Title: Up
Released on: Oct. 26, 1998
Favorite track: “Hope”

I see today with a newsprint fray / My night is colored headache grey

If the first track on an album sets the scene or makes a declaration of principles, what is “Airportman,” the introductory album of Up, trying to say? Some of my favorite REM songs start off their respective albums with considerable bangs, like “Radio Free Europe,” “Begin the Begin,” “Finest Worksong” and “Radio Song.”

“Airportman,” by contrast, is an odd, muted, haunting little ditty, almost inaudibly sung-whispered by Michael Stipe. It has 14 lines, most of which have only a few words. The haiku-like lyrics evoke a jet-lagged traveler who seems to be trying to register corporate/transportation slogans like “The people mover.” After September 11, one can’t read the lyrics “He moves efficiently / Beyond security / Great opportunity awaits” in quite the same way they were written. Plus, the song’s emphasis on the drum machine and electronic music almost sounds like a subconscious rebuke to former drummer Bill Berry, as if the remaining members are saying, “Sure, we’re sorry Bill’s gone. But we’ve got this great software…”

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

I won the race, I broke the cup, I drank it all, I spit it up

Early listening conditions: In 1997, about a year after New Adventures in Hi-Fi came out, goudabonbon 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”

I could be your Frankenstein

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]

But I feel better having screamed. Don't you?

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 UK. 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”

I was central / I had control / I lost my head / I need this

In some ways, Out of Time represents a peak for REM. It’s one of their most commercially successful (possibly the most 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.)

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Title: Green
Released on: Nov. 7, 1988
Favorite tracks: “Turn You Inside-Out,” “Orange Crush,” “You Are the Everything”

Dreams, they complement my life. Dreams, they complicate my life.

First, a question: Can we think of examples of REM songs used in other media?

For instance, Chris Elliott’s sit-com “Get a Life” used “Stand,” from this album, as its opening theme song. How many other examples of REM songs in other media can we think of? “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” turned up in the trailers for Chicken Little, which I see every time Sweetness and I watch mid-1990s Pixar movies on DVD. I could have sworn that “My So-Called Life” used “Everybody Hurts,” but I may be mistaken on that. A character on the short-lived series “Going to Extremes” sang part of “Losing My Religion” once.

Anyway, I really enjoy REM’s first album for Warner Bros., Orange. Given that it features the hit song “Orange Crush” and has that distinctive orange-colored album cover, Orange 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, REM’s Orange.

Wait, what now?

Oh. I mean, Green. (Really? Green? Okay.)

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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 sound,” the “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.”

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

A pistol hot cup of rhyme.

“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 a 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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