R.E.M.’s last four albums — Up, Reveal, Around the Sun and Accelerate — have been mild disappointments. Those records followed New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the excellent and underrated follow-up to Monster, and they were all recorded without drummer Bill Berry, who quit the band to live on his farm after surviving a brain aneurysm.

By no means is it a coincidence that R.E.M.’s weakest efforts followed the loss of Berry. I don’t know how much he contributed to the songwriting, but there is a chemistry in some bands that, once altered, can never be reclaimed.

Post-Berry, R.E.M. is by no means a bad band — they remain a very good one — but they are a decidedly different band. And when the first ten albums are as essential as theirs are, different isn’t so great.

Ironically, their best post-Berry album is the one they recorded immediately after he left the band — Up. On later albums they would use a session drummer, but on this sad and sometimes dissonant record they relied on moody keyboards to replace the absent drums.

The finest song on the album, and perhaps their finest moment post-New Adventures is ‘At My Most Beautiful,’ an unabashed love song in a style right out of The Beach Boys. This is one of the few straightforward love songs Stipe has written and it makes you wonder why he hasn’t gone down this road more often.