Moby - Hotel / Hotel Ambient (2005)

 Disc One: Hotel: 1) Hotel Intro; 2) Raining Again; 3) Beautiful; 4) Lift Me Up; 5) Where You End; 6) Temptation; 7) Spiders; 8) Dream About Me; 9) Very; 10) I Like It; 11) Love Should; 12) Slipping Away; 13) Forever; 14) Homeward Angel; 15) 35 Minutes [hidden track]
Disc Two: Hotel Ambient: 1) Swear; 2) Snowball; 3) Blue Paper; 4) Homeward Angel (Long); 5) Chord Sounds; 6) Not Sensitive; 7) Lilly; 8) The Come Down; 9) Overland; 10) Live Forever; 11) Aerial

Moby as a rock star. The tunes are there but it's not a perfectly comfortable fit.

Key tracks: "Raining Again", "Dream About Me", "Slipping Away". Hotel Ambient: "Swear"

Moby, always the honest nice guy, has openly admitted that he spent most of the 00s cruising around on auto-pilot, trying to write popular music that he felt was expected of him rather than what he was personally inspired to write. He had become a global superstar and was treated as such and he struggled to cope with it. His last album 18 had struck a few huge international hits with “We Are All Made of Stars” and “Extreme Ways”, which were effectively rock songs played through an electronic filter and where Moby took a proper front role in his music. Thus, when two rock songs became some of the biggest hits of his career, he didn’t want to disappoint his million-head audience and saw this as people wanting more of the same. He grabbed his guitar and started writing big rock hits, taking on a true frontman role for the first time when facing the big audience. Technically he had already done this once before with Animal Rights but this time people actually wanted to hear the songs.

Which brings us to our main point of contention: Moby is not a rock star. He’s a great musician, a fantastic producer and an all-around lovely guy but not a rock star. He’s a good performer but his voice isn’t cut out for stadium-sized rock songs and his lyrics can’t take being so exposed. He mumbles rather than soars, his vocal range is fairly limited and he’s the kind of writer who’s willing to earnestly use “thou” just to get a rhyme in (“Lift Me Up”). Furthermore, his preferred style of production is fantastic for the line of music he normally associates himself with, but the clean, polished sound takes the edge off any attempt at a rock song. Moby mentions in the liner notes how he doesn’t want to make sterile music, which is downright ironic considering how cleanly-shaven and dirt-free Hotel is. Listen to the drum and piano intro to “Raining Again”: what tries to be an energetic build-up comes across flat, like a basic pre-set rhythm loop on a set of cheap keyboards. The music in Hotel is something that wants to be played loud but lacks the balls for it, written by someone whose forte lies in instrumentals and which is performed by a man who’s far more comfortable behind his synthesizers than he is in front of the microphone.

It’s also still good music, even though it really doesn’t make a lick of sense considering all I’ve said. For the duration of the entire album you’re repeatedly reminded of the myriad of issues stemming from the points raised above, and yet nearly every track manages to survive through it. With most it’s a simple case of the actual songs being good to listen to. Rock-Moby isn’t a particularly intricate or complex songwriter and Hotel is largely made out of very basic verse/chorus/verse structures (with a big emphasis on the chorus part), but that worked well for him with “Extreme Ways” and “We Are All Made of Stars” and it works well for him here. It helps the songs overcome their weaknesses: “Raining Again” blows away its limp intro into a faint memory as it turns into a joyous stadium-stomper and despite its lyrical shortcomings “Lift Me Up” is an exciting roof-raiser that acts like a rock-rearranged dance track. Now and then Hotel also uses its building blocks exquisitely and everything falls into place the right way. The clean and shiny production compliments the sunny and happy feeling of “Dream About Me” perfectly and really emphasises its utter loveliness, while “Slipping Away” utilises Moby’s weary voice for a perfect bittersweet punch when combined with the song’s melancholy melodies.

Hotel goes on for 15 songs (including the intro and the hidden track) and besides the ones already mentioned, particularly noteworthy are also the bombastic “Spiders” (with even more baffling lyrics) and the New Order cover “Temptation”, which successfully turns the original electro-stomper into a sweet, quiet ballad sung by the guest vocalist Laura Dawn. The run mostly goes without a hitch even if some parts point out the album’s inherent awkwardness more than others. Only the cringy bedroom jam attempt “I Like It” veers into the bad territory: it tries to be sexy but is sung by two people who really can’t sing sexy, and it bears so little relevance to the album’s general concept to the point that it almost actively sabotages it. Hotel generally starts spreading its wings in the latter half, with the pure dance interjection “Very” and the two instrumental ambient pieces at the end making appearances like the album had started to get bored of its own concept. The general unravelling makes the last parts of the album a little bit more of a trek that could’ve done editing, but it still manages to hang in place. And for what it’s worth, the “official” closer “Homeward Angel” is a wonderful, glacial piece of piano-lead ambient pulled off in the way Moby does best, like a reminder that despite the excursion to new waters he’s still in touch with his old strengths.

The ambient theme, as a matter of a fact, is just as notable as the rock material during the Hotel era. The special edition of the album came with the bonus disc Hotel Ambient, which got almost as much promo time on the album’s website as the main disc itself. It’s a selection of 10 original ambient tracks as well as an extended version of the already wonderful “Homeward Angel” and as far as bonus discs go, it’s borderline essential; especially if you enjoy Moby’s ambient works. The production that didn’t quite fit the main album is much more suited towards the minimalist electronic compositions, coming off as glacial and crystalline rather than sterile. As expected of an ambient album it’s not a particularly hook-driven collection, but each song feels as distinguishable as anything on the more obviously different main album. “Swear” and “Blue Paper” in particular are actual delights, as well as the extended version of “Homeward Angel” obviously. What makes the songs stand out from a lot of other ambient, including the majority of Moby’s own material, is that the atmosphere it produces is bright and perky for most parts, rather than the usual dreaminess. It’s the kind of ambient album you’d play during the day rather than at night.

One of the reasons I sometimes find numerical ratings really awkward are cases like Hotel. To me Hotel Ambient – which at the end of the day is a bonus disc – is such an essential part of Hotel that I find it hard to separate the two: together they’re the full Hotel experience and that brings a whole load of nerdy rating-related issues, especially when very few are going to get access to the extras (although Hotel Ambient has since been re-released separately on digital platforms). The main Hotel itself is hard to rate as it is, anyway. It’s a strange album where I can hear every single flaw and which I find easier to criticise than praise, yet when it comes down to it I’m more than happy to play it from start to finish and enjoy the ride. Part of it is probably honest nostalgia: Hotel’s release ties down to the period of time where I had started to become a heavy internet user and artists had begun to take advantage of the online world.  One of my biggest memories surrounding Hotel relates to the pre-album hype around it on Moby’s own website, which hosted a Flash animated mini hotel to explore and where you could find samples of the upcoming songs from. I spent ages there in awe of fancy modern gimmicks and repeating the samples, and I still associate the album with all that. The other part is that there’s a really good album within Hotel, but the inspirational wires got mixed somewhere and the musical ideas appeared in the head of the wrong artist. It’s a strange case of the artist sounding more comfortable with the bonus material than the main album itself and the whole thing has been puzzling me ever since the album was released. Hotel is the height of Moby’s post-Play wilderness years and while it has a way of getting you into it, it never stops being a slightly awkward dress-up performance.

Rating: 7/10

Moby - 18 (2002)

 1) We Are All Made of Stars; 2) In This World; 3) In My Heart; 4) Great Escape; 5) Signs of Love; 6) One of These Mornings; 7) Another Woman; 8) Fireworks; 9) Extreme Ways; 10) Jam for the Ladies; 11) Sunday (The Day Before My Birthday); 12) 18; 13) Sleep Alone; 14) At Least We Tried; 15) Harbour: 16) Look Back In; 17) The Rafters; 18) I’m Not Worried at All

Part an attempt to follow up on a hit, part an attempt to deal with tragedy. A confused but often beautiful collection of songs.

Key tracks: "Signs of Love", "Extreme Ways", "Harbour"

Most of Moby’s albums tend to follow one big musical concept or another, often explicitly stated in the liner notes that accompany each release. 18 is the outlier: despite being seemingly obvious about its angle at first glance, it’s a little bit more complicated and unclear than that.

The preceding album Play had hit it big, way bigger than anyone anticipated, and suddenly Moby had been thrusted into worldwide super stardom with countless new fans and casual appreciators. 18 should have been an easy victory lap. Instead, this was something the formerly eager genre-flipper Moby struggled to deal with. There were expectations now - both from the audience and the label - and he was a global superstar now. Moby mentions in the liner notes that he wrote over 80 songs for the album which is either a premium humblebrag or a sign of artistic desperation, writing things over and over while trying to figure out just how to respond to the sudden demand. In its core, it’s audible that 18 started out as a response to his sudden, hit-making reputation.

Then 9/11 happened. Moby was a proud New Yorker at the time and the incident hit uncomfortably close to home. He explicitly mentions the event in the liner notes and while it’s never referenced directly within the album itself, its shadow looms all over the album. Moby needed to write a big hit follow-up but he was still processing the tragedy and coping with the confusion and numbness of the aftermath. This inevitably ended up leaving its print on the subsequent writing sessions, with Moby now not only having to write for a new audience but trying to do it under a drastically different mindset.

This uncertainty turns 18 into a curious collection of music. It openly wants to be embraced, and unsurprisingly its overall sound is reminiscent of Play, with the same bittersweet, soulful grooves and string-laden melodies dominating the production, and it’s clearly been intended as a direct follow-up. It even follows a similar set of songs, from the structure of a hook-driven first half and a more mellow second half to even direct song counterparts: most obviously “Porcelain” and “Signs of Love” as the whispering ballads, “Bodyrock” and “Jam for the Ladies” as the party cuts and “My Weakness” and “I’m Not Worried at All” as the hymnal closers, with the new songs not really copying the old tracks but clearly carrying the same intent and placement as their original counterparts. Elsewhere Moby tries to reflect his new superstar status by turning over for a more rock-driven approach with “We Are All Made of Stars” and “Extreme Ways” (and to a lesser extent, “Harbour”), which bring the man himself into the spotlight more confidently than ever. They’re trendily produced and radio-ready, clear attempts to break Moby through from being just a guy behind a DJ deck into a legitimate frontman and a more obvious songwriter for a potential crossover audience.

Yet, it’s all filtered through that post-9/11 melancholy. The heart of 18 is an aching one and it rarely allows itself to smile with certainty. Where there is an energetic beat there’s undoubtedly also a beautiful, sad melody laid on top of it and as the album gets further, energetic distractions like “In My Heart” and “Jam for the Ladies” become exceedingly rare as the sad, mid-tempo atmospherics take over. “Extreme Ways” may be an attempt at a rock anthem but it’s resigned and weary, Moby desperately gasping out “then we fell apart” in its chorus and sounding completely detached and cold elsewhere. Moby’s attempt to find some meaning in tragedy breaks through any crack it can find within the songs, turning what sounds initially like another big hit follow-up into a strangely wistful set of songs.

All that leaves 18 a little confused itself and in fact, that’s become the album’s signature trait. No matter how you mix the tracks together or switch the way you view them, the songs on 18 just do not really gel together smartly. They’re too all over the place, trying to say a load of different things and uncertain of what to focus on. And there’s just too much of it - Moby’s never been much of an editor but at over 70 minutes long and spanning across 18 songs, the sheer amount of songs doesn’t help 18’s case. The thing is, the melancholy side of 18 is actually a really strong one, musically. The moodier second half is where the album really shines: the title track, “At Least We Tried”, “Harbour” (featuring the ever-powerful Sinead O’Connor) and “I’m Not Worried at All” are all superb, all wonderfully haunting, beautiful and almost tearjerkingly wistful. Add in a number of the stronger songs from the first half (“Signs of Love” and “Extreme Ways” in particular - the latter genuinely is a great song, partially because of its sheer melancholy) and you’d actually have a potentially incredible album of ache, loss and finding the light. As it is, that’s not what we really have, and I’m not really sure how exactly to define what we do have.

Rating: 7/10

Moby - I Like to Score (1997)

 1) Novio; 2) James Bond Theme (Moby’s Re-Version); 3) Go (1997 Mix); 4) Ah-Ah (1997 Mix); 5) I Like to Score; 6) Oil 1; 7) New Dawn Fades; 8) God Moving Over the Face of the Waters (Alternative Mix); 9) First Cool Hive (Alternative Mix); 10) Nash; 11) Love Theme; 12) Grace

An uneven collection of soundtrack discards, where the best songs are ones that had already been released on earlier albums.

  
Key tracks: "James Bond Theme (Moby's Re-Version)", "New Dawn Fades", "First Cool Hive (Alt. Mix)"

Despite his oft-cinematic soundscapes, so far Moby hasn’t found himself scoring films yet. He was, however, a frequent sight on various soundtrack releases at one point. Even just by the late 90s and before Play his “appears on” credits had become a long, expansive list. An odds and sods compilation like I Like to Score is thus, in theory, the kind of quick cash grab that actually has a decent purpose for fans, pulling together songs scattered across a multitude of releases for easy sourcing.

I Like to Score is understandably a big old mixed bag. Most of these songs were taken from “music inspired by” types of soundtrack CDs and are thus more like ordinary one-off tracks rather than anything particularly score-like - and understandably the styles and sounds vary greatly, given the period on display mostly consists of his dance years but the studio album right prior was the distorted angst oddity Animal Rights. A good chunk is familiar from Moby’s past albums, presented here with minor mixing and editing tweaks: even “Go” is here though it was never part of any soundtrack, but its Twin Peaks sample and the chance to reissue one of Moby’s early hit singles must have been enough for the label to include it. And what do you know, they’re also the album’s best songs: “Go”, “First Cool Hive” and “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” all rank among Moby’s best songs of the 90s and the remixing is barely noticable so none of their original charm has been lost. Even “Ah-Ah”, which was just another song on Moby’s debut, still jumps out here.

Given the nature of the compilation the incohesiveness is perfectly understandable, but coupled with the wildly varying quality it really doesn’t make the album more than a curio at best. Pairing random key early tracks with novelties like “I Like to Score” and “New Dawn Fades” (the former a short take on porn funk, the latter a full-on Animal Rights-’d up take on Joy Division) is only going to make the latter pale in comparison, and the wild mood and style swings make it a difficult album to actually ever want to listen to. Moby’s take on the iconic James Bond theme sums up 90s action move soundtracks perfectly and isn’t half bad, but hilariously feels completely like a fish out of water simply because of how obviously it stands out among all the soundtrack compilation filler around it. And, well, filler it largely is. Decent filler with occasional flashes of goodness (“Love Theme” in particular), but clearly nothing that Moby felt he would waste by placing it on some random soundtrack somewhere.

The back cover pre-assumptively states “Music from films Vol. 1” - a sequel hasn’t happened, despite Moby scoring a legitimate movie hit by licensing “Extreme Ways” for the Bourne trilogy some years after this compilation. Really, I Like to Score is less about its film connection and acts more like an outtakes collection to mop up some loose ends before Moby would switch gears in his musical career with the release of Play. Even for a fan, this is far from being as interesting as you’d initially think and it’s completely clear that most of this album’s merits fall to the songs that the film directors heard on Moby’s albums and found them so strong they felt they had to license them for their movies. Those songs also work better on their original albums than here. But if it’s completionism that you’re after, this fits the bill just fine.

Rating: 5/10

R.E.M. - Up (1998)

1) Airportman; 2) Lotus; 3) Suspicion; 4) Hope; 5) At My Most Beautiful; 6) The Apologist; 7) Sad Professor; 8) You’re in the Air; 9) Walk Unafraid; 10) Why Not Smile; 11) Daysleeper; 12) Diminished/I’m Not Over You; 13) Parakeet; 14) Falls to Climb

Channeling their internal confusion and melancholy through electronic elements and noise textures, R.E.M. begin anew and create their most ambitious and incredible record. 

Key tracks: "Walk Unafraid", "Daysleeper", "Falls to Climb"

First time I heard “Lotus”, one of the key singles from Up, I wasn’t particularly thrilled. Granted, I was about 10 and my music taste wasn’t particularly good at the time in general, but I still vividly remember hearing it and how odd and disjointed it sounded to my ears - to the degree that I still remember it. I guess many people were in a similar position to me at the time, likely including R.E.M. themselves. Bill Berry had left and given the others his blessing to continue without him, and they did so with mixed feelings, describing themselves as a three-legged dog. Things didn’t just have to change, they were forced to change. 1998 was a peak year for alternative rock heroes discovering electronics and R.E.M. found themselves caught in the tide by half-accident: occupying Berry’s empty drummer’s seat with drum machines was a logical step, but they dug deeper than just that, hiding their own troubled thoughts into sonic layers and scratching the traditional R.E.M. melodies with organised chaos.

It’s up for debate how much of it was influenced by the general melancholy lingering among the band at the time, but Up hatched into an introspective mood piece. Much of it is moves along the same mid-to-low tempo and the soundscape is full of detailed textures, soft keyboard walls and electronic fuzz. Peter Buck’s guitar takes a backseat and instead of his traditional bright melodies, he hides the harmony under distortion, replaces it with heavy e-bow treatment or leaves guitars out altogether in favour of keyboards. Stipe alternates between worn-out, frustrated and completely given up throughout the album and the narrator characters of his lyrics are all at their lowest point - people who have been beaten by the world and are too tired to rise up again, who succumb to accusing everyone else but themselves, feel eternally confused and out of place in the world, or just plain give up. The band members look sullen and lost in their own worlds in the back cover and that about sums it up. R.E.M. weren’t really ready to continue just yet, but they did and the emotional exert comes through in the music.

Despite the abrupt 180 in the mood from New Adventures’ rock and roll breeze, the band are still very clearly riding atop the creative wave that guided them through the 90s. Look no further than the opening twin act of Up, which is one of the most perfectly complimentary pairings of songs I’ve come across. “Airportman” starts the album in a most un-R.E.M.-like fashion, with a tiny electronic percussion pecking in the background while a strong, distorted bass appears and disappears intermittently amidst a sea of all sorts of ambient noise. A tiny piano melody seems to wander its own way, a tiniest trace of harmony all by itself, Stipe whispers and mutters his words almost incomprehensibly. This goes on for four minutes until the song gently fades into total silence. And then everything crashes. The next in line “Lotus” breaks the silence with a drum roll and launches into a surreally funky, thick and groovy number that sounds like it’s coming from the depths of a fever dream. The mood is tossed completely topsy-turvy from “Airportman”, the ambient drone switched into a loud interpretation of a rock song. But “Lotus” retains its mysterious atmosphere - Stipe’s lyrics border on nonsense in their extremely abstract obliqueness, his vocals are double-tracked throughout the song to play both the parts of a softly seductive whisperer and a guttural crooner, and the song’s instrumentation has something very beautifully unsettling to it with its swooping strings, thick bass and endlessly buzzing keyboard lines in the background, all the bells and whistles thrown around and throughout in-between (the band would release a “Weird Mix” of the song as a b-side to the single, which reverses the mix i.e. everything that was in the background is now in the fore and vice versa - you genuinely do not get just how busy the song is until you listen to it). Suffice to say I’ve turned my opinion around on “Lotus” from my ten-year-old self’s take on it, an as an opener salvo both “Airportman” and “Lotus” is a jawdropper.

“Lotus” is by far the most frenetic of Up’s lot but it’s far from the only curve ball the album throws; if anything, Up is nothing but curve balls. The running current through the album is its focus on the introspective aspects of R.E.M.’s music, but how it expresses that varies wildly. “The Apologist” swivels between self-loathing and one “I’m sorry” after another as it jumps from its loopy verses into something vaguely resembling a hook-oriented chorus, “Hope” pushes onward like a train in its electro-acoustic glory, covering its acoustic guitar bones with a dissonant electronic wail, “Walk Unafraid” increases the tempo to create something that resembles a traditional rock track although in a twisted, masqueraded form, with a habit of falling apart piece by piece. On the other end there’s the dreamy “Suspicion” with its gentle lullaby melody that sounds alarmingly otherwordly rather than soothing (and on an album bereft of traditional Buck moments, features a guitar solo), the gorgeously swirling “You’re in the Air” that reaches a place somewhere between desperate and aching, and “Diminished”, an unassumingly calm and collected with a dark heart, and another case of the arrangement favouring a selection of odds and ends to twist the song sonically into something far beyond its calm lurch forward. Even something as simple as “Why Not Smile” with its downstated melody and one of the most straightforward arrangements of the album, mostly centered around Mills’ organ, drowns itself into guitar feedback before too long, countering its own saccharine notions (or faux-saccharine, given the song can be either venomous or genuine depending who you ask).

What’s common with all these songs musically is the intricate attention to rhythm and the desire to distort the mood within the song. Without Berry’s steady drumming keeping the songs on track, it’s almost like the rhythm has gone off the rails: the metronome-esque drum machines tick perfectly in time, but they’re often accentuated by overlaid percussion or drum sections that are driven by fills. It gives Up a jilted feeling, a walk where the floor seems to almost give in with each step. The other hum and drum over the arrangements enhances that feel. R.E.M.’s utilisation of electronic elements isn’t just more prominent keyboards (although Mills gets the lead instrument role more often than Buck for much of the album), but it’s used to intentionally screw around with expectations: gentle songs with soft melodies covered in feedback and static, piercing synth lines and controlled chaos. It’s a fantastic sound: it’s the perfect accompaniment to the lyrics and the prevalent mood, keeping the listener on their toes and rewarding those who take the focus to sink into the production and the sound with fascinating details which alter songs forever as soon as you spot them.

Parts of Up do drop these obscuring elements and the stark nakedness and simple beauty of them are arresting in comparison. The ethereal and sleepy single “Daysleeper” captures its 2AM burnout blues mood perfectly and lifts off like a soothingly melancholy cloud: it’s the most traditionally R.E.M.-esque song on the album in a myriad of ways, from its tone to heavily band-centered arrangement, and on Up it serves as a palate cleanser and a brief oasis of straightforward grace. “Sad Professor” serves a similar purpose, an acoustic song full of late-night, isolationist melancholy that could have come from any album in the last decade of R.E.M. and now sounds like a traditional look back. It’s full of weary blues like nearly everything in Up, but there is a genuine spot of light as well: “At My Most Beautiful” is the album’s one moment of honest happiness. It’s R.E.M.’s most straightforward love song and a tribute to Beach Boys musically and vocally (with the vocal harmonies making up so much of its theme), a simple and heart-in-sleeve confession of pure love and infatuation in form of a celebration to all the silly little things you do when hopelessly in love. It’s the only moment on the album with no strings attached or doubt sown at the back of the mind and that alone makes it stand out, but it’s generally a little marvel of a song: a genuine heart-warmer of a love song. Both “Daysleeper” and “At My Most Beautiful” were also singles, somewhat deceivingly open invites to an album that otherwise retreats into itself.

That retreat makes Up special, though. The argument that a lot of the best music comes from personal hardships is painfully true too often, and it’s happened here as well. Up isn’t a traditional kind of R.E.M. album, certainly not a beginning of a new chapter even if it feels like it: it’s an abrupt interlude and gear change which needed to exist, rather than a new iteration of the band making their bold first step. But it’s an album soaked with meaning, feeling and power. Its dense sound is an aural chest of wonders that begins to create its own reality as it begins, enveloping the listener within the production and demanding attention to every little detail. Within that production is a selection of songs full of ache and confusion, brought forward by a captivating emotional performance. They’re songs that are subtler about their intentions than most of the band’s music, but which pack every bit as much strength inside them: if you want hooks you have them, but there’s a whole realm of inspiring musical passages, fantastic instrumental parts and fantastic areas where strong songwriting and deliberately emphasised production choices seamlessly merge, where both are as important as each other. It hits hard. Up isn’t a signifier of R.E.M.’s most obvious strengths but through the band challenging themselves and pushing through their hardships, they have created a superlative album that is, quite honestly, their best record.

That statement isn’t a slight towards Bill Berry - the man was essential, as some of the other later-day R.E.M. albums prove. And it’s a statement obviously loaded with an incredible amount of personal bias: over time Up has found me at times when I’ve needed something like it the most, it was one of the key albums that made me re-think and realise certain facets of music that I thoroughly love, and its weary mood mixed with its gorgeous songs have a power even today that takes me aback.
I’ve held back on mentioning Up’s closer until now. As fantastically as it started, Up’s complimenting bookend has a similar importance to its cycle. At the final moments of a long, contemplative album, “Falls to Climb” offers its final confessional. Built entirely around a swirling organ and Stipe’s tortured, waiting-on-release singing, “Falls to Climb” is the final act of release, with the narrator accepting his faults and the effects of his actions with martyr-like openess. The music gradually builds element by element each go-around, sometimes with bogus steps - the acoustic guitar that only appears for a moment before disappearing forever again - until it finally lifts off with a simple marching beat, Stipe yelling out his final lines of the album - “I am free” - over and over again before the music quietens down. It’s the perfect finale for Up: an emotional expunge to settle the score, to bury the emotional conflicts of the album and to relieve as much the narrator as the listener. It’s one of the very best songs R.E.M. ever did, and as a closer it’s one of the rare ones which present such an impactful finale that after the album stops to silence and you emerge back into the real world, everything feels a little different, your own emotional charge feels different.

It’s hard for me to describe exactly why, but this is among the very, very greatest records ever for me, likely even in the top 2 of all time if you want to go list-y. Should I consider reasons why I love music so much, it’s albums like this.

Rating: 10/10

Arcade Fire - Arcade Fire EP (2003)

1) Old Flame; 2) I'm Sleeping in a Submarine; 3) No Cars Go; 4) The Woodlands National Anthem; 5) My Heart Is an Apple; 6) Headlights Look Like Diamonds; 7) Vampire/Forest Fire

Hard to call this the meager beginnings given how big this sounds at times, but in the AF scale of things it's the humble beginnings. Everything you like about the band can be found here, just with a cosier tone.  

Key tracks: "Old Flame", "I'm Sleeping in a Submarine", "Headlights Look Like Diamonds"

You can already hear it on this humble debut EP, which likely wouldn't get half the attention it's received if it wasn't for the album that followed, that Arcade Fire operate on Big Ideas and they were reaching for a Big Sound to go with them from the get-go. As far as low-key debuts go, the Arcade Fire EP (or Us Kids Know, as I've sometimes heard it called) is more ambitious than most, and certainly one of the more bombastic. Part of what makes Funeral so special and Arcade Fire such a force overall is the combination of personal songwriting with a decidedly anthemic sound you can sing along to with your brethren crowds; that goal has been there from the start, and in a lot of ways this is like a prototype for Funeral. Just cosier and less dynamic.

At this stage the big ideas are coming from a relatively inexperienced band who sound like they're recording this at their own home, and the general recording aesthetic matches this. Where Funeral would feature a quadrilogy of songs about a neighbourhood getting snowed in, the cuts here sound like what you'd expect from a band holed up inside a room during the cold winter. The tip-toe shuffling and piano-twirling "I'm Sleeping in a Submarine" and the world-weary"Heart Is an Apple" are natural born torchlight moments with an "(Acoustic)" tag tacked onto them, and "The Woodlands National Anthem" is mostly built around just vocals, an acoustic guitar and some assorted handclaps and random percussion, but it still sounds like there's an intent to fill the entire room with its sound. It's a band dreaming to be big yet not quite having the setup to go all the way, but they're doing the best they can with what they do have and that will goes a long way: even with the stakes lowered there's still a kind of grandeur to these could-be anthems.

The intensity that Arcade Fire are famous for is also present here already, and the best songs of the EP reflect that. Both "Old Flame" and "Headlights Look Like Diamonds" are high-speed and high-energy, the group putting their all into a couplet of songs that rush through with the joy and thrill of a new band finding their wings. "Old Flame" is a great way to kick off the EP, full of drama with its accordion and strings raising the wind in its pounding rhythm, but "Headlights Look Like Diamonds" is absolutely the highlight of the entire EP, Both guitar and glockenspiel riffs that are instantly imprinted in your head, a strong backbone of a thumping beat that explodes into a flurry as the vocals go crazy, and the inspired flicking between the tightening hook of the verses and the flood-like rush of sheer vibrant joy that is the chorus - it's the anthem the rest of the EP has paved the way for. At the end of the the journey the band lift off and become genuinely huge with the colossal crescendo of "Vampire/Forest Fire", starting out as a decisively moody americana ballad with synths and growing in intensity from thereon into a wall of sound where you get a glimpse of the furious show force the band would become famous for on stage.

That's kind of what you can expect from the EP - familiar traits but with a more grassroots tone. The anthemic heights are there, the expanded instrumentation beyond the usual rock band sounds rears its head frequently and both Butler and Chassagne's vocals have already found their signature tones (and Chassagne practically takes co-lead vocals throughout the EP). If you heard this before the band had released anything else, I imagine it would've been quite stunning; and even now, in a world where one will likely come to this after hearing most of the other releases, it's still plenty enjoyable even if the songwriting isn't quite the perfect sharpness yet. The only slight disappointment here is the somewhat flaccid version of "No Cars Go", a song that would go on to become one of the band's defining songs some years later when re-recorded for Neon Bible; and I guess that's likely the only reason it sounds disappointing because the version here already has many of the same ideas that would carry over to the re-recording, it just doesn't sound quite as regal and gorgeously gigantic as the later version does. It does beg the question if any of the other songs here would suffer from the same had they been recreated with a more refined touch later on, and I've definitely made amends with it over the years, but even acknowledging that it still feels a little off in that familiar-but-not-quite way.

Besides that, it's hard to really fault this, even if it's hard to praise it to high heavens either in the overall context of the Arcade Fire back catalogue. The Arcade Fire playing here are still an unrefined version of themselves, full of fire but occasionally uneven: as a first ever recording it's great and humongously inspired, but it's also obvious it's more of a launch board for future achievements than a completely realised work on its own. Still, the songs are good and occasionally honestly great, and you can detect traces of Funeral's magic throughout - it's almost like a more intimate flipside for that album. The band likely never imagined this would continue to have the kind of widespread release it does but I'm glad it's had the relative longevity, even if among the hardcore perhaps, because it's still a worthwhile listen.

Rating: 7/10

Physical corner: Gatefold with a fold-out lyrics sheet.

R.E.M. - New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996)

1) How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us; 2) The Wake-Up Bomb; 3) New Test Leper; 4) Undertow; 5) E-Bow the Letter; 6) Leave; 7) Departure; 8) Bittersweet Me; 9) Be Mine; 10) Binky the Doormat; 11) Zither; 12) So Fast, So Numb; 13) Low Desert; 14) Electrolite

A road trip that arguably does the best job possible in distilling the very essence of R.E.M. and its many varied forms under the covers of one studio album. 

Key tracks: "New Test Leper", "E-Bow the Letter", "Bittersweet Me"

R.E.M.’s move to a more electrified direction in the mid-90s had an infamous aftermath. With the style shift inspired by a desire to go on stage again the band naturally embarked on an extended world tour following Monster, which in hindsight turned out to be a terrible decision. The tour was plagued by a number of problems throughout its run, including a number of health issues within the band which culminated in Bill Berry’s brain aneurysm, leaving him to retire the band after recovery for the sake of his own physical well-being. The incident gave the era an ominous end that often overshadows the period’s big positive: the band’s greatly increased creativity. The band had a lot of songs coming out, and the audience were treated each night to at least one song that hadn’t yet seen an official release. R.E.M. had never really managed to fully capture their live energy in studio despite their best efforts earlier on, and eventually someone came up with the idea of why bother trying to replicate when you could just record those news songs as they happened. New Adventures in Hi-Fi was released during the Monster tour and is a curious mixture of a live and studio record, featuring a set of brand new songs recorded throughout the tour in soundchecks and on stage, audience noise mixed to nothing, with a handful of brand new studio recordings scattered within. It was a brand new studio album as much as it was a road trip recollection, with travel photos and place names adorning the liner notes, and it is about as unpolished as R.E.M. could be at the time.

New Adventures acts much like a road trip too, traveling around and spotting new sights along the way - in sound it’s one of R.E.M.’s most varied. The body of the songs is still very heavily guitar-driven as per the band’s general guideline at the time, but there’s a marked move past Monster’s walls of fuzz into a more freewheeling, natural direction, shuffling through various R.E.M. traits of the past but with a kick in the backbone and a rawer tone. When the band do stray from the central sound, they go over and beyond: there’s absolutely nothing on the rest of the album that sounds like the piano-led casual stroll “Electrolite”, the deeply atmospheric “E-Bow the Letter” and the melancholy Western drawl of “How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us” (which completely blows away my general theory that each R.E.M. album starter is a perfect descriptor for the rest of the record), and they don’t even sound like each other. And yet, they make perfect sense in the context because of how wild-spirited and lively New Adventures in general is (hilariously, these are also three of the album’s four singles).

The idea to capture R.E.M. alive in their natural habitat also has the trait of making it clear how great a rock band they really were. While they very obviously always operated within that wide genre net, you could rarely call them exemplary of what we think about when we imagine what a rock band is like: being initially too gentle for it in the early days and then obstructed by the arrangement choices of the turn of the 90s, and even the hyper-rock of Monster was so over-the-top it could come off parodical. This time, due to the live atmosphere around most of New Adventures and how everyone is playing together simultaneously, not only does their beefed-up stage sound show up in all its strength but also the energy and chemistry of the context have been captured perfectly, and through it R.E.M. soar. New Adventures is R.E.M.’s most energetic album if only because of the power the band share between each other - but speedy powerhouses like “So Fast, So Numb”, “Departure” and “The Wake-Up Bomb” exemplify that energy literally as well. It’s a dumb thing to say from a pseudo-live album but it feels alive, every song running electrified and everyone’s performance amped up.

Indeed, if Monster saw the band answering their reputation as alternative rock champions by posing as an archetypal rock band, then this is R.E.M. answering for that moniker genuinely. They tone down some of Monster’s eccentricities and bring back the signature R.E.M.-tone, but keep the fire under their feet. “Bittersweet Me” sounds like a classic 90s rock song right from the first listen and is full of the yearning and ache while still having that swagger and cool around it. “Be Mine” on the other hand is a stadium torchlight moment built for the band’s growing crowds - complete with an exploding kick and guitar rev-ups right near the end -  but has a vulnerability, a warm human touch that still makes it feel intimate. “Undertow” is all churning guitar noise and pounding drums, exploding as it sees fit. At times it’s genuinely intense: the seven-minute “Leave” is the band’s longest song overall and it spends nearly all of that length winding itself more and more tense, stuck in its own dark musical loop while Michael’s voice grows more and more desperate. The era had its darker underbelly with the band’s fatigue and internal tensions resulting from it, and “Leave” is a reminder of it lurking in the background.

With the twists and turns it takes and how well it showcases the band themselves, New Adventures in Hi-Fi actually comes across as a quintessential R.E.M. album, in a way. It shows so many of the band’s sides from the rowdy to the intimate, the dark and the light, and the quirky sense of humour and the emotional sincerity, that it’s like a self-composed best of mixtape, representing the band in a nutshell - especially with their strengths both in studio and stage environment presented organically together, blending into one another. Just to hammer the point, among all the other excellent tracks there are a couple of integral cornerstone songs for the band. One is “New Test Leper” which is arguably the most R.E.M.-like song ever conceived, the one song that defines their signature sound and all the elements that make it from Buck’s jangles to Mills’ characteristic bass, paired with a gorgeous melody and an emotional charge that make it a fantastic song in general. Another is “E-Bow the Letter”, a haunting semi-spoken word piece guided by the ethereal sound of the titular gadget and backed by Patti Smith’s world-weary vocals, with a sonic richness that could only come from studio (it’s one of the few songs here recorded in a traditional environment). It’s the sound of every insomniac night spent staring through windows, every last stretch of a long journey, every moment of introspection and eventual flicker to a state of calming still. The verses pull you under the waves, the choruses bounce back upon through Buck’s chiming guitar riff. If it’s not R.E.M.’s best song it’s tied with whatever its biggest competitor is. It’s a phenomenal song - and of course, amusingly enough, a complete break from rest of New Adventures both in sound and spirit.

There’s plenty of other great moments too - particular favourites include the cheekily sex-obsessed Monster leftover “Binky the Doormat”, the impossibly feel-good “Electrolite” that always makes the world a little better and the hypnotic, unique shuffle of “How the West Was Won”, all which are completely different from one another and shine in wholly different ways. The batting average is very, very high here, with the only real dent being the short throwaway interlude “Zither”, and even that’s pleasant for what it is. Thus, New Adventures in Hi-Fi is like a parade of triumph, and it’s appropriately so given it closes off an era, even if completely by accident and not in the happiest of circumstances. With Berry’s departure sneakily lurking ahead, New Adventures is a convenient encapsulation of everything that came before musically, a summing up of the band. It is more a continuation than a re-definition in its nature and thus not necessarily an obvious stand-out in the band’s discography, but it’s slyly a classic in its own right: if it’s like a victory lap, it’s one that’s well in due. There’d be a change after this album, not for worse but for different nonetheless, and New Adventures is a brilliant and fitting send-off for the band as four-piece.

Rating: 9/10

R.E.M. - Monster (1994)

1) What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?; 2) Crush with Eyeliner; 3) King of Comedy; 4) I Don’t Sleep, I Dream; 5) Star 69; 6) Strange Currencies; 7) Tongue; 8) Bang and Blame; 9) I Took Your Name; 10) Let Me In; 11) Circus Envy; 12) You

Glam! Sleaze! Fuzz pedals! Riffs! And a whole load of great and surprisingly conflicted songs hiding underneath the loud textures.

Key tracks: "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", "Crush with Eyeliner", "Bang and Blame"

By 1994, R.E.M. had become a grand success story with critical and commercial acclaim pouring from everywhere, but very atypically they had done this without touring for their two recent hit albums. What had started as a temporary hiatus turned into an extended studio venture where the band didn’t feel the need to restrain themselves to a four-piece live setup. The spark of life for Monster was R.E.M.’s plan to return to the live setting and to go with it, after two relatively calmer albums, have a record more suitable for the stage. They’d become a signature band for the 90s alternative rock movement but without much of the whole ‘rock’ part of it, but that was about to change.

Monster isn’t quite as straightforward as its idea of a rock 'n’ riff record (or as someone on the internet once put it, the album where Peter Buck discovers the fuzz pedal) would seem to be at first glance. The elaborate string arrangements and acoustic guitars have been pushed off from the way of more and even more electric guitars, but when Monster is described as a rock record, it’s just as much an album about rock and roll. It’s full of cocksure rock star posturing, the kind where cool shades and suggestive poses pave way for trashing hotel rooms, with a hint of detached irony you’d expect from a rock band in the 90s. The more you familiarise yourself with Monster, the more apparent it is that the album openly embraces that semi-cliched rock star bravado, both honestly as well as on a meta level.

It goes far enough that it feels like straightforward escapism for the band. Despite their recent success R.E.M. were in fact in a bad shape at the time, culminating in a literal (obviously temporary) split during the sessions. Monster’s masquerade act is almost like deliberately moving away from what being in R.E.M. was meant to be like, running away from the fame by being something completely different. Michael Stipe, a known introvert, had turned into one of the world’s most known rock stars over the last couple of years and his lyrics on Monster are frequently written from the point of view of lust-driven, brashly egomaniac characters so at odds with his usual self that initially it can be downright jarring. The grunge-esque posturing and relentless walls of fuzz are deliberately exaggerated and over-the-top, almost as an act against the people who joined the band’s followers with the previous albums. Occasionally Monster seems to acknowledge this - one of the unused song titles listed in the liner notes is “Yes, I Am Fucking With You” after all - but the lines between R.E.M. the rock band and R.E.M. the Conceptual Rock Band are constantly blurred.

Approach it from whichever angle you will, Monster acts as a big reminder that actually, R.E.M. can be a real strong rock band when they want to. Buck’s guitar approach here is relatively straightforward but he knows what he’s doing with all the fuzz and distortion, and still scatters the occasional neat little detail here and there like the little “fills” of “King of Comedy”. Mills’ bass actually ends up taking most of the melodic leads this time. which slots in just fine with his style. The songs themselves are more basic than on most R.E.M. albums but the focus is on the right parts: make each section hook you in and hit you with a good musical muscle. Just as importantly, Monster is a really fun album, regardless of the mental health of its creators or the meta-side of its lyrics. It’s irresistibly rock and roll, sometimes in a knowingly dumb way: full of swagger and posture, glam winks on top of groovy bass riffs and walls of loud guitars. Stipe’s characters here may mostly be sleazebags but he performs them with such bravado that it’s hard to resist their rock star charm. The tunes are bouncy and filled with all kinds of tongue-in-cheek twists and details from particularly fun backing vocal cameos to little musical tidbits that make the songs bounce and come alive. And with straightforwardness comes a certain kind of strength in simplicity: focus on instant hook choruses and effectively snappy verses, which lend the songs a power of their own when done this well.

Most of Monster is made out of songs built from the same kind of loud guitar walls with a hint of a groove leading the rhythm underneath, but you’d be surprised how much variance the band squeeze out of the same elements. The swaggering “Crush With Eyeliner” and statement-of-intent like “I Took Your Name” are most exemplary of what Monster tries to go for, but you’ve got off-shoots like the garage punk-like “Star 69” which utilises the same building blocks for a completely different mood. Lead single “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” comes closest to a more typical R.E.M. cut pushed through a fuzz filter and has that infectious hit quality to it, and it’s a great song, but as a contrast you’ve got hypnotic deep cuts like “Bang and Blame” and the cold and mechanical “King of Comedy” which are far from sing-along crowd-pleasers. They’re among the album’s best though, and “Bang and Blame” in particular is a little masterpiece: it’s largely guided by Mills’ bass with Buck taking a shockingly minimalist guitar direction to contrast the rest of the album, which already gives it a strangely unnerving disposition when in context, but the way the song tweaks its verses with little additional instrumental parts and how the simple but effective chorus breaks the tension down are almost ingenious.

Even slow cuts like the torchlight anthem “Strange Currencies” or the moody swivel of “I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” operate largely by the same standards as rest of the album. “Tongue” is the big outlier for the entire album, with its slow dance comedown vibes and fragile falsetto. It’s a very bittersweet song, full of ache yet somehow sounding really adorable, lyrics full of disgust but presented in a song that’s musically ideal for tender cuddling. Out of the quieter songs it’s the big standout, but it’s hard to say whether it’s the best one or if that title belongs to “Let Me In”, which is a polar opposite musically. “Let Me In” is the one part of Monster where R.E.M. drop all antics and sound completely genuine - tragically, it’s due to grief. It’s their eulogy to Kurt Cobain, a close friend of the whole band, and it’s as devastating as you’d expect. The shoegaze-like atmospherics, full of distortion and noise only broken by faint other elements like light percussion and a simple keyboard melody, do little to hide the band’s grief. It’s an arresting song, and amidst all the fun it’s a bit of a reality check to how the band was genuinely feeling at the time. And to some sequencing credit, Monster doesn’t do a 180 after it, with “Circus Envy” sounding more muted compared to the other direct rock cuts and the closer “You” curls up into a claustrophobic, slow-burning mood drop of a closer, far from the rock and roll feel-good stroll the album started out with.

And what an intriguing album it is. Monster’s nature, with all of its stylistic subversions and sudden sonic transformations, makes it one of the most conceptually curious parts of R.E.M.’s discography and something far deeper than its more straightforward tendencies and fashionably grungy sound give it credit to. That alone makes it interesting, but what rarely gets said is just how tight a listen it is. Compared to the previous few it’s downright basic in its approach, but R.E.M. nail down those basics: while musically the album might consist of little more than loud electric vibes and snappy choruses, they’re pulled off really damn well on Monster. Each song is a standout of some sort and contributes something unique to the whole, and they’re all infectious in a way you want a muscular rock song to be like. Or to put it as directly as the album presents itself, in the end Monster’s qualities boil down to a very simple thing: a band in their peak performing great songs with immense gusto and refreshing - if a bit strange and potentially utterly false - sense of fun.

Rating: 8/10

R.E.M. - Automatic for the People (1992)

1) Drive; 2) Try Not to Breathe: 3) The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite: 4) Everybody Hurts; 5) New Orleans Instrumental No. 1; 6) Sweetness Follows; 7) Monty Got a Raw Deal; 8) Ignoreland; 9) Star Me Kitten; 10) Man on the Moon; 11) Nightswimming; 12) Find the River

The quintessential R.E.M. experience. Somber but not sad, grand but intimate, and a masterpiece of songwriting and arrangement.

Key tracks: "Drive", "Try Not to Breathe", "Man on the Moon"

The two albums preceding Automatic for the People - Green and Out of Time - saw R.E.M. broadening their scope and actively pushing their sound forward. One of the defining characteristics for those albums is their variance, full of stylistic experiments and the overall sound dominated by the band introducing new elements. They are classic albums in their own right, and a great deal of their quality is due to how fearlessly the band followed every instinct and idea they had. Automatic for the People, released roughly a year after Out of Time (made easier by the band’s decision not to tour in-between), is the logical conclusion: the new depth the band now had in their sound utilised for a cohesive collection of songs rather than every single separate idea.

R.E.M. cemented their legacy with the result.

One of the things I’ve harped on about on my R.E.M. reviews - and one I’ll probably continue to mention in my future ones - is how R.E.M. have always been masters of choosing the perfect opening song that lays out a statement for the album and signals its intentions right from the start. “Drive” once again does the same: the quiet acoustic base, the increasing dynamics that take the song from minor beginnings to something unpredictable and grand, and the orchestral touch which gives the song its grandeur are all elements that replicate throughout Automatic for the People in varying degrees. But the key thing is the mood: the heavy melancholy that follows the track around, from Stipe’s low drawl to the slow crawl of the music. R.E.M. haven’t been unfamiliar with a moody streak but “Drive” makes it its signature element. Automatic is an album that lets the atmospheric side of the band’s writing take the wheel, and focuses on setting a particular contemplative mood.

Don’t mistake that for sadness. Automatic is obsessed with mortality and loss, literal or metaphorical - death and fleeting time feature throughout the album’s imagery, and even when nothing is ticking away the characters in the songs are still obsessed with their own personal legacies and what will eventually be left behind. But the overall atmosphere is more elegiac than anything: finding the small moments of hope during the darkest times and celebrating life where you can. “Try Not to Breathe” is literally about the last thoughts of an old man dying but with Buck’s gorgeous guitar work and Mills and Berry’s heavenly harmonies, it sounds like a song of praise rather than a lament. Despite the somber tones of the record the band frequently let the songs soar away from the melancholy within.

In fact, I’d make a case for that Automatic for the People is ultimately a carefully joyous album, even if that joy is at times reflected through one kind of sadness or another. Take “Everybody Hurts”, the big break-out power ballad that’s become one of the de facto sad bastard songs in popular culture, but which is ultimately a shoulder to lean against and a helping hand to pick you up, more concerned in conquering the melancholy than dwelling in it. “Nightswimming” and “Find the River” are laced with nostalgia but it’s happy that these moments in life happened rather than being sad about them now having gone. This kind of uplifting melancholy is at the center of Automatic and makes it a wistful yet ultimately celebratory experience. This also helps it tie its various songs together and makes everything fit into the whole. The hyper-happy, stream-of-consciousness jangle pop of “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite”, which riffs on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and is so upbeat that Stipe breaks into a giggle halfway through a line at one point, initially comes off like another style-shattering stand-out along the lines of “Stand” or “Shiny Happy People”, but finds a cohesive footing with the other songs through the warmth that beats even within the album’s darkest moments. Similarly “Man on the Moon” is the album’s great culmination point in this regard, picking up all the strands of nostalgia and loss and bundling them into a life-affirming anthem that’s close to a catharsis for everything before.

Automatic gets the grace it needs to balance all these emotional building blocks via the expansion of sound and increased detail of arrangement R.E.M. had worked on during the past couple of albums, forming an appropriate musical backing to match Stipe. The general, more acoustic-based approach hasn’t changed much from Out of Time and effectively pegs Automatic as the former’s sibling album, and similarly that core is used as a launchpad for an expanded palette. The intricate orchestral sections (arranged by former Led Zeppelin John Paul Jones) give the music wings, and in particular the moments when they suddenly appear during “Drive” and “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” are incredible flashes of brilliance that change the tone of the songs in an instant. The expanded instrumental section puts more weight than ever into Mills’ piano and keyboard playing, with several of the songs carried by Mills’ delicate playing, while Buck’s increased armory of string instruments keep his part of the sound varied throughout, flicking between styles from distorted guitars to gently plucked mandolin. Berry and Mills also go all-out with their harmonies, working together over multiple songs to counter Stipe’s drawl and their backing vocals become integral to the songs’ impact, be it call-and-answer or wordless melodies. The level of detail in the carefully arranged layers is stupendous and Automatic expects you to pay attention to it, hiding intricacies even in its quietest moments (the countdown in the beginning of “Drive” took me an embarrassing amount of years to hear). Automatic is honestly beautiful both on a technical level and in its arrangements, and the sound they have chosen for the album give it its vulnerable, intimate warmth. Even the instrumental interlude (“New Orleans Instrumental No. 1”) resonates, evoking that quiet solemn moment late at night when staring through the window into the sleeping world and everything is still in life for a while.

That even the most obvious filler cut among the tracklist can bring up an emotional reaction like that is to the band’s credit, and underlines why Automatic for the People is such a special album. It’s a stunningly beautiful album, sometimes tragic and sometimes uplifting, but always one that tugs for a reaction straight from the heart. The music has an inherent richness and warmth to it which make it emotionally charged, and while Stipe’s lyrics tell very specific stories for most of Automatic, there’s a quality to them and the words he uses which feel like they manage to condense something very integral to the entire human experience within some verses and choruses. And of course, the songs themselves and the writing. The layers of Automatic aren’t used just to place instruments together but to add up strong melodies and gorgeous musical moments together. The songwriting on Automatic is gold on its own, right down to its curveballs: the grunge-lite “Ignoreland” gives the album a fire in its belly just when it needed one, and “Star Me Kitten” is a genuine delight whether you take it on face value as a dreamy lullaby and find amusement on how its soothing surface is matched with one of Stipe’s unashamedly thirstiest lyrics. You don’t really even need the intricacies: strip these songs down to their acoustic core and they’d be touching as is. “Nightswimming” is just piano, strings and Stipe and yet it’s enormously powerful and the kind of thing that happy tears were made for, and the relatively straightforward mid-tempo alt rocker “Monty Got a Raw Deal” is arguably the album’s best kept secret, a parallel universe hit anthem dressed up in modest garbs, navigating somewhere between swaggering and mystical with a one-two punch chorus hooks with both Buck’s simple guitar melody and Mills’ backing vocals. It’s a set of incredible songs, and a blunt statement like that is probably the best way to put it across - arguably better than a lot of my usual waffling about.

These songs are so incredible in fact that Automatic is among my all-time favourites. Unlike many other albums in that small category, Automatic hasn’t become so because it tied itself to one particular part of my life and became an important channel of expression forevermore; instead, it’s a relationship that’s grown from the enchanted initial listens to this state where I find myself emotionally rejuvenated whenever the album has finished playing. Even without the personal bias Automatic is a stunning album, an example of a band at their prime in a remarkable creative spree, following their instincts flawlessly. It’s the kind of concentration of quality that every artist aspires to make and which takes select creative and contextual sparks in order to happen. Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe not only managed to strike those sparks but made them so strong the warmth from them is still there each listen. They managed to contain something essential about life into their album; through that, it’s integrally tied into mine.

Rating: 10/10

R.E.M. - Out of Time (1991)

1) Radio Song; 2) Losing My Religion; 3) Low; 4) Near Wild Heaven; 5) Endgame; 6) Shiny Happy People; 7) Belong; 8) Half a World Away; 9) Texarkana; 10) Country Feedback; 11) Me in Honey

Wildly flailing in every direction, with numerous sound experiments and genre exercises. And yet, somehow this became a hit. And moreso, a real classic in general.

Key tracks: "Losing My Religion", "Belong", "Country Feedback"

What a bizarre album to become the one that turned R.E.M. into one of the biggest bands on Earth. Out of Time is a borderline messy jumble of different styles and various kinds of experiments, a band at the crossroads of development with the intent to go in all directions. It had two big hit singles. One of them is not just one of the most legendary songs of the 90s but a completely timeless, iconic classic -  an otherwordly confessional with a chorus so subtle that it doesn’t even really exist, a song that genuinely sounds magical and unique. The other is a silly novelty bubblegum pop song. Not that the rest of the album is any more consistent. There is a general trend of the band picking up acoustic instruments throughout the album but between spoken word jams, gentle instrumentals, funk rock, saccharine pop songs and heartrending laments, Out of Time never stays still in one place.

The wild movements signal a desire to grow, and Out of Time is a major milestone for R.E.M. in that regard. This is where the pieces really begin to fall in place, after the groundwork that Green paved. Green - itself a very varied album - generally acts as Out of Time’s blueprint. The lush sound that appeared in Green are taken even further, the band’s arrangements growing ever more detailed and masterful, and the taste for a less hurried tone that Green foreshadowed is now the norm. But a lot has changed within the band as well, with everyone more confidently rising into the spotlight and exercising their own skills and creativity: expanded instrumentation, casual role swaps and general do-anything mentality give Out of Time a richer palette and really highlights the band members. This is especially true for the two Mikes. Mills had sung the lead vocal on a few covers prior to now, but on Out of Time he gets two R.E.M. originals to sing on prominent display. The honey-sweet, effortlessly pretty “Near Wild Heaven” even became a single, which further underlined the band’s confidence in their own changes. The other song, the americana rocker “Texarkana”, arguably shows off Mills’ vocals even more confidently.

It’s Stipe, though, who undergoes the greatest metamorphosis on Out of Time. Where he once mumbled his way through the songs and intentionally hid his voice among the instruments, he’s now embraced the microphone and pours his heart out into his vocals, with a sharpened lyrical pen where the words deserve to be heard through the new clarity in his voice. Throughout the album he channels a gamut of emotions from heartrending to lighthearted and always comes across reaching personally to the listener. It’s on Out of Time where Stipe becomes one of the greatest frontmen in rock. R.E.M. were about to take over the world and Stipe sounds like he’s ready for the role.

The jumble of sounds is the result of the band being high on their newly-strengthened confidence and the fearlessness that results from it, but it’s precisely that confidence which makes such an odds and sods collection work so well. R.E.M. have discovered new peaks to their creativity and are riding them with abandon, putting everything of themselves behind each song and revelling in the results. Credit to the production and general background work where it’s due: cohesive sound elements run through Out of Time to make funk rock anthems, existential crises and shiny happy pop songs best friends, and the carefully thought out sequencing is genuinely experience-enricheningly good here. The rich, warm tones running throughout production also make the album sound instantly welcoming and full of heart, and it’s used to back one of R.E.M.’s greatest set of songs. That statement includes the instrumental interlude “Endgame” in all of its serenity as well as the pariah singalong “Shiny Happy People”, which is a genuinely brilliant song where it doesn’t matter whether it’s meant to be sarcastic or not, it’s just so heartwarmingly positive regardless. “Losing My Religion” – rather obviously – towers over everything: it’s a one of a kind of a song, a truly jawdropping piece of music where everything, from the arrangement to the melodies, the lyrics, the performance and the sheer emotion it evokes is spellbinding. Everything considered though, the rest of the album isn’t overshadowed by it at all. “Country Feedback” is the other bonafide classic of the set, as Stipe purges his guts over a desert dirge ballad in a fashion that sticks to your mind for good, delivering the downright rawest performance. The disarmingly gorgeous mood moment “Half a World Away” and half spoken word, half wordless soar “Belong” have always been big personal favourites out of the less mentioned songs, and “Texarkana” suits Mills’ softer vocal tone so perfectly that it could have been a perfect launchpad for a solo career.

Despite all that, Out of Time still feels almost understated and underspoken about, but you can understand it in a way: it doesn’t have a consistent stylistic angle of much of the band’s more praised works, and outside “Losing My Religion” and “Country Feedback” it lacks in the canonised standout moments. It has all the characteristics of a transitional album, the theoretically awkward step from the 80s indie heroes to Automatic for the People’s acoustic laments. Yet every single song has been crafted with such love and dedication that it transcends that notion and becomes a fully-fledged, fully-fleshed piece of great work on its own, defined by its wild swings everywhere but always keeping the heart in the same place. It’s a slightly bizarre, messy album, but it’s wrapped in homey warmth and wonderful tunes. It’s not an obvious classic perhaps, but nonetheless a brilliant moment for R.E.M.

Out of Time’s name is rather literal - it was chosen when the band was running out of time to name the album as it was about to go to print - but its more abstract reading is perfect for the album. There’s a timeless quality to the songs contained within, where they don’t feel like they’re tied to any particular decade: both thanks to the still-strong production as well as the songs that themselves are outside any kind of temporal bubble (apart from perhaps “Radio Song”, which is great fun and genuinely infectious, but also very early 90s). It’s a beautiful album and completely evergreen, ageless and nothing like anything before or since – utterly unique without even trying to reach for it. It’s the album that raised R.E.M. into well deserved stardom, the one where they certified their status as one of the greatest of all time and it contains one of the greatest songs ever recorded. The band made better albums, sure, but that’s incredible in its own self. Out of Time is nothing short of a classic.

Rating: 9/10

R.E.M. - Green (1988)

1) Pop Song 89; 2) Get Up; 3) You Are the Everything; 4) Stand; 5) World Leader Pretend; 6) The Wrong Child; 7) Orange Crush; 8) Turn You Inside-Out; 9) Hairshirt; 10) I Remember California; 11) The Eleventh Untitled Song

Palette expansion. The beginning of the golden age of R.E.M. and the birth of many of their modern-day traits.

Key tracks: "You Are the Everything", "World Leader Pretend", "Orange Crush"

Green has a very strong, incredibly evocative association with summer for me. Not even general summer, but long summer evenings in particular: the calm and quiet ones where the world is starting to slow down to the night but the sun is still up in the horizon and the air is still warm. That particular seasonal stillness is captured perfectly within Green, much of it due to specific personal reasons (guess the season I first got into Green and the time of the day I found myself binging on it) but the album invites the mental images readily itself. It’s at times upbeat and perky, other times soothing and always, always very lush. It’s a sonically rich step for R.E.M.: the first album where it feels genuinely possible for R.E.M. to actually evoke something very specific like this.

Green is of course also R.E.M.’s big jump to a major label, from I.R.S. to Warner. It’s a strange record to make a mainstream entrance with, going a little everywhere and most of the times in places the band hadn’t really touched upon much earlier on. Warner graced R.E.M. with brand new recording possibilities and the band took advantage of this. Green’s theme became one of everyone trying out different roles, testing new instruments and introducing wildly different ideas one after another. The band have effectively abandoned the concept of a core group with rigid roles here in favour of expanding the scope of what the band as a whole could do and evolve into. The hidden track “The Eleventh Untitled Song” features the most extreme version of this where every player in the band swapped instruments on a whim (Buck’s drumming in particular has a rather unorthodox rhythm), and while Green as a whole isn’t quite as radical that same “try anything” mentality runs throughout. Simultaneously the band started to pay more attention to the actual recording and production of the songs they were coming up with: with an increased amount of layers, more atmospheric touches and a more orchestrated nature Green’s songs started taking a different tone to the more straightforward approach of the earlier years. It wouldn’t be too far off to say that the expansion of the soundworld the band could now pull off directly affected the songwriting and the style the band adopted for Green as well: the possibilities guiding the directions the band could take.

That said, it’s hard to pinpoint where exactly Green’s style lies, because it’s one of the most varied collections of songs in R.E.M.’s catalogue. The political consciousness which featured heavily on Document hasn’t gone anywhere and R.E.M. made sure to use their growing spotlight to speak about the state of the country and the world whenever they could. Green is a part of that sentiment, right down to the environmental title, and as opposed to the general observations of Document “Orange Crush” and “World Leader Pretend” feel like actual protest songs: one in the shape of a sharp call-to-arms anthem which perfects stadium rocker ideas of Document, and the other a stupendously gorgeous and darkly foreboding mid-tempo that has the band’s enriched sonic aesthetics right on the forefront. But then that political consciousness is right next to the most ludicrously *pop* set of songs R.E.M. had committed to tape yet. Sometime during the sessions for Green the band got really into the idea of trying to write bubblegum pop songs and in fact, that’s the first impression Green gives from itself when the unashamedly catchy and upbeat “Pop Song 89” and “Get Up” kick off the album. “Stand” on the other hand is one of the most ridiculous things R.E.M. ever committed to tape: a self-aware Sesame Street sing-along with nonsensical but awfully catchy lyrics, an airheadedly upbeat feel and a wah-wah solo that goes down in history as one of the silliest things Buck has played. It’s stupid, but it’s hilariously brilliant.

The lush nature of Green is what ties the album’s wildly reaching strains together. Whether Stipe is shouting in the megaphone, rhyming a ditty or softly crooning like he does in so many of the album’s quieter moments placed in-between, Green is blossoming in details. Its sound has depth and while the styles differ, the productional approach unites the album’s various ideas. There’s some cunning tracklist sequencing going on too: the jangly pop is largely located in the first steps, the moodier or more muscular songs are towards the end (including the excellent proto-grunge headbanger “Turn You Inside Out” or the brooding “I Remember California” which has seen none of the light the album started with) and the center of the album is a sequence of mood pieces that act as the bridge. The occasional cross-pollination between the sections helps bridge the gaps, and through it Green becomes a cohesive whole, running from idea to idea but making the transition sound natural across the whole stretch.

On a completely personal level, it’s neither the pop or the politics which defines Green but it’s that subtler middle section. It’s where the spirit of the summer’s calm takes over and the songs that best capture it are the ones where the band sit down and immerse into the rich sound world they could now create. “The Wrong Child” and “Hairshirt” are wonderful mood pieces and a precursor for the next couple of albums hidden in plain sight, largely devoid of percussion but glimmering with so many other sounds and a beautiful yearning. The already mentioned “World Leader Pretend” is a protest song but more in its home with the other gentle beasts, full of as much heartache as it is fury and featuring one of Stipe’s most arresting vocal deliveries in its bridge. Most importantly, there’s “You Are the Everything”, not just one of R.E.M.’s greatest unspoken deep cuts but one of their very best songs in general. It’s a pastoral elegy of pure beauty and longing, Stipe’s voice quivering as the instruments swell into the midsummer night, Buck strumming his mandolin gently to Mills’ keyboards. It’s a stunner full of heart and soul, and to me the pinnacle point of what Green represents: the melodic richness and the captivating mood, and the sun setting down in the July sky. That “You Are the Everything” starts with sampled sounds of nature is just perfectly fitting.

With the wider palette they equip and the wild abandon they throw themselves into any idea, R.E.M. start showing signs of a fully mastered group after a long development. If Document had a sense of growing pains to it as the band consciously tried to become something bigger than they were, on Green they reach those ambitions gracefully. They are a clearly transformed band on Green and in fact, it marks the line in the sand where R.E.M. moved from being a great group to being an all-time classic band. After Murmur, Green is the first truly special album in the R.E.M.’s catalogue, and it’s the first album where you can genuinely hear and feel the magic of the band’s peak strength throughout a full record’s length. It’s a very curious album full of mix-and-match sidetracks, but the band weave it into a work that stands a whole, from its bouncy beginnings to muscular guitars and fragile laments. I would normally see it as little point to highlight a label change discussing a band, but whether intentional or not, R.E.M. moving to Warner R.E.M. coincides with the band evolving into the next stage. By showcasing the various facets of themselves, they finally pieced their elements together perfectly.

Rating: 8/10

R.E.M. - Document (1987)

1) Finest Worksong; 2) Welcome to the Occupation; 3) Exhuming McCarthy; 4) Disturbance at the Heron House; 5) Strange; 6) It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine); 7) The One I Love; 8) Fireplace; 9) Lightnin’ Hopkins; 10) King of Birds; 11) Oddfellows Local 151

Upsizing to stadium size, maybe a little too soon. But what a singles run, right?

Key tracks: "Finest Worksong", "It's the End of the World As I Know It (And I Feel Fine)", "The One I Love"

R.E.M. go big. The jump between Life’s Rich Pageant and Document is the largest so far between albums: far from the enthusiastic ramshackle riot of Pageant, Document is super-slick and booming like an American answer to what U2 were doing in the 80s. The production is sharp and gives even the smallest of songs a stadium-like feel, ready to be played for huge crowds. The angles the record covers are similarly big, with R.E.M. becoming more openly political and shaping Document to be a reflection of the political landscape at the time. It’s not quite enough to call Document a deadly serious album but there’s a conscious effort to make it an important one, both topically and as means for the band to reach larger audiences. This is R.E.M. knowingly attempting leap to the big leagues.

That they did. Document features not only the band’s first genuine hit but also their first pop-culturally iconic song. The former is “The One I Love”, a spiteful anti-love song performed like a fiery political fist-pumper: a song that sounds vulnerable in its verses yet rises into a furious chorus designed to soar, Stipe belting out like he’s never done before. The latter is “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”, a wild machine-gun rollercoaster with a ridiculously charming levity and an incredible array of hooks, including so many individual seconds in Stipe’s rapid fire stream of consciousness and the countless different backing vocal lines carrying each other. Both songs are famous enough that they don’t need any further introduction or description, but both are bonafide classics for a reason - “It’s the End of the World” especially so, which will never fail to throw a flurry of excitement whenever it plays, leading into impromptu singalongs wherever it goes: it’s a joyously perfect song. The third single off the album, “Finest Worksong”, doesn’t quite share the immortality of the other two but it’s where the R.E.M.’s ambitions for Document show up the clearest. It’s a huge song, meant to be played ridiculously loud and turned into an anthem. It only suffers in comparison to the other two songs, but on its own it’s a stormer, with Mills’ backing vocals once again stealing the spotlight in the chorus. There are very few songs in the R.E.M. catalogue as colossal as this in terms of sheer weight of the music.

The rest of Document is tame in comparison: not as bombastic as “Finest Worksong”, not as wild as “It’s the End of the World”, not as impassioned as “The One I Love”. Even the token off-kilter cut is just a slightly out of place cover of Wire’s “Strange”, which is decent enough and mainly merits a mention for Stipe changing the lyrics to address himself. The first half of the record is particularly affected by this, with the four-song stretch from “Welcome to the Occupation” to “Strange” being a series of fairly interchangeable rockers, all of which are by and far enjoyable but which only just register. “Disturbance at the Heron House” has a classic Buck riff that lifts it above the others, while “Exhuming McCarthy” is so lightweight it’s borderline twee, and comes off as a somewhat awkward coupling of the band’s lighter side and Document’s general sound and production. Which leaves us with “Welcome to the Occupation”, a good song which feels unfinished as it chugs along on a single track through its short length. It’s not until “It’s the End of the World” that Document really picks up again, at which point half the album’s done. There’s an attempt to make a set of energetic politically savvy rock songs here but it’s not a direction where R.E.M. at this stage shines: as songs they’re fine enough, but there’s only a trace of the band’s signature moves within.

The second half of Document makes a conscious move away from the straightforward rock songs and this is a blessing for the album, because it revives Document’s mojo. “Fireplace” and “Lightnin’ Hopkins” in particular are more in line with what “Finest Worksong” promised all the way in the beginning: almost-anthems with a fire in their belly and a commanding charisma. “Fireplace” sways and tilts with its rhythm alluringly before breaking down into an extended instrumental section starring a sax going crazy: it’s an unexpected swerve not just in the song, but on the entire album and it makes the song stand up even more, if the already interesting first half of the song didn’t do it already. “Lightnin’ Hopkins” meanwhile goes hard - it’s very atypically muscular and beefy for R.E.M. and arguably one of their most outwardly aggressive songs. It’s a rush of power and this time the hit lands. It’s excellent and exhilirating and stands up among the album’s best songs. “King of Birds” is a slight retread of Reckoning’s “Time After Time”, with a similar march-like beat and a dulcimer part that echoes the vaguely sitar-like guitar lines of “Time After Time”. There are worse songs to make a spiritual sequel for, and even if it’s not the most exciting of the cuts here it still has flashes of brilliance to it.

That leaves us with “Oddfellows Local 151”, a somewhat overlong slog of a song that never picks up into anything particularly interesting even if tries to reach for that moody closer spot, which closes off Document in a mildly disappointing manner. It suits Document in that regard: the album aims high and promises a lot (especially if you’ve only ever heard the two classics off it) but it doesn’t quite reach its goals. R.E.M. wanted to prove they can hit it big time while taking advantage of that in order to get the messages they wanted to send out heard, but if anything it proves that purposefully aiming for that scope doesn’t come naturally for R.E.M. They became a stadium band eventually but not through the kind of stadium rock sound they tried to go for here, and R.E.M.’s attempts at it vary greatly. Document is a good album but it’s also one where you can see the cracks more clearly than in a lot of other R.E.M. albums: in an attempt to scale up deliberately, they only managed to muddle up their own sound. And let’s face it - without its three solid classics, it would definitely be rated a notch lower.

Rating: 7/10