bit that has many times been called (often by the members of R.E.M. themselves) one of the worst R.E.M. songs ever. Well, let's get this out in the open here: I love "Shiny Happy People." It's fun, it's catchy, and it has just the right undercurrent of melancholy (they are putting something/someone in the ground, after all) to ferment the tune into something richer than just simple fluff. The same goes for pretty much the whole album, which, if you hadn't already guessed from its ranking, I also love. It's a fleet record, full of some of R.E.M.'s nimblest, sweetest melodies, and its 45 minutes go down remarkably easy. But at the core of all this sweetness is a dark mass that gives the music an emotional texture that's much more complex than the shiny, happy instrumentation would indicate initially. The darkness only boils to the surface at two tracks—"Losing My Religion" (a serious contender for my favorite R.E.M. song) and "Country Feedback"—but they're both powerhouses that color the rest of the record. There's heartbreak here: "I need this," goes the refrain in "Country Feedback," and the sadness isn't just in the desperation of the words but also in the tension created with those smooth, bright studio sounds. It's not radio pandering (not with that opening "Radio Song"); it's the necessary ligature to keep the emotions from tearing everything else apart.
Okay, this is the last time I'm going to use the Beatles analogy: New Adventures in Hi-Fi is R.E.M.'s White Album. This is true for a lot of different reasons: it's sprawling (R.E.M.'s longest record, by quite a margin at the time of its release, though that margin shrunk quite a bit during the band's subsequent "hey, we can put a whole hour's worth of songs on a CD" era); it's stylistically diverse, including one-off experiments like the Mexican-folk "Zither" (surely the album's "Wild Honey Pie"); it's also an album that captures a band on the brink of fracture, with drummer Bill Berry preparing to leave soon after the record's completion (though this departure was on considerably better terms than the Beatles' breakup). But enough about the Beatles. New Adventures in Hi-Fi is a phenomenally mature album, both stylistically and lyrically, the kind of album that a band can only make when it's been around for a decade or two and its members are entering their late thirties. When Michael Stipe sings, "Twentieth century, go to sleep," on the radiant closer, "Electrolite," you can hear the years weighing on him. The same goes for Peter Buck's fuzzed-out guitar, which sounds like the rock star posturing of Monster grown older, more grisled. This album is the logical conclusion of everything the band had done up to this point, something no more apparent than in bracing centerpiece, "Leave," where the hurt of Out of Time and Automatic for the People has festered into a pulsing open wound. It's beautiful, bracing stuff and stands as an artistic height that R.E.M. would never reach again.
A lot of bands with a debut as fully formed as Murmur have a sophomore slump. R.E.M., on the other hand, has, I dunno, a sophomore... hump? peak? Whatever you call it, Reckoning is the sound of a scrappy young band improbably becoming even better than before, and it's marvelous. Part of my preference for Reckoning over Murmur is (at the expense of my indie cred) due to the hugely improved production values; it's not exactly a mainstream-pristine record (we'd have to wait until Document to have one of those), but it's like a sunny day compared to Murmur's murk and muddle. The result is a much richer sound that teases out melodies in a gently precise way, and it's rapturous. "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville" is the obvious, standout track here, and it's the one that's gotten the most attention over the years, but every single song here is a marvel, from the jaunting movement of "Harborcoat" to the delicate beauty of "Camera." The increased clarity brought on with the crisper production gives us, for the first time in R.E.M.'s career, actual tangible emotions to latch onto in these songs, too: "So. Central Rain" is R.E.M.'s first overtly sad song, and "Pretty Persuasion" practically spews vitriol in a way that anticipates the more acerbic moments on Document and Green. The crazy thing is that these first forays into what would eventually become tried-and-true tropes for the band are also the very best iterations of these styles. R.E.M. didn't need to practice; two albums into their career, they were already masters.
There are a lot of things that can be said about Lifes Rich Pageant: its politics, its environmental themes, its commercial success. But focusing on any that runs the risk of eclipsing what's perhaps this album's greatest strength (something I've been guilty of on some of these other writeups), which is that the songs freakin' own. Lifes Rich Pageant is the great showcase of just how much of a songwriting powerhouse the men of R.E.M. were—especially in 1986, the height of what many consider their golden age. Its production, caught between the college-rock sounds of the first three albums and the radio-ready engineering of their next four, is the most optimal delivery system the band ever had for its sheer songwriting prowess, and it pays off wonderfully with a collection of some of the band's best songs. Robert Christgau calls the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar" "a rocker so compelling that it discourages exegesis"[6], and that pretty much describes my feelings about the twelve tracks on Lifes Rich Pageant. Take "Fall On Me," one of the album's many, many highlights. I can read the lyrics and think about its thesis about how commercialism destroys the environment, etc., but when the music starts, it sounds so glorious that I don't care at all what it says. This is true not just of the sweeter melodies like "Fall On Me" and "Cuyahoga" but also of the pricklier, deep-impact stuff like "These Days" and "Hyena," where R.E.M. really goes for broke on the rock 'n' roll. They've got smart, important things to say, but in a certain sense, who cares when they make music this awesome? It's not grandiose or conceptual, but song for song, on the level of pure craft, I'll stack this album up against any album in the rock canon. Plus, it takes its title from an Inspector Clouseau quote; that's a recipe for success if there ever was one.
Man, where to start with this album? How about personally: Automatic for the People is the first R.E.M. album that I ever owned (something that, I'm guessing, goes for many R.E.M. fans of a certain age); my brother had their greatest hits, and I'd heard quite a few of their songs on the radio, but this was the first CD of theirs that I ever got with my own money. When I first listened to it, I was alone, sitting at my parents' wobbly dining room table, my little circular CD player beside me, whirring. The house was empty. To this day, this is an album I find best experienced with nobody else around—preferably late at night, timed so that the final, gorgeous bars of "Find the River" fade at just the moment the evening is at its quietest. With other people (or even just in daylight), songs like "Nightswimming" and "Everybody Hurts" are easy to mock, friends and acquaintances filling up the spaces this album leaves intentionally blank, but alone, there's nothing to distract or buffer you from this album's quiet beauty. It's like the difference between a stage whisper and a real whisper, a secret passed between just two people. If I'm waxing pompous and insufferable about this one, know that it's because Automatic for the People is among my top 20—maybe even top 10—albums of all time. It's not a groundbreaking choice for #1 R.E.M. album (it's one of the band's best-selling records, and you won't find it in all that many bargain bins either), though it's hardly representative of what an R.E.M. album sounds like. The strings and organs recall some of the chamber poppiness on Green and especially Out of Time, and there's the requisite political number with "Ignoreland," but at most, these are just echoes of what R.E.M. had been up to this point and what they would become for the rest of their career. On Automatic for the People, the emotional depth are deeper, the tone is more mournful, the instrumentation is statelier, the left turns are weirder ("Star Me Kitten," anyone?). Gone is the college rock; not yet here are the guitar crunches of Monster and Hi-Fi nor the noodling electronics of the post-Berry era. Automatic for the People is just Automatic for the People. For all of R.E.M.'s masterpieces (and they are many), this is the one album of theirs that has grandeur, and in that sense, it's a sort of one-off for the band. But what a one-off it is.
And there you have it. Thanks for reading, everyone! Fellow R.E.M. fans out there, be sure to let me know your own favorite R.E.M. albums, songs, moments, anecdotes, complaints, thoughts, etc. I'd love to hear what everyone else has gotten out of this marvelous band.
Until next time!
1] For those of you out there who, like me, are fascinated by the quirks of owning physical media, I'd like to point out that the liner notes for the CD release of Green only have the lyrics to "World Leader Pretend." Also, the final song apparently has no title; on the disc, there's an "11." but no track title following, and the back of the CD doesn't even list an eleventh track. iTunes calls this song "Untitled," but Wikipedia says it's called "11." Mysterious. R.E.M.'s '80s releases are full of packaging weirdness like this, though for whatever reason, the trend doesn't continue into the '90s. Also also, my CD copy of this album is a used one, and the previous owner inscribed, in sharpie, the initials H.K.C. on the label side of the disc. H.K.C., whoever you are, thank you for selling your album so I could pick it up years later for $0.79.
2] Fun fact: Thom Yorke once said that Radiohead probably couldn't have made Kid A without the precedent of Up.
3] Packaging weirdness: on the back of my CD copy of Document are printed the words "Number 5 Document," right across from the track listing. I get it; Document is the fifth R.E.M. album. But why? No other R.E.M. album's packaging references its position in the band's discography. I mean, why not, I guess, but you've got to wonder what goes into these sorts of decisions.
4] More packaging weirdness: Fables of the Reconstruction is by far the most bizarre, as far as confounding packaging goes. Get this: the album basically has two covers, both of which are included in the CD edition, and which one is facing out seems to vary from retailer to retailer (those of you who have this on vinyl, let me know what that looks like). One cover is the one I included for the writeup above, while the other looks like this. If you look closely, you'll see that the first cover has the words "Fables of the" written across the top, while the second one has "Reconstruction of the" printed along the bottom. That means that when you put them together, they complete each others' phrases, creating a sort of snake-eating-its-tail situation where the phrases form an infinite loop. This, of course, plays right into the album's generally opacity and its central idea of reality being irrecoverably buried by fables and language, but it's still a little confounding. Also confounding: the spine of the CD copy I own bears not the album's title but "Reconstruction of the Fables." Additionally, the liner notes have a stylized track listing that includes "When I Was Young," an R.E.M. rarity that's only available in demo form, and that appears nowhere on this album. Why did R.E.M. do this? Was it a mistake? An artistic statement? Just trolling? Who knows, but it sure makes for some lengthy footnotes.
5] Even more packaging weirdness: Lifes Rich Pageant has maybe the best evidence for the argument that at least some of R.E.M.'s '80s packaging was just a mistake. Riddle me this: why would the band only include ten of the album's twelve songs on the track listing? And why are they in the wrong order?? Is it a printing error? Is it just to mess with the heads of bloggers writing about it 19 years later? Or is this all part of some elaborate message? Wake up, sheeple!!
6] An idea I think is complete BS for that particular song. No, Rob, it discourages exegesis because you just don't want to admit that actually reading the lyrics means you have to come to grips with the fact that it's a repellant celebration of racism and rape. At least with R.E.M., ignoring the words only means that you're tacitly agreeing to leftist political views.
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