Green

8.0/10

  So now we come to R.E.M.'s first major label album.  I know a lot of hardcore fans of their early years tend to site this album as the point where things took a turn for the worse, but personally I don't see a major drop in quality here.  The production has gotten a little slicker.  Maybe it's a bit too slick, but this still features a fine batch of tunes.  Orange Crush is still one of my favorites of their songs.  I really dig the guitar line on that one.  It always made me feel like I was flying or something, which I guess is perversely appropriate since the song is apparently about airplanes dropping agent orange on Vietnam.  I know, I thought it was a jingle for the soda at first, too, but it turns out it's political.  For a couple of albums now the lyrics have started to become more intelligible, and politics has crept in a bit as a subject matter, although not so overtly that they hit you over the head with it.  Honestly I don't think a lot of the songs here are political at all really, although the title of the album makes it sound like this is going to be some sort of environmental protest bonanza.

  Green has the distinction of featuring the first R.E.M. song I, personally, ever heard.  That song would be Stand.  I heard it on the radio when this album came out and I was just a tiny little kid of about eleven years old.  My initial opinion was I couldn't "stand" it.  Sorry for the bad joke, but I wasn't really impressed.  It just seemed kind of weird to me.  I also was a little kid with horrible taste, like all little kids.  I spent my time jamming to Casey's Top 40 back then.  Dark days indeed.  Anyway I didn't know who R.E.M. was then, and I wouldn't even really get into them for another 3 years.  But when I did start getting into them and I heard Stand again I was like "That's that song I heard on the radio 3 years ago and didn't like!  I like it now!"   I have to give a special shout out to the wah pedal sound in the guitar solo.  It's just fun, damn it.  Stand would also later go on to be featured as the theme song to the underrated sitcom Get a Life.  It also boasts a supremely goofy music video in which the band members and other random people dance awkwardly and jump through the air and stuff.  It's been awhile since I've seen it, but it's kind of funny as I recall.

  Overall the name of the game here is poppy catchy songs.  Pop Song 89 and Get Up make you bounce around like you're in one of those bouncy castle things.  Then You Are the Everything comes along and is all slow and pretty and basically torpedoes that whole bouncy poppy thing.  But it's a good song.  When I was first getting into this I had a friend who hated The Wrong Child.  He was actually the person who introduced me to R.E.M., but every time that song came on he would fast forward past it because he couldn't stand it.  So for awhile I had it in my head that that song sucked, and I would skip it, too.  But then one day I realized I hadn't really actually listened to it, so I let it play.  I discovered it wasn't that bad.  It's not the strongest song on the album, but it's perfectly fine.  So after that I stopped skipping it.

  Side 2 is maybe a little less poppy than side 1, but it maintains the quality pretty well I think.  In addition to the aforementioned Orange Crush you get another pretty good rocker in Turn You Inside Out.  Hairshirt kind of meanders around a bit, and I could understand if someone were to find it boring, but it works for me.  I Remember California has an awesome atmospheric guitar line that's somewhat reminiscent of Oddfellows Local 151 off the last album.  I know I wasn't as high on that song, but this song is better I think.  And then the album closes off with another bouncy pop song that for some reason they decided not to give a title.

  Green also features some odd packaging things, back in the days when you actually looked at the packaging of albums.  In addition to not even listing the eleventh song on the track list on the back they also replace the number 4 with a letter R in front of Stand.  And then, (this blew my 14 year old mind) if you held the front cover up to the light you could see little translucent 4's in the R's in the words R.E.M. and Green.  Why the hell did they do this?  I read somewhere it was because when Michael Stipe was originally typing out the track list he accidentally his the R key instead of the 4 key.  So instead of correcting it they instead decided to do goofy stuff with the packaging that probably cost a lot more to make.  Which might be why not every copy apparently had the little 4's in the R's.  I remember I was visiting my older brother who also happened to own a copy of Green and I wanted to blow his mind so I went and grabbed his copy and held it up to the light and there were no 4's there.  What the hell?  I think he thought I was smoking drugs or something.  I had originally owned Green on a cassette tape and when I replaced it with a CD I actually passed up buying copies that didn't have the 4's just to get a copy that did have it.  I was serious about this, damn it.

  One other oddity about the packaging is they decided to include the lyrics for one song only.  They had never included any song lyrics before on their previous albums, possibly because they consisted of gibberish that Stipe made up on the spot.  But this one has lyrics for World Leader Pretend.  I can only guess it's because Stipe was particularly proud of them.  They're pretty good lyrics actually.  And looking at the packaging right now I just noticed something else I never noticed before.  They randomly have the letters I, M, and C underlined in the lyric sheet under some words.  IMC?  Is this some sort of hidden message?  How have I never seen this before?  Mind blown again.  Sort of.  If I knew what IMC meant it would be really cool.  Maybe Stipe had another typo while trying to write the name of the band.

  So I've written a lot about Green, but it's one of the first albums I ever got really into.  I'm always going to be kind of biased towards it.  I think it often seems to get the short-shrift by critics and fans, but it's a pretty cool album really.
  

Document

8.0/10

  Document is the 5th album from R.E.M. as the cover proudly proclaims.  Somewhere on there it says something about "file under fire" which makes sense as there are a lot of mentions of fire on this album.  This was the last record they released as an independent band.  After this it was major label all the way, baby.

  For some reason I've always felt like this album has a pretty steep dropoff in its second half.  But truthfully I really like King of Birds a lot.  I think it's a bit of an underrated gem in their catalog.  It almost has an Eastern vibe to it or something.  Fireplace also features probably the only usage of saxophone in their entire discography and it's a pretty cool song in its own right.  I think the two tracks that drag it down a little bit for me are Lightnin Hopkins and Oddfellows Local 151.  Neither one is a terrible song, but Lightnin Hopkins in particular is kind of weird and kind of ugly.  Oddfellows, on the other hand in plenty atmospheric and has a kind of cool guitar line.  It goes on a little too long for my tastes though, and when he starts singing about Pee Wee I somehow always picture Pee Wee Herman and it's kind of a weird image.

   The rest of the album is pretty uniformly strong.  The most famous songs are The One I Love and It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine.)  It's pretty much common knowledge that the former song is really kind of a burn instead of a sweet love song, so I won't spend a long time discussing it.  I believe it was also their first top ten hit mostly due to people not understanding it.  It's nice to know the public has always been super intelligent when it comes to pop culture.  It's the End of the World is one of the funnest songs ever to sing along to, even if I can't understand all the lyrics.  It's still fun to make up your own.

  I'd also like to give a quick shout out to some of the other songs that don't seem to be mentioned as much  So good job Welcome to the Occupation, Exhuming McCarthy, and Disturbance at the Heron House.  You're all good songs.  There's even a pretty cool cover of Wire's Strange to round things out.
  Overall R.E.M. is rocking a bit harder on this one than in their earlier days and the sound suits them well.  It's not quite as jangly as they're known for at his stage of their career, but Document is a solid album.

Lifes Rich Pageant

8.5/10

When I was first getting into R.E.M. back in the early 90's, this was most definitely a hugely overlooked album in their discography.  Even among huge R.E.M. fans I talked to I never seemed to hear anyone talk about this one.  And on their early greatest hits album Eponymous this was only represented by one track.

In the intervening years and with the advent of internet review sites, this album's reputation seems to have improved quite a bit.  At least among the online critical community, I've often seen this rated as one of their best.  I might even be inclined to agree with that, depending on my mood.

Right out the gate it rocks harder than any R.E.M. album to date with a solid one-two opening punch of "Begin the Begin" and "These Days."  Then track 3 brings "Fall On Me," which doesn't rock as much, but has a fantastic melody.  The patented Mike Mills counter melody backup vocals are in full effect here.  Mike Mills backup vocals are always welcome in R.E.M. songs as far as I'm concerned.  "Fall On Me" may just be their best song to date.  It's really damn good.  It's also that one track that showed up on Eponymous that I mentioned earlier.

Things get a little weirder from here on out but the quality stays pretty strong.  The next two tracks "Cuyahoga" and "Hyena" have never been my favorites, but I never skipped them either.  "Underneath the Bunker" is a weird, kind of middle eastern sounding mostly instrumental, but I actually like it a lot.  Side 2 kicks off with "The Flowers of Guatemala," a decidedly not-rocking out song, but it's pretty and features a simple but effective Peter Buck guitar solo.  The album continues on in a kind of eclectic nature.  "I Believe" is a real highlight and even features a nifty banjo intro.  "Swan Swan H" is kind of dirge-like but I've always had a soft spot for it.  And it finally closes with a nice catchy cover of "Superman" with what I do believe features Mike Mills on lead vocals.

Overall this is another strong early R.E.M. album and is too ingrained in my music-listening subconscious for me to give it too bad of a grade.  But honestly if you're at all interested in R.E.M. it's essential.

Apparently this was produced by the same guy who produced John Cougar Mellencamp albums around this time.  Weird.

Fables of the Reconstruction

8.0/10

People seem to love to point at Fables as the weakest album of the IRS years, but I've got to disagree on this one.  Yes I've read the stories about how this was a difficult album from the recording process.  From being depressed about being in England and writing an album about the American South to apparently clashing with the producer and whatnot.  I do think this contains some of the weakest songs they've recorded to date, particularly "Old Man Kensey" is sort of a clunker.  But only sort of.  You can hear much worse songs on top 40 radio every day.

Elsewhere you've got some of the strongest songs they've produced to date.  "Feeling Gravity's Pull," "Maps and Legends," "Driver 8," "Green Grow the Rushes," and "Wendell Gee" are all awesome songs.  Meanwhile "Can't Get There From Here" is probably the weirdest thing they've recorded to date.  It's some sort of stab at funk or something that doesn't quite work, but in doing so it doesn't quite work in a great way.  The remaining songs aren't shabby but maybe blend into the background a little bit.

The key words here is atmosphere.  These songs have atmosphere in spades.  Even "Old Man Kensey."  It all works to make this cool dark southern gothic feel that's a departure from what they'd done before.  They never quite trod these grounds again, which to my ears makes it a definite keeper.  The lows on this are probably lower than the lows on Reckoning but I think the highs are much higher.  

Reckoning

8.0/10

Another good early R.E.M. album.  Some people like this one better than Murmur.  For me it's a step down. It's got a lot of good songs on it but it doesn't seem to have a ton of diversity or the same sense of "mystery" as Murmur.  I like it a lot and yet to my ears it might be the weakest early R.E.M. album.  Most people would probably give that title to the next album, but for me it's probably this one.

I was ready to give it a 7.5 based on memory alone, but upon re-listening to it, it deserves higher than that. It starts off really strong with Harborcoat and maintains that for the first 3 tracks.  Track 4 also known as Pretty Persuasion is a good song, but it's a noticeable dropoff from the first 3.

Pavement wrote a song about this album called "The Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" in which Steve Malkmus famously proclaims Time After Time to be his least favorite track.  It's not my favorite but there's something about the almost middle-eastern sounding guitar part that I dig.  For me the last track Little America is probably my least favorite.  It's not awful but it feels like they could have closed the album with something a little stronger.

I guess there's something a little "plain" sounding about the production on this one.  It's solid, but it's kind of no frills.  But if you like R.E.M. at all it's a must.

Murmur

8.5/10

Murmur is R.E.M.'s first full length album and is considered by many to be their best.  I can't quite agree with that assessment, but I am a fan of it.  There are a few tracks that never floated my boat too much like Catapult, 9-9, and West of the Fields.  None of these songs are bad by any means they're just not especially highlights to my ears.  On the other hand tracks like Radio Free Europe, Perfect Circle, Sitting Still, Shaking Through, and We Walk are all strong enough to ensure classic status.

Much has been made of Michael Stipe's mumbling on this album.  While I agree there are many moments of incomprehensibility, there are also many phrases that are quite easy to make out.  That said, I'm not sure these phrases always make literal sense.  But that's okay.  I really don't generally turn to song lyrics to receive wisdom.  .

The classic R.E.M. sound is on full display here.  Peter Buck's guitar is jangling away.  Mike Mills plays melodic bass lines and adds a lot with his backing vocals.  Bill Berry isn't a flashy drummer but he serves these songs perfectly.  And Stipe's voice is distinctive but not obnoxious.

I didn't hear this album until about 8 or 9 years after it's initial release and it wasn't the first R.E.M. album I heard so it didn't really sound radical to me when I first heard it.  But compared to what 1983 sounded like in general, it must have been a breath of fresh air to the college kids that were into this sort of thing at the time.

In short, it's a good album.  I dig.

Intro

All righty then.  This is going to be a spot where, if I actually get the urge to do it, I will review albums.  I'm not really trying to be a music critic as I find them to be largely pointless.  This is just where I'm going to state my own personal thoughts and opinions.  It's partially going to be an excuse to revisit old favorites from my collection, and partially a chance to jot down some thoughts on newer stuff because nowadays I seem to have difficulty remembering whether or not I liked stuff that I checked out.  Where applicable I might mention what the general critical consensus about an album seems to be and whether or not I agree with it.  I think I'll use a 1 to 10 rating scale with 1 being a complete piece of crap and 10 being an amazingly awesome album.  Consequently there probably won't be too many 10's and the ones that are there will probably be because of sentimental reasons.  Theoretically most albums should receive in the neighborhood of a 5 because that's an average album and by definition most albums are average.  If I generally think an album's pretty good but not spectacular it'll probably be a little over a 5.  If it leaves no impression at all it might actually be a little under a 5 because music should be memorable, damn it.  In actual practice a lot of albums I review will end up on the higher end of the scale, especially at first as I plan on focusing on bands I like.  Also scores may be subject to change as sometimes I end up liking stuff more later on after more listens and sometimes stuff grows off me as well.  Finally I must re-iterate, like all music reviews this is an opinion not a fact.  So if you happen to stumble onto this somehow and read a bad review of your favorite record, take a chill pill buddy.  Maybe I was having a bad day and I missed the obvious awesomeness of said record.  It'll all be okay.