They Might Be Giants

7.5/10

  Ah... They Might Be Giants.  This is another of my favorite bands from my high school days.  Surprisingly they're still chugging along, at least at the time of this writing.  This band consists of two guys named John from Brooklyn who have an interest in odd subject matter and have a knack for catchy melody.  I've heard this called "nerdy" music, but all I know is they've made me laugh quite a bit and they've lodged many catchy tunes in my head over the years.  Plus I'll take this over some whiny little emo bastard any day.

So this is their first album.  It's self-titled but I always referred to it as the pink album, since that was the color of the sleeve.  They establish much of their modus operandi on this.  The catchy hooky melodies and quirky subject matter are here in spades.  They've also always been very generous as far as the number of songs they include on each album.  This one's no different and features no less that 19 tracks.  Some of them are pretty short and some are just kind of throwaway jokes, but still.  A few of the songs on this album are a little weird even for my tastes, but there are also several fully formed catchy-as-fuck pop songs on here.

This album honestly starts off awesomely.  The first five tracks are all brilliant and catchy.  In a perfect world Don't Let's Start should have been a smash radio hit.  Number Three is perfectly and hilariously placed in the third spot following a very strong opening two tracks, it contains the joke that they only have two songs in them and this is the third one.  They quickly put a lie to the notion that they're only capable of writing two good songs as this album has at least a dozen of them.  Hideaway Folk Family comes in at track five and is catchy as all hell and features some weird fake backwards singing at the end.  Why?  Why not?

The first very slight misstep for me comes with 32 Footsteps.  It's not unlistenable or horrible or anything and it's even still sort of catchy.  It's just kind of weird and not particularly in a funny way.  I'm not really certain what they're going on about here to be honest.

It's followed by the very brief and quirky Toddler Hiway, which is honestly kind of a throwaway joke, but it's a catchy one.  I kind of wish they had developed the song more.

This is followed by another string of strong catchy songs.  Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes is pretty silly, but it's got a hell of a hook.  It's really hard not to get this stuck in the old noggin.  A couple tracks after that we get She's An Angel, an oddly sweet little love song that for my money might feature the catchiest chorus on the whole album.  Plus it has some really funny imagery of racing around in those little Shriner cars.

Have you noticed I've been using the word catchy a lot?  Aside from demonstrating an unimpressive diversity of my vocabulary skills, it's simply the name of the game when it comes to this band.  I'll probably be using that word quite a bit more as I review all their albums.  Catchy is one of my favorite qualities a band can have.  Yes, it can be used in service of really terrible annoying songs, but way too many bands couldn't write a catchy melody to save their lives.

Unfortunately the second half of the album kind of drops the ball a little bit in the catchy department.  There are still a few memorable hooks here, but there are also more of the quirky experimental throwaways that are just kind of weird without being especially funny or clever.  What the hell is Boat of Car about?  I don't have a clue.  It's not especially pleasant to listen to, but it's mercifully short.  I'm not super sure about Chess Piece Face either, but it's also quite short.

I'm re-listening to the second half as I write this and overall maybe the songs are actually a little better than I'm giving them credit for.  They just suffer in comparison to the awesome songs on the earlier part of the album.  There are still quite a few catchy melodies, they're just maybe not quite as catchy and the quirky stuff just seems odd instead of being all that funny.  The end of the album just feels like a slight letdown to me.  But really only slightly.

Overall this is an album bursting with quirky ideas and awesomely catchy hooks.  It's well worth checking out if you like memorable melodies and a slightly skewered sensibility.  It bodes of good things to come and things would soon get even better.

Collapse Into Now

7.5/10

  This ended up being the final R.E.M. album as they announced their breakup shortly after it came out.  I think this ended up being a good album to go out on.  It doesn't do anything innovative whatsoever, but it succeeds in sounding like an R.E.M. album.  All the classic elements are here from the jangly guitar to the Mike Mills backing vocals and most of the songs could have easily fit on other albums.  It serves as sort of a career retrospective in a way, with certain songs being really reminiscent of earlier works.  In many cases this wouldn't be a positive thing but for R.E.M. this far into their career and as their last album, it's kind of what you're looking for.  It's like R.E.M. comfort food or something.

They start off right off the bat with a couple of high energy uptempo songs that wouldn't have been out of place on Accelerate.  One gets the sense that they're still trying to assure you that they haven't slipped back into their Around the Sun style.

The acoustic guitar driven Uberlin really invokes Drive from Automatic for the People without quite being a straight ripoff.  The way Stipe sings the verse with the pauses in between words is really similar to the way he delivered the verses in Drive.  I definitely get the impression this similarity is purposeful and is supposed to kind of put you in the mindframe of Automatic.  The chorus, which is quite nice, goes in another direction entirely.  So it really is a different song, you see.

Later you get the ballad Walk it Back, which sounds like it could have fit on any number of albums from Out of Time to New Adventures in Hi-fi.  It's immediately followed by the aggressive rocker Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter, which could have been on Monster, New Adventures, or maybe even Document.

Final track Blue invokes the hell out of E-Bow the Letter with the spoken word lyrics and atmosphere.  They even went so far as to get Patti Smith to sing backup vocals again.

The album as a whole contains a nice mix of uptempo and slower songs, as well as acoustic and electric arrangements.  The melodies are pretty consistently solid throughout.  To my ears there are no obvious weak links here.  While I can't in any way say this is among their best albums, they most definitely did not drop the ball for their final album, which is kind of a relief in and of itself.

Looking back at their extensive catalog, they definitely have released a high number of above average to really good if not great albums.  Is that enough to put them into the pantheon of classic bands?  In my opinion, yeah, it is, even if I'm not as obsessed with them as I once was.  I don't think I would consider them my favorite band anymore.  My tastes have shifted a little more towards noisy psychedelic stuff, but I always appreciate good melodies and R.E.M. has long delivered those.  I'm also quite aware that I have a fairly strong personal bias towards this band just because they came along at the right time for me.  That said I think their classic albums have stood the test of time well.  I think new generations will continue to discover and enjoy R.E.M. for awhile at least.      

Accelerate

7.0/10

  The world seemed to issue a collective yawn after the release of Around the Sun.  That is, if they weren't loudly grumbling that R.E.M. should have broken up after New Adventures in Hi-Fi, if not even sooner.  Even the band didn't seem to like Around the Sun too much.  It seems like it even sucked the energy out of them.  The four year wait between that album and this one represents the longest gap between any two R.E.M. albums.

Accelerate feels like a conscious effort on the part of the band to not sound like Around the Sun.  Thus the electric guitar rears its head prominently and most of the songs are much more uptempo.  Even the title of the album seems like a blatant advertisement that this is not another album of plodding mid-tempo songs.  They've also addressed the album length problem that's dogged them for a little while now.  This is the shortest album they've released in years and many of the songs don't even break the three minute mark.  As such Accelerate is a brisk listen, which is good, but it may suffer a bit from feeling slight.

For me the renewed sense of energy is definitely a welcome sign.  It really would have kind of sucked if Around the Sun had been their final album just because it wasn't a good note to go out on.  While I don't personally feel Accelerate lives up to their earlier classic material it's certainly a bounce back in the right direction.

You can tell the difference in the energy level right off the bat with Living Well is the Best Revenge.  Peter Buck's electric guitar rips off a riff and some upbeat drums come in.  Stipe joins in after a few bars with much more energetic singing than appeared anywhere on the previous album.  They're wasting no time in letting you know you're not in for a repeat of Around the Sun.  This song is a nice little jolt of adrenaline and wouldn't sound out of place on Lifes Rich Pageant.  That's a good thing.  I think I even hear some much missed Mike Mills backing vocals near the end of it.  They're low in the mix, but it's very welcome to hear them.

The next song Man-Sized Wreath maintains the sound and energy level of the first track.  If the first track was this album's equivalent of Begin the Begin, then this song is its These Days.  I'm relieved to say we're off to a pretty good start so far.

The next song is Supernatural Superserious, which I seem to recall actually getting some airplay.  It's fast-paced like the first two tracks and it's pretty damn catchy.  It might be the best song on the album so far.  Not to mention those are almost certainly Mike Mills backing vocals in the chorus.  They're such an essential part of the R.E.M. sound I really don't understand why they seemed to disappear for awhile there.

Next track Hollow Man brings in some piano and seems to slow down the pace a little, which is actually okay at this point, but even this song brings in some electric guitar and gets more upbeat at the chorus.  It actually makes for a pretty neat trick as it injects a little variety into the album, something the last album was sorely missing.

Houston brings in some jangly minor key acoustic guitar and what sounds like some organ.  It's different sound-wise than anything we've seen so far, which furthers the diversity and variety of the album.  Once again this is a positive thing.

Elsewhere Until the Day is Done almost sounds like it could have been on Automatic for the People and I have to say I find Mr. Richards to be a very catchy tune.  I think it might be my favorite song on the whole album.

Final track I'm Gonna DJ is kind of dumb, but at least they stuck it at the end of the album.  Granted it doesn't end the album on the highest note, but it doesn't interrupt the flow of the rest of the album and you can always skip it.

  Accelerate is a sizable improvement, but it doesn't resonate with me the way the early albums did.  Part of that is timing.  I was an impressionable teenager when I fell head over heels for Out of Time and Automatic for the People.  I had entered my 30's by the time Accelerate came out.  I still like music, but it's not as all-consumingly amazing as it was back then.  I haven't lived with Accelerate like I have with the earlier albums.  It didn't accompany my formative years.  I haven't listened to it hundreds, if not thousands of times.  It's not seared into my brain in the same way.  All of this places it at a bit of an unfair disadvantage as far as my personal estimation goes.  But I'm glad that I like it as much as I do and I'm especially glad that R.E.M. was able to go out on a higher note between this album and the next one, which proved to be their last.

Around the Sun

5.0/10

  The critical consensus seems to be that this is the worst R.E.M. album of all time.  Unfortunately I have to agree with that assessment.  The thing is, it's not horrible or irredeemable, it's just kind of bland.  Taken individually I don't really have a problem with any of the songs, but they're all kind of the same mid-tempo ballad.  There's not a lot of variety on display here and it gets to sound really samey after awhile.  They've done albums in the past that maintain an overall sound to them.  Automatic for the People was largely acoustic while Monster featured the same distorted guitar sound on many of its tracks.  Even Murmur sounds largely of a piece.  It's just the sound they chose this time isn't very interesting.  It's kind of like Automatic-Lite.  Plus the arrangements are just a little boring.  There's not much in the way of electric guitar to be seen and while there are some synths present, they seem to always remain in the realm of "tasteful."  But tasteful isn't what this album needs.  It needs some energy and some diversity.  It needs some more Mike Mills backing vocals.  It ultimately just kind of sounds like they weren't very inspired this time around.

  The thing is I think most of these songs are salvageable.  Like I said, taken individually I don't think they're all that bad, but they're just too similar in sound to each other.  If they had increased the tempo of a few songs or added some more interesting bleeps and bloops to the background it really would have helped.  Plus, like the last few albums, it's too long.  It's kind of a chore to sit through, which makes it feel really long.  Only two songs top the five minute mark this time, but a lot of them are above four minutes still.

  It honestly starts out promisingly enough.  Leaving New York is probably the best song on the album and I dig the part near the end where Stipe is singing different parts of the song at the same time.  So far so good, right?

  Electron Blue is next and it's not really a bad song at all, but it just doesn't seem like it's bringing anything new or interesting to the table.  Still, it's pretty good so not all hope is lost.  After that we get the Outsiders, which is mostly notable for featuring Q-Tip rapping at the end.  The thing is they already did the guest-rapper thing back on Radio Song from Out of Time.  And at least in that song it seemed more integrated to the song as a whole.  Here it feels more tacked on to the end and gimmicky.  And it's not even a new gimmick.

  This kind of seems to start a downward spiral as we get track after track that just sort of fails to impress.  I kind of like High Speed Train a little more than a lot of the other tracks, but it's not enough to right what's kind of a sinking ship.

  Around the Sun really isn't overtly terrible, but in a way that's sort of worse.  I kind of wish it was just a piece of crap unmitigated disaster.  Instead it's just sort of lodged firmly in the middle of the road.  James Taylor could have released this exact same album in 2004 and I wouldn't have blinked an eye.  That's what makes it kind of depressing.  I'd still rather listen to it than the majority of crap that's foisted upon the public, but it's really just a solidly average album from a band that used to be consistently well above average.  I will also allow that this is probably the R.E.M. album that I've listened to the least number of times, so it's possible that it's some kind of grower.  I don't really know it as well as I know their classics and I have difficulty distinguishing a lot of the songs or remembering how they go after the album finishes.  As it stands, I don't hate Around the Sun, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone and I definitely would steer newbies away from this one.

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.