Reveal

7.5/10

  We have firmly arrived in the era of R.E.M. that most critics have agreed to dump on as much as possible.  I've once again heard the accusation that there are no memorable tunes on this album, but that is completely not the case.  The truth is R.E.M. have once again delivered a highly melodic album, and many of the songs feature lushly appealing arrangements as well as upbeat and catchy hooks.  So why does everyone seem to hate this album so much?  I can only guess that on some level they're still bitter about the band carrying on without Bill Berry.

  I'm here to tell you that this is not actually a bad album.  It's not particularly their most innovative album either, and there are a couple songs I'm ever so slightly less fond of, so that's why I rated it a little lower than Up.  They've retained a lot of the electronic sounds from the previous album, but they've also married them to more of the traditional R.E.M. jangly guitar sound.  One thing this album lacks, as did Up, is much in the way of Mike Mills backing vocals.  They were such an integral part of the early R.E.M. sound and I'm not sure why they wandered so much away from that on their later albums.  If you want to use that as an excuse to hate later R.E.M. albums, I'm willing to concede you that point.

Reveal kicks off in nice fashion with The Lifting.  You get some cool spacey synth sounds right off the bat followed by a catchy melody.  This is a good song, damn it.  They really put the electronic touches to good use here.

  The next track I've Been High is a bit slower and maaaaybe breaks up the momentum a little.  It's not a bad song at all, but maybe track 2 wasn't the right spot for it.  On the other hand it doesn't really ruin the album for me either.  I'm fine with it where it is, I'm just trying to think of ways in which other people might like this album better.

  Next up is All The Way To Reno, which features some cool guitar parts that almost sound like they could be in a western movie to me.  They somehow evoke dusty trails and tumbleweeds to me.  Also it has some pretty genuinely funny lyrics, what with the whole notion of somebody going to Reno to become a star.  I think Stipe is making some sort of joke here.  That prankster.

Elsewhere we get another Beach Boys homage in Summer Turns to High and what clearly sounds like a Burt Bacharach tribute to me in Beachball.  There's certainly nothing wrong with tipping the hat to either of these acts in my book and I quite enjoy both tracks.

Imitation of Life got some airplay at the time and it's a damn catchy song.  I've seen it pointed out elsewhere that it follows the same chord progression as Driver 8, but the melody is different.  Plenty of songs have been written using the same chord progressions and numerous artists have done much more blatant re-writes of their own songs than this.  Plus if you're going to steal something, you may as well steal from yourself, right?

I don't dislike any of the songs on this album really, but I'm maybe not quite as huge on Saturn Return or Chorus and the Ring.  On the other hand I think I'll Take The Rain is a pretty epic song that never seems to get any love.

To my ears the songwriting remains pretty strong overall on this album.  There are possibly some slight signs of dwindling inspiration here and there and I wouldn't recommend this as a starting point to someone who's never heard R.E.M. before, but it's nowhere near as horrible as the critical consensus would like you to think it is.  It's like everyone just arbitrarily decided it was time to turn on R.E.M. because they had been around for a long time and because of that, they just had to suck.  But people really jumped the gun on this one.  They wrote them off a couple of albums too early.  It's not really until the next album that things took a noticeable downturn... (cue scary music)

Up

8.0/10

  I feel a certain amount of pressure to rate Up lower.  That's certainly the general consensus when it comes to this album.  This was their first album without drummer and founding member Bill Berry, who as previously mentioned retired to become a farmer.  I think a lot of people were somehow offended that they decided to continue on without him.  But it's not as if Bill Berry himself was pissed they went on.  From what I understand one of his conditions for leaving the group was that the rest of them not break up.  And I also recall reading somewhere that he considered this their best album.

  It seems like they took the opportunity to play around with some different sounds and textures.  Specifically there are a lot more synths and electronic sounds and drum machines than we've ever heard on an R.E.M. album before.  They actually might have been a little ahead of the game here as all kinds of rock bands seemed to start "experimenting" with electronics around the late '90's and early 00's.

  They open up the album with what's probably the most radical experiment on the record in the form of Airportman.  It's not really a traditional verse chorus verse kind of song, but rather almost a drone with some pretty and ethereal synth noises as Stipe quietly sings "Great Opportunity" several times.  It's not exactly a super flashy start to the album, as it's a kind of quiet, almost barely there sort of song, and it doesn't really have hit single potential, but I think it's sort of a bold choice to kick the album off with and it does set the tone for what's to come.  It's really different from anything they had ever done up to this point, too, and I honestly quite like it.

  The second track Lotus takes us back to more familiar territory.  It's more of a rocker and could have easily fit on New Adventures in Hi-Fi or even Monster, for that matter.  I can't say it's a ripoff of any of their earlier songs or anything, but it definitely sounds much more like R.E.M. as we've come to know them at this point.

  They ended up giving Leonard Cohen a co-writing credit on the song Hope since they felt the song bore some similarity to his smash hit Suzanne.  I'm actually a pretty big fan of Leonard Cohen so it didn't really bother me that they were using his song as inspiration.  Listening to Hope the melodic similarity is most definitely there, but I think they did it differently enough that they could have gotten away with not crediting Cohen, but kudos to them for just owning up to it and doing it anyway.

  The next song At My Most Beautiful sounds distinctly Beach Boys influenced, but they decided not to credit Brian Wilson for that one.  Not that they're ripping off any particular Beach Boys song, but the sound in general is very Wilson-esque.

  The single off of this one was Daysleeper and I seem to remember it being a pretty moderate hit at the time.  It's a catchy song that sounds more traditionally R.E.M. than most of the other songs on here.  It could have easily been on Out of Time without drawing undue attention to itself.

  I don't think Walk Unafraid was released as a single, but in some alternate universe I think it could have been a decent sized hit.  It's got a nice melody and a pretty anthemic chorus.  I don't hear people talking about it too much, but it's a really nice song.

  Overall I think Up shares some of the same flaws as it's predecessor.  It's probably a little too long at over an hour in length again.  Also a lot of the songs clock in at over five minutes again.  Once again I have difficulty pointing to any weak link songs that should have been cut.  I think they actually manage to do some interesting stuff with the synthesizers and end up creating some fairly complex soundscapes at various points throughout the album.  I think people's biggest beefs with this album are that Bill Berry isn't on it, they dared to use electronics, and it's kind of long.

I've read a lot of reviews that claim the songwriting sucks on this one, but I have to disagree with that.  These songs possess melodies, and I can actually remember how they go after the record's over, unlike a lot of stuff that critics seem to freak out over.  I think this album gets a bit of an unfair bad rap and is most certainly underrated.  I'm not going to attempt to argue that it's their best album or even among their top five, but it's not the unmitigated disaster that the critical consensus would have you believe.  And I would gladly listen to this over anything that's been featured in the past several Grammy awards.  But that's just me.

New Adventures in Hi-Fi

8.0/10

  This is another really solid album and ended up being the last one to feature drummer and founding member Bill Berry, who retired to devote more time to farming or something.  It's kind of understandable since he suffered a brain aneurysm during the Monster tour, which was when this album was also recorded.  It's made up of a combination of live cuts, stuff recorded during sound checks, and a few actual in-the-studio recordings.  Despite the varied nature of how the tracks were recorded, it mostly sounds of a piece.  It also kind of sounds like a mashup of Monster and Automatic for the People, which makes sense because those were the two previous albums and they were actively touring behind Monster.  This one doesn't seem to have garnered the same disrespect as Monster has over the years, nor the praise of Automatic.  It was generally well received, but it's become kind of overlooked.

  For me personally I was in my sophomore year of college when this came out.  I remember still being excited for it, but my R.E.M. obsession had worn off a little bit by this point.  College is a good time for expanding one's music tastes and mine were expanding in all sorts of directions.  I was discovering all kinds of new bands, as well as how getting inebriated can positively affect how different kinds of music sound.  I wouldn't say that I was "outgrowing" R.E.M., but I was becoming aware that there was a much wider world of music.

  As such I don't have quite as many personal memories associated with this one as I do with the three or four albums prior to this.  I still like it quite a bit, and I remember liking it quite well when it first came out, it just had to jostle with a lot of other things for my attention.

  For some reason the initial copy of this I bought had a weird glitch in the CD that made the opening track How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us cut in and out.  I didn't realize at first that this wasn't intentional, even though it seemed like a pretty odd choice.  They really are going for some new adventures, I thought to myself at the time.  It wasn't until a little bit later that I realized I hadn't heard the "real" version of the song.  So I finally got the true experience and it still is a bit of a departure for the band.  (A bit of an unintentional joke in that last sentence, since there's a song on this album called Departure.)  It features some kind of sparse piano lines and almost a hip-hop beat.  This ends up setting the par for the course nicely as there are several instances throughout the album where sounds and textures are prominently used that haven't really been on an R.E.M. album before.

  Second track Wake Up Bomb is not really one of these instances as it sounds like it could have come straight off of Monster.  Indeed I think it was probably originally an outtake from the Monster sessions.  If I remember correctly you can find the title of this song among the various bits of text in the Monster artwork.  It's a good song though.

  Later on we get E-bow the Letter, which if memory serves was released as the first single from this album.  It reminds me a little bit of Country Feedback, which is overall a good thing, since I really like that song.  Instead of the pedal steel and feedback, it uses a sound created by an e-bow, which is partially where the title comes from.  E-bows are pretty cool, if you've never seen one.  You kind of hold them over the guitar string and they make it vibrate through usage of an electromagnetic field.  Science, people.  It works.  Anyway it sort of makes a sound like bowing the guitar strings.  It also sort of sounds a little like the noises in Country Feedback, but it's a cool sound.  E-bow the Letter also has prominent Patti Smith backup vocals, which work well in this context.  

  Elsewhere we have Leave, which has a prominent siren sound throughout its seven minute-plus run time, which represented the longest R.E.M. song to date.  From what I understand rather than use a loop or a keyboard preset this sound was actually created by backup musician Scott McCaughey of Young Fresh Fellows and Minus 5 fame, who had to move a dial back and forth for the entire seven minutes.  I bet his hand got really tired by the end of that.  I think they might have been playing a bit of a prank on him.

  On a slightly related note I actually had a brief semi-awkward conversation with Scott McCaughey years later in a bar in Austin one time.  He was playing in South by Southwest with Tuatara, a band which also featured Peter Buck.  As it turned out Mike Mills was in the crowd that night as well.  It was kind of weird for me because I had been such a huge R.E.M. fan in my younger days and here I was in a small bar where two of the members were just kind of hanging out after Tuatara played.  I couldn't really think of anything to say and I didn't want to bother them so I didn't talk to them.  But I did almost bump into Scott McCaughey so I just mentioned how I was a fan of Young Fresh Fellows and Minus 5.  I don't know if he gets approached all that often because he almost seemed a little surprised I knew about his other bands.  I was a little bit drunk and I didn't really know what else to say, so I ended up kind of awkwardly excusing myself.  He seemed like a really nice dude though.

  Getting back to New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the one complaint I seem to hear leveled against it most frequently is that it's too long.  I'm somewhat inclined to agree with this.  At over an hour in length, it's the longest R.E.M. album to date.  It's also got a lot of songs that break the 5 minute mark.  The thing is, I actually like all the songs here and I wouldn't really want to cut anything.  I guess Zither is kind of a slight instrumental, but it fits the album and I don't mind listening to it.  Maybe a couple of the songs could have been very slightly trimmed in length.

  I also have to nominate Binky the Doormat as the goofiest R.E.M. song title to date.  I guess it's a reference to the movie Shakes the Clown, which is kind of goofy in and of itself.  It's a pretty cool song though, with some tasty Mike Mills backup vocals.

  There's really nothing to dislike here.  It's a solid album.  I don't know if I've ever met anyone who would claim it as their favorite album, but there's no reason why it couldn't or shouldn't be somebody's favorite.  If you like their other stuff, you'll like this one.  Unless you're one of those snobs who only like the IRS years.  Then you'll think they're total sellouts who suck long and hard.  

Monster

7.5/10

  People hate Monster.  What's more people love to hate Monster.  They love to call it a grunge ripoff sellout album.  They take especial glee in pointing out how prevalent it was to find it in used CD bins.  Until Around the Sun came out it was pretty much guaranteed to be pointed out as the worst R.E.M. album.

  I'm going to stick up for Monster though.  I like Monster.  No, I don't think it's as good as Automatic for the People, but it's awfulness has been wildly overstated.  I also think it's ubiquity in used CD bins is more reflective of people's fickle taste in music than the poor quality of the music contained within this particular record.  R.E.M. was popular at the time.  Most people are sheep-like when it comes to buying music so lots of copies were sold.  Then these same people were told to like something else instead so they sold off their copies of Monster.  Good.  Monster doesn't need those people anyway.

  As for the charge that they were ripping off grunge, I kind of have to disagree with that as well.  Grunge was everywhere at the time.  This doesn't sound like grunge.  Actually some would argue that most of what was on the radio at the time didn't sound like "true" grunge either, but regardless, to my ears this really doesn't sound like Pearl Jam or Stone Temple Pilots or Gin Blossoms or Goo Goo Dolls, or whatever the hell else was popular at the time.  It just has more distorted electric guitars than the previous R.E.M. albums had and distorted guitars were one feature of grunge music.

 Here's the thing, though.  R.E.M. hadn't toured since Green and they wanted to hit the road again.  Their last two albums were quieter and not particularly rocking albums that weren't exactly suited to large arenas.  They wanted some big dumb loud rock songs they could play in stadiums.  Also, it was just time to shake up their sound again.  Even as a fan who loved Out of Time and Automatic for the People, I remember hoping they would shake up their sound for the next album.  The most opposite thing they could do from the quiet, largely acoustic previous album was to plug in and get abrasive.  I, for one, was excited for some rocking electric guitar music from them.  And on that front they delivered.

  I also remember my sense of anticipation for this album was through the roof.  I was hugely obsessed with R.E.M. at this point and this was the dark days before the internet.  It had been two long years since Automatic for the People and I had next to no information as to what the band was up to.  They didn't have a website where I could see updates.  I knew they weren't touring, and whenever I'd browse music magazines there weren't any articles about them during that time.  I had no idea if they were working on a new album or if they had broken up or what the hell was going on.  Two years with no news about your favorite band seemed like an interminably long time back then.  So when I finally heard that Monster was coming out I did a little jump for joy and counted down the days.  I never get that level of excitement around music any more, and that's a sad thing.

  Anyway I bought it on cassette the day it came out, gazed in wonder at the bright orange packaging, and couldn't wait to pop it into my tape player.  Right off the bat What's the Frequency, Kenneth? kicks in with its distorted guitar chords and signals this is going to be a different sort of R.E.M. album, and at the time I couldn't have been more thrilled.  It's a pretty kick-ass song, and I loved the little chugga-chugga guitar noises that crop up from time to time.

  It's immediately followed by Crush With Eyeliner, which I suppose is probably about a transvestite or something, but it continues the rollicking good vibe from the first song.  It even features Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth fame repeating some of the lines Stipe sings and sounding too cool for the room.  The guitar tone is pretty much the same as the first song.  Peter Buck uses more or less the same guitar sound on almost every song on this album, but it's a cool sound.  I'm assuming he bought a new pedal and fell in love with it or something.  Really there aren't any other "grunge" albums that have the same sound as this.  That's partially why I bristle at the grunge comparison this album constantly gets.

  King of Comedy didn't really sound like any R.E.M. song I'd ever heard, but I thought it was pretty cool, too, while I Don't Sleep I Dream features some prominent falsetto that would be explored more fully with Tongue.  Star 69 is just a fast rocking good time.

  The first real break in the proceedings is Strange Currencies.  It's a ballad that's in all honesty kind of a rewrite of Everybody Hurts from the previous album.  But the weird thing is, I kind of like it better than Everybody Hurts.  It doesn't have a "message" like that song did, and it's all the better for it.

  Next up is the aforementioned Tongue.  It's kind of a slow piano ballad sung entirely in falsetto and only features a little bit of the distorted guitar that is so prominent elsewhere on the album.  I remember thinking it sounded utterly bizarre to me the first time I heard it.  I wasn't sure about the high-pitched almost feminine singing style at first, but I grew to really like this song.

  The rest of side 2 brings back the electric guitars in a big way.  Let Me In is kind of interesting in that it doesn't have drums for most of its run.  It's almost like a ballad set against a distorted guitar without the kinds of rock drums you normally hear.  It actually makes for a kind of a strange effect.  There's also a pretty cool organ line that comes in near the end.  I guess this was a tribute to Kurt Cobain, who had committed suicide earlier that year.

  For some reason I really like I Took Your Name.  I never seem to really hear anyone mention that song, so I'm mentioning it.

  I'm not quite as big on the final two songs, but they're fine.  They certainly fit well with the rest of the album.

  It's kind of funny because for awhile I let the critical consensus about Monster affect my opinion of it.  Without having actually listened to it in a decent expanse of time I started agreeing that it wasn't a very good effort.  More than ten years after its initial release I got to talking with a friend of mine who was a couple years younger than me and a huge R.E.M. fan.  I asked him what his favorite R.E.M. album was and he replied without hesitation Monster.  I had actually introduced him to R.E.M. around the time this album came out and I think it served the role for him that Out of Time did for me.  It was probably the album that launched his music fandom and he had lots of good memories associated with it.  And that got me to remembering how much fun it was to pop this into the tape player in my car and crank up the volume back in the day.  I loved blasting the hell out of this while driving down the freeway and that's got to be worth a little good will.  I don't know if I would direct a newcomer to R.E.M. here as their initial introduction to the band, but it certainly is a worthy addition to their catalog, despite what the haters would have you think.

Automatic for the People

9.5/10

  All right this is another album I really can't be objective about, but at least this time popular opinion seems to be on my side.  Automatic for the People came out at exactly the right moment in my life to just knock my socks off.  One of my friends had turned me on to Out of Time and Green and I had even heard a little bit of Document.  I hadn't really explored much farther back in their catalog yet, but I was pretty damn obsessed with Out of Time.  Even though it came out in 1991, it was probably the summer of 1992 when I really got hooked on it.  I also turned 15 that year, which is a great age for discovering music.  Music in general just sounded better when I was 15 than it does to my jaded 30+ year old ears.  And I didn't know anything about music yet, so it was this vast unexplored wilderness that held who knew how many treasures just waiting to be discovered.  At this point I hadn't really even gotten into any other bands yet, but I loved me some R.E.M. and lo and behold I found out they were coming out with a new album in October of that year.  I was excited to say the least.  There was no internet for albums to leak onto early back in those days and no websites to read reviews on.  There were music magazines, but I didn't really read them.

  So Automatic for the People became the first album I ever bought on the day it came out.  I also got to listen to it without hearing anybody else's opinion of it, which has become an increasingly rare thing in this day and age.  Before I even listened to it, I couldn't help but notice by scanning song titles like Try Not to Breathe, Everybody Hurts, and Sweetness Follows that this record seemed to be a little darker than the previous often sunny poppy record.  The gray packaging combined with pictures of the band dressed in black with dark glasses and serious looks on their face contributed to this impression.  Sure enough when opening track Drive kicks in with its minor key arpeggiated guitar line it looks like you're in for a depressing good time.  This impression mostly holds with the next song Try Not to Breathe, which I think is a pretty underrated awesome song.  It's got a cool guitar line and a pretty melody and features some nice Mike Mills harmonies.  It also contains lines about flying over my grave and needing something to breathe, which kind of keeps things a little dark and depressing.  I've heard the song is being sung from the perspective of an old man, which makes sense.  It doesn't do much to lighten up the mood though.

  So it looks like Automatic for the People is going to be a major downer and then this goofy-ass bouncy song sung in a high pitch comes along in the form of The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite.  It contains such lyrics as "a can of beans of black eyed peas or a reading from Dr. Seuss" and "tell her she can kiss my ass and laugh and say that you were only kidding."  Kind of strange compared to what's come so far.  Then the chorus involves Stipe cramming as many words as he can in to the smallest number of beats.  For the longest time I had no idea what the hell he was singing, but now I believe it's "Call me in when you try to wake her up."  It kind of sounds like he's saying "Ambien will wake her up," which is a pretty silly thing to say since ambien's a sleeping pill.  It's a good thing that's not what he's saying.  Despite all this I actually do like this song.  It's not my favorite on the album, but it is catchy and I think pacing-wise there needed to be a little more of an upbeat song right around this point.

  I'm not the world's hugest fan of Everybody Hurts, although I don't hate it.  It got really overplayed at the time and the lyrics are maybe the tiniest bit trite.  But if it ever helped anyone who was depressed or suicidal, then more power to it.  It's not a complete abomination or anything and it fits with the rest of the album fine.

  New Orleans Instrumental No. 1 is a kind of cool little track.  It doesn't stick around for too long and it's not a major statement or anything, but I dig it.

  Elsewhere Sweetness Follow is really pretty and features prominent strings that were apparently arranged by John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin.  It furthers the dark vibe though since the first lines mention burying your father and mother and later on it asks a brother and sister what would they care if they lost the other.  Real lightweight stuff here.  But it's seriously a pretty awesome song.

Side 2 is pretty bad ass.  It starts off relatively low key with the 1-2 "punch" of Monty Got a Raw Deal, which features a cool jangly mandolin or something, and Ignoreland, which is kind of a rocker and by far the most out of place track on the album.  I guess it's an angry political rant, but it's kind of hard to understand what Stipe's saying.  Sort of a throwback to the old days.  I would never claim it as a highlight of the album, but it's fine.  Even if it really doesn't fit the rest of the album sound-wise.

  Next up comes Star Me Kitten, which is a really slow song, but it's not boring.  It's just got a really cool vibe to it.  Oh yeah, and he's really saying "Fuck Me Kitten," not Star Me Kitten, which is all kinds of awesome, especially when you're 15.

   Lots of people think Man on the Moon is one of the best R.E.M. songs of all time.  I'm not of that opinion, although I like it a lot.  I don't know, maybe it got a little overplayed or something, but really for me it just gets overshadowed by the next two songs that end the album on a super strong note.

  Pretty is the name of the game when you're talking about Nightswimming.  It's got this neat kind of rolling piano line and even the main melody is kind of non-linear.  There's no chorus to speak of, the song just kind of keeps moving forward, but it's never anything less than beautiful.  Plus it seemed like I knew a lot of girls who liked it and at that age identifying with their music taste seemed like a great way to pick up the ladies.

  I actually kind of overlooked Find the River at first, maybe because it's tucked away at the very end of the album and Nightswimming is so obviously a highlight.  Once I did notice it though I realized I really liked it and it might even be my favorite song on the whole album.  I even managed to get a Find the River t-shirt that I wore until it got several very large holes in it.

  I'm not sure if everything I said here came across as completely glowing, but at the end of the day this is probably my favorite R.E.M. album.  If you'd never heard them before and wanted one album to check out I very well might point you here.  I generally try not to mention every single track when reviewing an album.  I've heard somewhere that doing so is considered bad form in the music reviewing world, but I couldn't help it.  This album came out at a time when music was the most important thing in the world to me and I just had a really deep love for it and it evoked cool moods and feelings in me back then that I can still sort of conjure up if I listen to it now.  It's "mature" and kind of slow and thoughtful, but it's not boring.  It's held up pretty well over the years, too.  This album's old enough now to be of legal drinking age.  Crazy.

Out of Time

9.0/10

  I can't possibly be objective about this album.  Not that music criticism is ever anything but subjective, but for this album in particular my outlook will almost certainly be different from most.  The thing is this is the album that got me into music, plain and simple.  Every music fan has an album that was their first one they ever really got into.  For me it's this one.  Prior to this I casually listened to the radio.  I wanted to like music, but I wasn't super thrilled with the music I was discovering.  Then when I was about 14 years old one of my friends showed me this album and I got completely obsessed with it.  I remember taking a road trip to California with my friend and my cousin and we just played this album on repeat over and over again.  It set me off on the path of becoming a music fan, and for that reason I could never possibly give this a bad rating.

  It's kind of weird because the general critical consensus of this has seemed to cool off, but I remember at the time all kinds of people being totally enthralled by it.  It was very loved by a lot of people and now I see it listed as one of their worst albums on a lot of critical review sites.  I guess it goes to show how much context can play a role in how albums are perceived.  To me, at the time, it was a breath of fresh air in the midst of a vast musical wasteland.  If I were to come to it for the first time now at this point in time, without ever having heard it before, I can't say it would have the same effect on me.  It probably wouldn't.  So for the average person coming to it new, you could probably expect to knock that score down a little bit.  But not too much.  I think this album has come to be underrated.

  As far as I know Out of Time was the first album on which R.E.M. utilized guest musicians, and they're all over this dang thing.  Kate Pierson from fellow Athens band the B-52's lends her vocals to 3 or 4 of these songs, which is the first time we've heard female vocals on an R.E.M. record.  The album kicks off with guest rapper KRS-One saying "Hey I can't find nothing on the radio" before a pretty arpeggiated chord kicks in and Michael Stipe sings.  KRS-One pipes up intermittently throughout Radio Song's "funky" verses before taking over entirely for the final verse with an actual rap.  A lot of people don't seem to like Radio Song very much, and while I agree the guest rapper thing was a little incongruous for R.E.M. as we knew them, his part is pretty short and not terribly obnoxious.  Plus it was kind of a bold thing for them to do at the time.  I also can't resist the whole "pretty" section of the song where Stipe is singing "The world is collapsing around our ears."  It's not my favorite R.E.M. song, but it was different from anything they'd really done prior to this, which may have something to do with why so many people don't like it.

  The next song was the gargantuan single from this album.  I still hear Losing My Religion all over the place.  I heard it in a bar just the other night.  And I still dig it.  It's a good song and after all these years and how much it's been overplayed I'm not completely sick of it.  Plus there aren't too many hit songs that prominently feature a mandolin.

  I don't have too much to say about Low other than it's kind of got a Doors-y vibe and Stipe sings in a deeper register than normal.  I always thought it was kind of cool how his voice goes lower as he says the word low over and over again.

  This album features Mike Mills lead vocals on two songs, which in my opinion is a good thing.  I'm pretty sure this is the only time you get so much unfiltered Mike Mills goodness in the R.E.M. catalog.  Both songs are catchy as all get out, if not necessarily breakout single material.  I think they might have released Near Wild Heaven as a single anyway.  Still, Mills has a nice melodious voice that's maybe lacking a little in some sort of "oomph" or "grit" or something, but is never anything less than pleasant to listen to.

  Endgame is a mostly instrumental song with some wordless vocals.  It's possibly a little slight, but it's super pretty.  They even bring in cool instruments like flugelhorns and whatnot on it.  It's relaxing and you could totally fall asleep to it and I mean that in the best possible way.

  Shiny Happy People gets a bad rap these days.  I've heard even the band has disowned it.  I see how the lyrics are maybe kind of embarrassing or cheesy, and I've also heard they were intended to be taken ironically.  Whatever the case may be, this was released as a single and got plenty popular at the time.  It's still a catchy as hell song, and I have a good memory associated with it that overrides any potential embarrassment over the lyrics.  I remember being on vacation in the Poconos during the summer of probably 1992.  My parents were part of some group that was having their annual meeting there and there weren't too many kids there in my age range.  But one of the other "kids" that was there was a cute blonde girl who was probably about a year older than me.  At that age under normal circumstances I would have been way too shy and flabbergasted to talk to her, but since we were pretty much the only teenagers we got to hanging out and she was really cool and it ended up being a pretty awesome time.  At any rate we were talking somewhere and Shiny Happy People came on in the background and she exclaimed how much she loved the song and started singing along to it.  Wait a minute here, a cute cool older woman loves a song by the band I am currently obsessed with?  Sorry, this song officially rules.

The rest of side 2 stays strong with Country Feedback being a particular highlight.  There's like a pedal steel mixed with guitar feedback, which is how they very cleverly came up with the title.  Add in the fact that Stipe says the F-word, which was unfathomably cool to me when I was 14 or 15.  Also the part at the end where he keeps repeating "It's crazy what you could have had I need this" is totally awesome.

It's Out of Time, god damn it.  It doesn't really "rock" and maybe the production's a little slick, but I'll always remember how awesome this album was for me when I discovered it.  I've heard it a bajillion times since then, but in the right mood it can still evoke that same sense of awesomeness it did back in the day.