REM - "Pilgrmage"

Even after all these years of listening to it, I'm still finding amazement in "West Of The Fields". Just an an amazing production with the opening submarine drums and all the vocals.

SEARCH: The Gregorian chant in "Pilgrimage."

(nb not hating on murmur, just wasn't feeling it yesterday)

really like murmur. it and reckoning ("harborcoat", " chinese brothers" and "little america" all just kill) are the ones that hold up best for me. it was best when you could not understand what michael stipe was saying. their suckyness now is throughly depressing...

mitch easter is a fucking charlatan though. how he got a reputation as a good producer i'm fucked if i know. he wasn't even the best songwriter in Let's Active

http://half.ebay.com/cat/buy/prod.cgi?meta_id=2&domain_id=1876&cpid=1740892

If I'm gonna put on an early R.E.M. album these days, I usually go back to the root: Chronic Town. I was a freshman at UGA when it came out, and I can still remember buying it, taking it back to my dorm room, and listening to it over and over, just boggled that someone from Athens did something that good. And then the person who reviewed it in the Red and Black (college daily) actually made a comparison (in re "Gardening at Night") that it was as good as something the Beatles could have done, which both shocked me and struck me as totally true. And then a week or two later, Rolling Stone reviewed it and gave it four stars. I still remember how surreal it all seemed. The U.S. indie revolution was on, as it were.

And the record still sounds pretty damn good, too. Murmur is another great record and another great achievement, but something about the relatively clean sound and simplicity of C-Town still does it for me, on those occasions I need it done.

Of course, "Perfect Circle" is wonderous - and, it beats the pants off the tiredly copiest "Nightswiming".

The first "Mobile Fidelty" LP i bought was Murmer -- i hate it; you have to crank the stereo all the way up to get any decent volume (my "Half-Speed Master" of Blow By Blow does the same thing).

Hell, i'll even throw out a little love for Don Dixon (see "Jean Harlow's Return"), hey, do you think it was he with the tastey piano chops?

Yes, for about a year and a half. Long, stupid story. I still have lots of fond memories of the place, though.

haha - 'chronic town's still their best' is soooo athens response to r.e.m.

I didn't say it's their best, just my all-time sentimental fave, for reasons outlined above.

Chronic Town IS their best, dammit!! If it was an album, it'd be the greatest album of all time! But it's just an EP, so it has settle for best EP of all time.

Talk About the Passion had the worst video.

I prefer Reckoning, I guess, but I've not listened to any of them in years. Floppy haired moody singer has become some sort of gay Action Man, Buck looks like a bench, Mills seems to have been repeating the same bass fills for the last 5 records.

The main problem I have with them these days is that every album seems to be some sort of ill-advised reaction to the previous ill-advised reaction to . . . (nb as well all know this started with Monster).

That's awesome. When I was in high school a decade later and crazy about R.E.M., I strongly felt like I should have been in college in the early '80s, when those records came out. It was like I had missed out on being at the right place at the right time.

I love the flat, imploding sound of the drums in as "Pilgrimage" kicks into the chorus. And Buck's back-and-forth guitar in the chorus, with the voices over it - R.E.M. really never sounded better. (I was never crazy about "Radio Free Europe," so I always started the album with this song.)

Anyone else have a better sense of what happened?

The "college rock" term is actually appropriate in this instance b/c of of the scene, very specific to the U. of Georgia art school crowd, begat by REM &, before them, the B52's. They were all bored college kids with creativity to spare who constructed their own idiosyncratic universe without any clue that the larger world would be watching at all. Also, what happened there seemed to set the stage for the other college-related microcosms that sprouted up in the 80s & early 90s: Chapel Hill, Austin & the like. Granted, college towns have been seedbeds for cultural happenings long before REM etc., but they sort of drew attention to the phenomenon & thus became intrinically linked with the "college" idea. I'm sure they got played on college radio a lot as well, along with all of their Our Band Could Be Your Life peers who paved the way for Nirvana &, later, Puddle of Mudd.