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Song of the Day #693: ‘I and I’ – Bob Dylan

I’ve been playing Infidels a lot during the past week, learning it the way you do with a new album, and it’s growing on me more and more. I’m planning to rank all of Dylan’s albums once I’ve cycled through his discography on these Dylan Weekends and I’m already anticipating what a daunting task that will be.

I’ve always had my favorites and my second tier, but I’ve now introduced great new albums such as Infidels, Planet Waves, Street Legal and Slow Train Coming, with another undiscovered album still to come. And then there are the albums I still don’t own but have come to appreciate from afar — Self Portrait, Dylan, Saved and Shot of Love.

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Song of the Day #692: ‘Jokerman’ – Bob Dylan

After four years of the “Christian thing” (which is a long time in music years), Bob Dylan released the (mostly) secular Infidels in 1983 and it was celebrated as a return to form.

And indeed it is his best album from that mid-70s to late-80s period when he was at his shakiest. As I’ve discovered through these blog entries, that period wasn’t quite as shaky as I’d been led to believe but it was shaky.

Infidels is another album that I purchased expressly for the purposes of this blog and I’m really glad I did. I’m not sure why I never got around to buying it in the past, because I’ve always heard it’s a good album, so it was nice to have the excuse.

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Song of the Day #691: ‘Until the Day is Done’ – R.E.M.

In 2008, R.E.M. administered smelling salts to their sagging career in the form of Accelerate, 35 minutes of the rawest, most visceral music they’d recorded since Lifes Rich Pageant and Document.

The band was in need of a comeback (according to Peter Buck, Michael Stipe himself said “If we make another bad record, it’s over” following the collapse of Around the Sun) and they got it with Accelerate.

The album earned them their best reviews in years and, even more important, they sounded like a band again… Stipe tears into his vocals with a passion he hadn’t tapped consistently in more than a decade and Buck lets loose on the guitars like a real headbanger.

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Song of the Day #690: ‘The Ascent of Man’ – R.E.M.

Three and a half years after Reveal failed to set the world on fire, R.E.M. released their most disappointing album yet — 2004’s Around the Sun. Oddly, I have sort of the opposite reaction to this record than I do to Reveal… I find myself wanting to like it even as the songs fall flat. I guess it’s the part of me that likes rooting for the underdog.

It’s also the part of me that wanted to believe that one of my most beloved bands hadn’t simply lost it. Two disappointments in a row following a strong but very out-of-character album… it seemed as if the loss of Bill Berry really had fundamentally changed R.E.M. This was a new band, and a worse one.

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Song of the Day #689: ‘I’ve Been High’ – R.E.M.

Three years after Up, R.E.M. released their second album as a trio, 2001’s Reveal. After the sonic experimentation of Up, Reveal was more in the vein of a “normal” R.E.M. album, sharing a style and tone closest to their work on Automatic For the People.

For me, this is one of the trickiest albums in the band’s catalog. While I enjoy most of the songs quite a bit, the album itself has never quite gelled. I don’t know if it’s the lack of Bill Berry, but Reveal has always seemed off in some way.

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