Crib Notes

Title: New Adventures in Hi-Fi
Released on: Sept. 9, 1996
Favorite tracks: “The Wake-Up Bomb,” “Undertow,” “E-Bow the Letter,” “Leave”

In 1997, about a year after New Adventures in Hi-Fi came out, my wife and I bought the house in which we still live. For the previous five years, we’d lived in a place with a dishwasher but no washer/dryer. Our new house had a washer/dryer, but no dishwasher — which, as far as I’m concerned, counts as an upgrade. For a couple of years we washed dishes by hand. I’d usually do it after dark while playing CDs, preferably ones with good “night music,” like Rain Dogs by Tom Waits, Stay Sick! by The Cramps, Kiko by Los Lobos and especially New Adventures in Hi-Fi by R.E.M. (Incidentally, I think Automatic for the People is also very much a “night music” album.)

Something about the repetitive action of scrubbing and drying the dishes and listening to the rolling, cascading melodies of the album – most especially three-song sequence of “Undertow,” “E-Bow The Letter” and “Leave” – would put me in something close to a trance-state. Many of the songs on New Adventures have striking powers of accumulation: they build and build and CREST, and then build and build and build and CREST HIGHER. I find myself more prone to “get lost” in New Adventures than any other REM album. I can’t say whether it’s “better” than Murmur or Document, but it’s the one that interests me the most. You can keep diving into it without striking bottom.

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Title: Monster
Released on: Sept. 26, 1994
Favorite tracks: “King of Comedy,” “Star 69”

After the relatively low-key, mellow tones of Automatic for the People, REM clearly wanted to turn the amplifiers up to 11 and rock out again with Monster. In one interview, guitarist Peter Buck described Monster as “a ‘rock’ record, with the rock in quotation marks.” He explained, “That’s not what we started out to make, but that’s certainly how it turned out to be… Like, it’s a rock record, but is it really?” (Answer: Yes! It really is a rock record.)

Monster marks a different kind of directional change in REM’s refinement of its sound. You could say that REM had always gone forward in its musical development. The path would probably look more like a sine wave than a straight line, but the band always followed along a continuum in, for instance, increasing the clarity of Michael Stipe’s vocals and lyrical thrust. Monster strikes me as REM’s first serious attempt to reverse course, to retrace its steps and recapture some of the virtues they’d put aside over time. And, true to form, they want to backtrack while dabbling in musical idioms that hadn’t touched on much before.

Monster strikes me as an brash, exciting experiment with results that aren’t 100% successful – as compared to Automatic for the People, which is an extremely successful experiment whose parameters don’t really interest me in particular. Monster holds up better than I was expecting.

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Title: Automatic for the People
Released on: Oct. 5, 1992
Favorite tracks: [None]

If the REMtrospective’s have so far seemed like an aging fan’s on-line admiration society (“See you next tour!”), well, now we come to Automatic For the People. Huge hit. Three top 40 hits in the U.S. and U.K., 75 weeks on the album charts in the U.S., 179 in the U.K. Source of song that became a youth anthem (“Everybody Hurts”) and another that provided the title for a movie (“Man in the Moon.”)

And I don’t like it. A couple of songs I actively loathe. The only reason I won’t call it my least favorite REM album is that I just haven’t listened to Up, Reveal or Around the Sun enough to know how they’d stack up. I know some people adore it and I get the impression that a whole new generation and fan base discovered REM through Automatic for the People — which, for me, is part of the problem.

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Title: Out of Time
Released on: March 11, 1991
Favorite tracks: “Radio Song,” “Losing My Religion,” “Low,” “Country Feedback”

Out of Time represents a peak for REM. It’s one of their most commercially successful of their albums, with “Losing My Religion” being their biggest hit single and possibly their “most famous” song. It turned the band from a popular college/alternative act to a popular mainstream band.

And Out of Time took REM to the big-time without compromising their artistic integrity, unless you count the ever-increasing intelligibility of Stipe’s singing to be a compromise. It’s like the listening audience finally “got” REM – or maybe REM and the audience met each other halfway. Because the band’s sound definitely changed. Looking back at Chronic Town, Murmur and Reckoning, it’s amazing how different the band sounds. The philosophy of songwriting, the prominence of the vocals, Buck’s once-trademark guitar style – all have gone through a transition. But it’s a “the same, only different” kind of transformation: I recognize the songs as “REM songs” (which is not something I’d say for Automatic for the People).

It’s interesting to compare them in this regard to U2, college-rock contemporaries turned arena rock acts. U2’s sound has evolved too, and they’ve dabbled in different directions, but they’ve remained in a narrower continuum than REM ever did.

Does “Losing My Religion” qualify as one of the most unlikely hit singles of all time? The Wikipedia entry has this quote: “According to Peter Buck, when Warner Bros. heard the album that was to take them to the top, they were dumbfounded: “You think the one with the lead mandolin should be the first single?!””

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Title: Orange Green

Released on: Nov. 7, 1988

Favorite tracks: “Turn You Inside-Out,” “Orange Crush,” “You Are the Everything”

I really enjoy REM’s first album for Warner Bros., Orange Green. Given that it features the hit song “Orange Crush” and has that distinctive orange-colored album cover, Orange Green is just the perfect name for the album. I think that whenever I hear the songs, I think of the color orange, and when I see that shade of orange elsewhere, I think of that name, Orange Green.

Then again, a friend of mine passed along a rumor that they called it Green in honor of the payday they received from signing with Warner Brothers. I’m not sure I believe it, but it has a logic.

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Title: Document
Released on: Sept. 1, 1987
Favorite tracks: “Finest Worksong,” “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” “King of Birds”

A thumbnail sketch. A jeweler’s stone. A mean idea to call my own.

Document could be my favorite R.E.M. album. Of course, I have a lot of favorites, including Murmur and New Adventures in Hi-Fi, but Document is my favorite favorite. It may have the “biggest” and “tallest” sound of any of their albums. Certain “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” has their “fastest sound,” although some tracks on Accelerate give the song a run for its money.

Document is the last R.E.M. album I bought on vinyl — Green and all the subsequent ones, I bought on CD. That’s no doubt part of the reason why I associate the two sides of Document with having distinct identities. Side A seems to be about political action, and Side B seems to be more about disengagement, introspection and even immolation.

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Title: Dead Letter Office
Released on: April 28, 1987
Favorite tracks: “Voice of Harold”

My “REMtrospective” project, a chronological, album-by-album review of the work of R.E.M. from the band’s first EP Chronic Town through its latest release Accelerate, seems to have experienced a “Can’t Get There From Here” episode. Despite having been derailed in late May (thanks in part to a couple of family vacations), it’s ready to start up again, bearing in mind that I’m more of an interested amateur than a pro rock critic or musicologist. If you missed them the first time, here are the entries for Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction and Lifes Rich Pageant. As Stipe sings on the latter, “Let’s begin again.”

The evolution of R.E.M.’s sound from murmured jangle to hammering clarity was well underway with 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant. Dead Letter Office, a collection of rarities and B-sides, nevertheless serves as a fitting transitional album, winding up REM’s early period. (The timing seems particularly appropriate to me personally, since I got my undergrad diploma a few weeks after Dead Letter Office came out.)

For me, most odds-and-sods song collections serve as appendices or supplements to a musical artist’s work, but they don’t stand on their own as well; I’m thinking of XTC’s Rag and Bone Buffet and Bruce Springsteen’s 18 Tracks, which have some songs I like and a lot of songs I can’t remember. Dead Letter Office is much the same. For many of these albums, it’s kind of interesting to hear them cover artists they clearly admire, or chew on a musical idea that came to fruition more successfully elsewhere. A lot of times “rarities” tracks remind me of deleted scenes from DVDs: there’s a reason why they didn’t make the final cut. But there are exceptions.

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Title: Lifes Rich Pageant
Released on: July 28, 1986
Favorite tracks: “These Days,” “Begin the Begin,” “Swan Swan H”

“Let’s begin again,” Michael Stipe sings in “Begin the Begin,” the first song on Lifes Rich Pageant. When the members of R.E.M. start their fourth full-length album with an anthemic message to start anew, it’s almost like they’re presenting Pageant as a “do-over” album compared to Fables. Not that I think that Fables would necessitate a do-over, but if Wikipedia is to be believed, the band had ambivalent feelings about Fables and didn’t enjoy the process of recording it.

Signals aside, there’s a marked difference between the albums. In my memory, R.E.M. made a gradual, step-by-step transition from the jangly, oblique, murmury quality of its early albums to the brighter, soaring, more articulate sound that followed — and coincided with the band’s increasing commercial popularity. It was like a dance of the seven veils, with Pageant less muffled than Fables, Document more “unwrapped” than Pageant, etc.

Instead, rediscovering Pageant reveals a sharp, almost immediate transition, like day for night. If their charging rave-ups had a “train engine” sound before, they traded them for jet engines here, as attested immediately by the low rumble, like a distant sonic bomb, underneath “Begin the Begin.” The hammering drums of “These Days” and the whoops of the equally rapid “Just a Touch” almost sound like punk songs.

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Title: Fables of the Reconstruction
Released on: June 10, 1985
Favorite tracks: “Feeling Gravitys Pull,” “Old Man Kensey,” “Can’t Get There From Here”

Supposedly Fables of the Reconstruction (or would that be Reconstruction of the Fables?) is about the American South. The term “Reconstruction” harks back to Dixie following the Civil War, and there are little references to Southern geography in the songs. Rumor has it that “Maps and Legends” is allegedly dedicated to outsider artist Howard Finster of Summerville, Ga., who did the Reckoning cover. Stipe’s lyrics always pepper in bits of Southern vernacular, although I’m not sure that “Can’t Get There From Here” counts as a “Southern” expression. The song does refer to Philomath, Georgia, though. And the soft banjo in the album-closing “Wendell Gee” delicately evokes bluegrass.

I have a hard time interpreting Fables as some kind of alt-rock equivalent to a William Faulkner novel, though. (“Swan Swan H” on R.E.M.’s subsequent album, Lifes Rich Pageant, does have more of a Southern “literary” theme, however.) To me, its “Southern” mostly in the ways that Chronic Town feels Southern, and generally seems like a continuation of some of Chronic Town’s ideas. Someone could probably make a case that R.E.M., who helped turn Athens, Ga., into an alt-rock mecca, influenced Southern rock and roll more than Southern music influenced it.

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Title: Reckoning
Released on: April 10, 1984 (U.S.)
Favorite tracks: “Little America,” “Time After Time (annElise)”

Back when we were college students following R.E.M.’s new releases, a friend of mine once told me that he heard of a rock band that, after their Acclaimed Breakthrough First Album, wanted to call their next album Disappointing Follow-Up. (I don’t recall which band it was.) Reckoning, released 364 days after Murmur, shows no trace of the sophomore slump. In many ways, it’s a step forward: the songs are brighter, tighter and peppier, and the music draws on some surprising genres and cultural influences. It’s a good album.

So why do I like Murmur so much more than Reckoning? There’s nothing wrong with Reckoning, but it’s not even a close rival with its predecessor. I think it has something to do with the way that certain albums can be more than the sum of their songs.

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Title: Murmur
Released on: April 11, 1983
Favorite tracks: “Pilgrimage,” “Radio Free Europe,” “Sitting Still,” “West of the Fields”

My thoughts about REM’s first full-length album Murmur, a beloved landmark album in rock music, center on this question: can you sing early REM songs in the shower?

By “early,” let’s say pre-Lifes Rich Pageant. By “shower,” I mean, as opposed to singing along to an R.E.M. recording in the car or on the iPod or whatnot. I can chime in with practically any R.E.M. song after a fashion, no matter how obscure the lyrics, but I can’t carry the early tunes on my own. What strikes me about Murmur is how it’s a great album that goes so much against the grain of conventional rock songs.

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