Tag Archives: r.e.m.

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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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Song of the Day #688: ‘You’re In the Air’ – R.E.M.

In 1997, a year after the release of New Adventures in Hi-Fi, R.E.M. founding member Bill Berry, their drummer, chose to leave the band to live a quiet life on his farm. His departure followed a scare a couple of years earlier in which he collapsed onstage with a brain aneurysm. No doubt that sort of thing causes you to reevaluate your life in short order.

Beyond playing the drums and a host of other instruments, Berry was an active songwriter for R.E.M. (the full band is credited with writing all of their songs, though Berry’s name has specifically been attached to such classics as ‘Man On the Moon,’ ‘Driver 8’ and ‘Can’t Get There From Here’).

And his musical contributions aside, I don’t think it can be overemphasized how much the absence of a family member means to the family he leaves behind.

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Song of the Day #687: ‘New Test Leper’ – R.E.M.

I’ve talked about a couple of albums being R.E.M.’s most overrated, and now I arrive at an album I consider one of their most underrated.

1996’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi is a sprawling effort largely recorded during sound checks and rehearsals for their Monster tour, giving it a casual, ramshackle feel. It blends the rocking sound of Monster with the more acoustic flavors of the band’s earlier work.

I call the album underrated not because it was critically panned (on the contrary, it received strong reviews) or a dud on the charts (it sold reasonably well, though not at the levels of their previous three albums) but because in discussions of R.E.M.’s best work, I rarely see New Adventures in Hi-Fi mentioned. And I believe it absolutely belongs in that mix.

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