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.

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.