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Your feeling on R.E.M. is?
I like R.E.M.
64%
 64%  [ 32 ]
I haven't really heard any R.E.M. even though they've been around over 20 years - basically I live in a cave.
8%
 8%  [ 4 ]
I prefer older R.E.M. before they sold out and before Berry left.
26%
 26%  [ 13 ]
I'm a teeny bopper and I want my mommy (ga ga goo goo)!
2%
 2%  [ 1 ]
Total Votes : 50

Author Message
johnip
Vintage Newbie


bigideas wrote:
johnip wrote:
what is ACL?


austin city limits
they air the show on PBS stations.
i get two and one airs ACL on Thurs and the other Sat, though it seems it hasn't been on in a while.


Ah. I think I saw a little of that a few weeks ago maybe?

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Cap'n O'Schovanec
Golly, Poster


I love REM. Nothing better then a nice deep sleep. Something I haven't had in a long time. I think I'm developing insomnia.
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bigideas
Vintage Newbie


johnip wrote:
bigideas wrote:
johnip wrote:
what is ACL?


austin city limits
they air the show on PBS stations.
i get two and one airs ACL on Thurs and the other Sat, though it seems it hasn't been on in a while.


Ah. I think I saw a little of that a few weeks ago maybe?


that's entirely possible - i haven't caught an ACL episode in quite a while.
i still don't think i saw all of the recent Wilco episode.
but yeah, it's a show to watch out for. over the years i've seen:

Beck backed by The Flaming Lips and them doing their own songs, too
Wilco
Spoon
Bright Eyes
Coldplay
Rilo Kiley
The Shins
Ryan Adams
Arcade Fire
The Decemberists
Modest Mouse
My Morning Jacket
Sufjan Stevens
Death Cab for Cutie
plus tons more that i didn't see

a lot of times these were the first times i ever saw what these bands were like live.

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grain thrower
Vintage Newbie


ACL programs are different for different markets, we got REM two or three weeks ago. Really good set, 'Living Well' ranks right along their best songs ever. Although I think Stipe's voice is shot to hell these days, but oh well.

Note to Jason Miller: dontcha think Eisley would be a nice fit for that program, hmmm?

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piperjay23
Sea Post King


"...I sat there lookin ugly. Lookin ugly and mean. I knew what she was sayin, she was sayin to me: Baby's got some new rules, Baby said she's had it with meee."

From Me and Honey with Kate whats her face from the B52's on back up. Brilliant song.

REM rocks. Night Swimming...Driver 8...Radio Free Eurpoe.

Turn it up loud and sing along.

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bigideas
Vintage Newbie


piperjay23 wrote:
"...I sat there lookin ugly. Lookin ugly and mean. I knew what she was sayin, she was sayin to me: Baby's got some new rules, Baby said she's had it with meee."

From Me and Honey with Kate whats her face from the B52's on back up. Brilliant song.


i still haven't gotten around to their back catalog.

too many new records have come out - Wolf Parade, Coldplay, Weezer, and i finally picked up an Elvis Costello record - My Aim is True. also, Elliott Smith's Figure 8 is haunting me as of late.

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Sprocket
Vintage Newbie


Been crunking out the old R.E.M. recently.

I still find it peculiar that Automatic For The People is arguably their most well-known (and bought?) album. It's certainly their most cohesive, but it's also thick and velveteen. The reverb is kept in a little more check than in Monster, but it's still a surprisingly oppressive experience, lightened only by Sidewinder, Everybody Hurts and perhaps Nightswimming. Sweetness Follows used to just about finish me off, but nowadays I think I find Country Feedback on Out of Time the more shattering.

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Last edited by Sprocket on Thu Sep 30, 2010 5:41 am; edited 1 time in total
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bigideas
Vintage Newbie


Haven't listened to REM in a while, but your post made me find out what they were doing. New album scheduled for Spring 2011:

By Daniel Kreps
Jul 14, 2010 11:02 AM EDT

R.E.M. have completed recording their 15th studio album with producer Jacknife Lee at Berlin, Germany's Hansa Studios and will mix the disc in the fall. The band have penciled in a spring 2011 release date for the follow-up to 2008's Accelerate, and while Michael Stipe and Co. haven't offered up much in terms of details about their new LP, "postcards" from the studio posted on their official website have given fans the impression that recording in Berlin has influenced the band's latest work.

"Berlin is a pulsing, exciting city with so many varied and distinctive neighborhoods, iconic history all around, great food at all levels and from every corner of the world . . . an excellent place to set up camp and make a great record," the band wrote last month. R.E.M's manager Bertis Downs later added, "I will not report on the sound or the dimension of the recordings so far, to my ears it all sounds like quite a wonderful set of songs." Classic albums like Iggy Pop's The Idiot, U2's Achtung Baby and two-thirds of David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy (Heroes, Low) were all also recorded at Hansa Studios.

Guitarist Peter Buck has also found time to collaborate with Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody on a new band called Tired Pony. The pair initially met at the Isle of Wight festival, then hit the studio for eight days to record 15 songs when both had a break from their day jobs. "We'd walk into a room and there'd be nothing, but an hour later there'd be a finished song," Buck told the BBC. "It was really an experiment to see how spontaneous we could work, and how much emotion you can bring to the surface, and how you can just listen to the songs and then have them just occur. We never spent much time on then, we never talked about it, we'd just go in and do it, and it would be done. There's the possibility it could really fail, and that's what made it so exciting, it was like walking a tightrope for eight days."

Buck added that his work with Tired Pony inspired at least one new R.E.M. track: "There's at least one piece of music where I kind of thought, 'This is something Gary would like, this is something he might write,' and I threw it out there, and I think it'll be on the next record."

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inorbit
Laughing Citizen


soupey wrote:
I guess everyone here will hate me when I say that I've only ever heard "It's the end of the world as we know it", and even that I didn't know it was an REM song until oh, last week? So it's option "I live in a cave" for me.


uh... no, actually, I'm impressed that if you've only heard one song, its from that era (even if its not particularly representative of it).

As for the poll- I couldn't answer...

Reason:
I liked REM very, very much through Green, which is, in a lot of people's opinion, their sell out album. At the time though, it was my favorite yet.
It wasn't my favorite show of theirs only because they had graduated to playing arenas on the back of Green, and I don't like arena shows much. Musically/artistically though, it was amazing.

So it would be inaccurate to say that I only liked REM BEFORE they sold out, I think....

I lost interest with Out of Time, which is when mass market success (and/or age/wealth/relative sobriety) turned them into a very different kind music- it was the last one I bought.

Haven't paid any attention to them since, but still put the old stuff on once in a while... I didn't even know Berry had left. I don't think I could actually name an REM album after AFP, truth be told.

---edit
just noticed how old this thread is...
Oh well, never mind. Must have come up when I was out of pocket.
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bigideas
Vintage Newbie


DISCOVER DISCOVERER
R.E.M. is now offering a free download of DISCOVERER from their forthcoming album COLLAPSE INTO NOW. If you head over to REMHQ.com, you can be among the first to download a track from the band's new studio album for free! While you’re there, catch an early glimpse of the artwork for the new record which is due out March 8th, 2011. The album will be available for iTunes pre-order 12/21.

COLLAPSE INTO NOW tracklisting:
1. Discoverer
2. All The Best
3. Überlin
4. Oh My Heart
5. It Happened Today
6. Every Day Is Yours To Win
7. Mine Smell Like Honey
8. Walk It Back
9. Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter
10. That Someone Is You
11. Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I
12. Blue

COLLAPSE INTO NOW . . . from Portland to New Orleans to Berlin to Nashville and soon . . . to you. Starting now, with DISCOVERER.
Enjoy!

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Sprocket
Vintage Newbie


It's a good one, though a little muddy. Sounds structurally like a song they might have written during the Up sessions, but instrumentally in the style of Monster. Also, despite a few daft singles, I don't think R.E.M. ever sold out per se, in as much as I still get an impression of earnestness from their music... I don't think they tend to write songs in a calculated way to get success and money, just some songs work better than others.
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inorbit
Laughing Citizen


Sprocket wrote:
Also, despite a few daft singles, I don't think R.E.M. ever sold out per se, in as much as I still get an impression of earnestness from their music... I don't think they tend to write songs in a calculated way to get success and money, just some songs work better than others.


Well, with the move to Warner from IRS (which was independent until the mid 90s) for Green, I would say by definition that they were then in a position where they were required to write songs at that point "in a calculated way to get success and money", and would have been brought under terrific pressure to do so.

And I would argue that Stand was their first foray into truly daft singles. Embarrassing. So I do see the argument that with Green (and beyond), they did sell out.

But I maintain that the sound didn't truly lose its characteristic dark edginess more generally and start substituting sap for atmosphere until Out of Time.

Others maintain that the sell out happened with Document... due to the ubiquity of ITEOTWAWKI I suppose, after the ability to sing the whole thing through became a common test at mook infested high school keggers nationwide for whether one was loaded enough yet* (and was there a graduation party in the late 80's and 90's where this wasn't played?)

doesn't add up to me though-- that's when they started co-producing with Scott Litt, after having been produced by a succession of much cheesier guys for the albums after Rekoning... so if you are going by production, it seems you would date the sellout to Fables (which would be a shame, because its a good album).

Besides, I can't reconcile timelessly classic manifestos like this with selling out

-------------------------------------------------------
* Who'd ever have thought that you'd still find purportedly legitimate singers getting giggles out of the idiotic amusements of stoned teenagers from twenty-three years ago
I guess its retro-kitsch now.... or something.
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Last edited by inorbit on Sun Dec 19, 2010 6:54 am; edited 6 times in total
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Sprocket
Vintage Newbie


I think 'sap for atmosphere' gets closer to the truth, but it's not universal or ubiquitous. If an album must be fingered as the one where the tides turned, then I think Green is far more mawkish overall than Out of Time, which is clearly an album of two halfs. Green certainly had the bigger, blander sing-alongs, though it makes for a pleasant listening experience, if not exactly a challenging one. For me the album only gets going just as it stops, which is a shame because 'I Remember California' is one of the most elegaic soundings songs they've written and Stipe's lyrics are often at their most evocative when he's trying to capture a sense of place. By contrast, Out of Time lurches into action with the daft and vaugely irritating 'Radio Song'. 'Losing My Religion' has been played so many times, it's easy to forget that's it's a great song, brought through by the lovely, taut, fragile mandolin. The first side bumbles along softly and pleasingly, but then the end of the album, especially 'Texarkana' and 'Country Feedback' is on a whole other level, the later quite possibly being my favourite R.E.M. song.

Also, for such a successful album, there is loads of their earlier dark edge on Automatic For the People. While it's remembered for 'Everybody Hurts' and 'Nightswimming', which are not bad songs in their own rights if not a little cloying, the rest of the album is spookily morbid and certainly much less immediately accessible than Green. So, I don't think it's a matter that they turned pop/ stadium rock and never looked back. Up especially is a very odd album indeed with much less direct, more esoteric lyricism representative of their early career.

Also, Fables, which is terrific, is still the right side of murky, there are times when it sounds little short of a Joy Division album to my years, especially during the brittle, strung-out opening songs.

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bigideas
Vintage Newbie


What do you think of the deluxe 2 CD versions they're doing? I have the albums from Automatic on, though I did not get into them with that album, so I would like to hear everything prior.
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inorbit
Laughing Citizen


bigideas wrote:
What do you think of the deluxe 2 CD versions they're doing? I have the albums from Automatic on, though I did not get into them with that album, so I would like to hear everything prior.


I don't know them....
Are they re-releases of the IRS albums done two to a CD or something? I don't even know who owns their pre-Warner back catalog now- London or someone like that maybe?
Don't know what kind of bonus material they might have put on them, but if you like REM, I highly recommend obtaining Chronic Town (just an EP-but classic and essential), Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, Life's Rich Pageant, and possibly also Document if you like it, in whatever form (unless they've gone and put updated versions of the tracks on them or something). But thats a lot of old ossified stuff to go buy, so I'm not sure I'd spring for re-releases unless they are a real bargain...

If I were you I'd just keep my eye on the used bin at a good local record store and grab 'em for cheap as they come up. They were widely held, so they should cycle through reasonably. None of them are what you would call rare.

Of course, the original CD's of the early IRS stuff were all re-releases to begin with- remember there weren't any CD's when Chronic Town came out. IRS put the back catalogue out on CD in the late 80's/early 90's when REM broke big (on Warner). Lots of people bought them.

Some people of my vintage would point you at an old copy of Eponymous (the greatest hits collection from 1988) for a good overview of the IRS years, but I was never a fan of that record. Although it has some "rare versions" (whatever that means) of some of the better known tracks, its mostly the singles, which aren't the better or most characteristic songs from their respective albums. I think you would be better off just starting off picking up one or two of their old albums.

If you want an exotic collection, though, Dead Letter Office (their rarities collection) has some real gems on it. Check out the track listing. Couple of velvet underground covers, etc. Unlike most such albums, which are usually tiresome, that one actually makes a really good album one of their best- has stuff like this pylon cover that became classic REM but aren't anywhere else. The album spans 81-88. Its VERY worthwhile.
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