Continuing my look at 1994, first by counting down my own top ten albums of that year.
#4 – Monster – R.E.M.
Comparing R.E.M.’s 80s output vs. their 90s output makes for an interesting showdown. While their early albums embody the jangly pop rock sound that helped revolutionize the alternative rock landscape, the later work took that sound to darker and stranger places, resulting in some of the band’s most memorable songs.
‘Wind Out’ (or ‘Windout’ as it appears on the album liner notes) is a track included on R.E.M.’s 1987 collection of odds and ends, Dead Letter Office.
In the album’s entertaining liner notes, written by guitarist Peter Buck with a fair amount of self-deprecating wit (thought not in this case), the song is described this way:
This is one of our earliest songs, written in the summer of 1980. We recorded it for our second album. In retrospect, I think that it would have fit on Reckoning very well, but at the time we decided not to included it.
> a soundtrack that shall remain nameless.
Continuing my look at 1984, first by counting down my own top five albums of that year.
#1. Reckoning – R.E.M.
Thirteen years ago, I named R.E.M.’s Reckoning as their fourth-best album, an opinion I’ll stand by today as I declare it my favorite album of 1984. The alternative rock legends’ second full-length release captures so much about when makes them one of the all-time greats.
‘Swan Swan H’ is the penultimate track on R.E.M.’s 1986 album Lifes Rich Pageant, though it was listed last on the packaging because a cover of the song ‘Superman’ was left off.
This album was the band’s fourth, and the first to move into more rock territory after the murky alternative pop of their first three releases. I slotted this album as #3 on my list of R.E.M. releases when I ranked them back in 2008.
My lord, has it really been 27 years since R.E.M. released Monster? I remember being taken aback by the volume and aggression of this album coming on the heels of 1992’s Automatic For the People, but mostly loving the results.
R.E.M. said they wanted to make a loud album after the mostly acoustic Out of Time and Automatic For the People, and Monster certainly fit the bill. Soaked in reverb, this mashup of glam rock and grunge sounds like nothing else in the band’s catalog, for better and worse.
Meet Me In Montauk 