R.E.M. Band • Page 6

At this stage my 10 will probably be:

Perfect Circle
So. Central Rain
Don't Go Back to Rockville
Driver 8
Fall on Me
It's the End of the World as We Know It
Losing My Religion
Nightswimming
Man on the Moon
Find the River

 

Fables is the great underdog of their discography.

My second favorite R.E.M. album.

 

still can't believe how good Accelerate was and is. what a fuckin album

 

Listening to Fables again now... still not into it but I will say Driver 8 is their best song to that point and Good Advices seems criminally underrated. Can't Get There From Here is their first misstep (I don't hate Time After Time).

 

"Can't Get There From Here" is great!

 

Hmm I'm trying to find something to like about it but I, ahem, can't get there

 

do people not like Time After Time? always thought it was a highlight on that album

 

It's not a favorite, but I'm a fan.

Their only real missteps in the early years are all on Document, in my opinion. And even those aren't really bad, just below average.

 

yeah "misstep" is a strong word to use for albums as good as their first few are. I'm not huge on West of the Fields or Auctioneer but I'd never call em missteps. I think Green is the first album to have a song I outright don't care for

 

Can't Get There From Here is the one I'd consider a misstep. I don't know if Time After Time is maligned but I just remember Pavement didn't like it lol. Second half of Document is nowhere near as strong as the first but I don't hate any of the tracks. Don't really hate any on Green either. Such a consistent band

 

WHAAAAAAAAT??!!? Those horns though!!!!!!!!!!

To each their own but I LOVE that song

 

I do enjoy the horn part. That is the only part I enjoy though unfortunately. Glad others love it! I re-listened to Document this morning and revise my earlier statement. The second half of that record is pretty great. Give me King of Birds into Oldfellows Local 151 over We Walk/West of the Fields. And I Remember California/Untitled.

 

King of Birds into Oddfellows is really damn good. But I forgot about Lightnin Hopkins when I said there were no bad songs before Green. fuck that song

 

copied over my top 20 from another site, because i'm in that mood where i just wanna talk R.E.M. and no-one else wants to talk R.E.M. idk

1. Nightswimming - one of the greatest songs of all time and a personal favourite. shows how a simple piano melody complimenting a great lyric can be more impactful than almost anything else
2. Fall On Me - the best track from the early years shows why R.E.M.'s lead-backing vocal interplay is probably the best in music. Stipe's favourite for a reason, and most sane people's favourite too
3. Shaking Through - OPPORTUNE
4. Country Feedback - wonderful on record, but live becomes a pure vehicle of catharsis that's entirely born of its improvised roots. possibly my favourite Stipe vocal too
5. Find the River - if you hear this and don't feel the full weight of leaving home (& the responsibilities, regrets and excitements therein) then I do not fuck with you tbh
6. Feeling Gravitys Pull - the best R.E.M. opener combines a slow-mo instrumental and a phenomenal use of strings for a track that's Radiohead 14 years before Radiohead started making good music
7. Diminished - the most underrated R.E.M. track wrings uncanny emotion from the narrator's ambiguity over whether he killed his lover or not. "is the jury wavering? do they know I sing?" justifies the whole damn album
8. Electrolite - a fitting farewell to the Berry era of the band if ever there could be one, and a beautiful ode to an entire century in that way only Stipe can do it
9. Near Wild Heaven - Mills' finest vocal explores the intersection between paradise and realism, I think? idk it just sounds real fuckin' pretty
10. Camera - Reckoning's one moment of unvarnished humanity is completely and utterly moving, and not a second outstaying its welcome
11. Driver 8 - just a banger with a phenomenal chorus
12. Harborcoat - some of Buck and Mills' best ever work soundtracks some of my favourite Stipe poetic nonsense - "they shifted the statues for harbouring ghosts"
13. Let Me In - the Kurt Cobain tribute is so stubbornly anti-melodic it pretty much becomes distortion and noise, but Stipe's "heyyy - let me in" says all that needed to be said
14. Try Not to Breathe - AFTP shows early that it can maintain some energy while still brutally fucking depressing. Stipe leaves the character work behind for a moment and writes about his dying grandmother in one of the greatest choruses of all time
15. Perfect Circle - the mystery/ambiguity of Murmur peaks with this song, a gorgeous ode to lost childhood or potentially something else entirely - i'm content never knowing
16. E-Bow the Letter - country feedback part deux but not quite as good but it's got that extra patti smith swag
17. Daysleeper - gorgeous piano-led tune shows that Stipe's ability to inhabit every type of character is still his biggest asset as a songwriter, even post-Berry
18. I Believe - almost the perfect LRP song, the bizarre conflation of nature and existentialism reaches its head on a near-perfect absolute banger. "I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract"
19. Me In Honey - simple pleasures are sometimes the best, and this might be the best R.E.M. chorus to just fuckin' wail real loud
20. I'll Take the Rain - like Brian Wilson himself waltzed into the studio from the mid-sixties and helped create this post-2000 absolute gem

 

Great choices. And hey, I'm always in the mood to talk R.E.M.!

I think Up is pretty underrated in general. I tend to agree with Stipe that it's maybe a few songs too long, but otherwise it's prime R.E.M. -- right up there with their best stuff for me. Probably Stipe's best album lyrically, too.

 

yeah, it's definitely a couple songs too long. I think I'd cut "Lotus" and "The Apologist", which are both pretty good but feel b-sidey. I think the one-two of "Daysleeper"/"Diminished" is absolutely breathtaking, though, as is that last run of four songs on Reveal

 

I don’t like The B-52s but Kate Pierson and Michael Stipe just complement each other so well. Me In Honey is one of my favourites, too (I love all those songs though). R.E.M. were genius at creating beauty in simplicity

 

no other band could do vocal harmonies like they did, whether it was Mills or Pierson or someone else. absolute fuckin geniuses at it

 

Which R.E.M. album should I listen to tomorrow morning?

 

Shaking Through is one of my favourites too! I don't see much talk about it.

 

start ur day off right with Lifes Rich Pageant!

that pitch change in the last chorus is just one of my favourite things ever

 

Great list! Definitely not run of the mill but I can't argue with much of it. Rare to see a list with no Losing My Religion, End of the World, So. Central Rain, One I Love, Man on the Moon, Radio Free Europe, Orange Crush, Rockville... To think none of those classics made your top 20 just shows the band's tremendous depth.

 

thanks! honestly I'm a bit tired of the big hits like Orange Crush etc. as much as I enjoy them. Man on the Moon is the best of them and has held up well, but it still probably wouldn't crack my top on Automatic. So. Central and Rockville are probably my favourites of the songs you listed (though I much prefer the live Mills vocal version of the latter). just goes to show what a terrific catalogue this band gave us

 

Yeah that's fair. For whatever reason I was never familiar with many of their songs so the more acclaimed ones have been standouts to me as I've recently listened through (most of) their discography. I think I'd put Automatic and Murmur tied for my favs but Lifes Rich Pageant is growing on me a lot.