Best of the platinum R.E.M. albums

Out of Time, followed by Monster, NAIHF, and Document.

"Automatic For The People" remains the best thing they've ever done, and I doubt they will ever be able to top it.

I really love New Adventures -- I usually don't care about someone's summing-up album, but for me this one worked.

my top 3's Automatic - New - Document, but i voted for New

Out of Time, Automatic for the People, Document, Monster, Green, New Adventures in Hi-Fi

but really I love the first five about equally, and loathe New Adventures.

up and reveal and the other latter-day albums sold less than document and green? ouch.

Yeah, Document and Green both had big singles.

i've always bought into the out of time/indie cult band become mtv darlings narrative but i guess it wasn't quite that sudden or drastic a change

Document and Green both had big singles.

Weren't "Daysleeper" and "Imitation Of Life" rather big? Kind of?

compared to "The One I Love" and "Stand"? not really.

Weren't "Daysleeper" and "Imitation Of Life" rather big? Kind of?

Not in the US; I don't know if anyone who isn't an ILX poster ever heard them.

Difficult poll. I voted "Document" but could have gone with "Automatic" or "Hi Fi." For some reason "Out of Time" never grabbed me, maybe over-exposure. "Green" seems the weakest of the bunch, "Monster" the most under-rated (now, not when it was released).

Document. Green has some amazing highs (Stand, Orange Crush), but lower lows. Out of Time is better than it gets credit for, though Shiny Happy People still offendeth mine eye. Automatic is the critic's darling and objectively impressive, but it just doesn't move me much. Plus Everybody Hurts exceeds Shiny Happy in sheer loathesomeness.

Yeah, you're actually wrong on both counts there.

I get that a lot

green, without hesitation

Automatic For The People is their best record.

Document, easily. Followed closely by AFTP. Those two are rated just about right, I'd say. I do agree that "Everybody Hurts" did not age very well, though. But that could just be b/c I'm old and bitter now. FWIW, I think Up is better than all of these.

I'm a lurker and voting Automatic. I imagine it will win and people will blame the lurkers.

Automatic and you can blame me for that.

Automatic for the People > Document > Out of Time > New Adventures in Hi-Fi >
Monster > Green

i think automatic probably is the best of these, but something about its self-confidence makes me doubt it a little. like, they knew exactly what they were doing when they made it, and they nailed it and hit their big commercial peak, but the relative absence of the weird half-baked-experiment stuff that you can find on most of their albums makes it seem a little too neat. i'm tempted to vote document, which has lots of half-bakedness, but i think i'll go green because apparently too many people hate it.

Monster.

Oh, Green. It remains among my 2 or 3 favourite REM albums, rather unfashionably. I pretty much can't listen to any of the other listed albums, although they all have high points. I'll listen to Green all day.

the toplessness in the "pop song '89" video was a controversy for about a week. mostly now i just notice stipe had all that hair...

hahah tipsy before i even clicked on that first youtube i was all i bet it's "Get up".. i still love it 19 years (?wtF?!) later. hate to say it ('cause it's hella played) but i'm afraid one of their biggest sins post-Fables is stipe's vocals being pushed up in the mix.

i fucking accidentily clicked on "out of time" when i meant "automatic for the people", but didnt notice until i had already clicked "vote". AFTP is by far their best album in general, and one of the best rock records of the 90s.

when out of time came out, i thought it sort of took green's ideas and built on them. now i think it took green's ideas and contracted them. i still like it -- can't fuck with "losing my religion," "low," "country feedback," the unjustly maligned "shiny happy people" -- but green seems bigger and more intimate at the same time.

Since the poll isn't "platinum REM albums with my favorite songs on them" and Lifes Rich Pageant didn't go platinum, this has to be Automatic For The People. It's not my favorite REM record, but it's their best post-Murmur.

Yes, it's tremendously assured, but if this is their "cocky" play it's awfully weird and dark. Where tipsy mothra hears shrewd and canny, I hear a band at the peak of their powers. And what we're both hearing is an extraordinary control.

Maintaining that melancholy beauty across an entire album's worth of material is no mean feat, and the extraordinary consistency that makes some of the stuff that might have counted in the oddball column on earlier records fit right in.

It's also what makes everything that they've done since more or less irrelevant. There's a lot of great material since, but nothing left to prove or say.

i guess automatic is in that nevermind zone for me, where it's hard to actually hear the record. i know it's great and respect it and just am not drawn to it anymore. still needs more distance, maybe. where green or monster can still seem sort of fresh if i go awhile without listening to them.

(nb: rogermexico and i have been debating r.e.m. albums since we used to listen to reckoning in my bedroom in like 1984 or something.)

weird. dark. beautiful.

i guess automatic is in that nevermind zone for me, where it's hard to actually hear the record.

doesn't the legend now have it that automatic was the last record K-Cobe played?

I had no idea Green was so hated. It's my favourite here by a million miles. I Remember California is possibly my 2nd or 3rd favourite REM song.

document or automatic. i loved green the week it came out (out of time too) but the love didn't last.

i think automatic probably is the best of these, but something about its self-confidence makes me doubt it a little. like, they knew exactly what they were doing when they made it, and they nailed it and hit their big commercial peak, but the relative absence of the weird half-baked-experiment stuff that you can find on most of their albums makes it seem a little too neat.

This was exactly my reaction to Out of Time, so much so that I kind of slept on Automatic for a few years.

"Shiny Happy People" and "Country Feedback" are weird half-baked experiments! They're weird, fully cooked experiments!

make up yor mind!

I've always liked "Pop Song 89," never saw the video before. Leave it to Stipe to be able to render a bunch of topless women 100% non-sexual. Kind of brilliant.

I'm least sick of Document. I remember reading an interview in Spin or Option in late '87 when Peter Buck said they're still hoping to be able to create a classic album as good as their favorites from Patti Smith, Wire, Television, etc. The irony, is they already did with Murmur. I guess it's hard to admit everything's downhill after your debut.

"Shiny Happy People" and "Country Feedback" are weird half-baked experiments! They're weird, fully cooked experiments!

*are NOT weird half-baked experiments

Thanks for posting the Sugarland cover of "Nightswimming", Tipsy! I'd not seen that. I really like that band; my brother has been sort-of acquaintances of theirs since Jennifer Nettles Band and Billy Pilgrim days, so it's been weird to see them get huge.

I listened to Automatic last night, at 3AM when I woke up and couldn't fall back asleep because the wind is so strong here this weekend. It sounded like my house was fighting back, and I could sympathize. Automatic takes me to a strange place that I won't get into because it's so intensely personal; the record is so much a part of a specific period of my life that was quite dark and new and weird (nobody was telling me what to do, and I wasn't sure that was a good thing). So listening to it is like going home for the holidays, that mix of nostalgia and familiarity with the puzzling foreignness places and people get when you haven't seen them for a long time. I was struck by the organ work (is that Mike Mills or Peter Holsapple?), it's really overwhelming, and gives the record its funereal vibe that critics seem to focus on (yeah, the lyrics too, but they're all over the place).

As a mood piece the record overwhelms me but as a family of songs I still prefer Out of Time. I think I'm the lone person on ILM who absolutely loves "Radio Song", though. The vibe is so technicolor, all those pastels we were wearing in the early 90s, and the mood's of possibility (and love songs!), rather than nostalgia and memory. I usually prefer possibility over nostalgia, as I'm naturally inclined to look back anyway, I don't need help.

I had no idea Green was so hated.

Me neither. It's still my favourite too.

"Out Of Time" was on to something. "Losing My Religion" may be their all time best, "Near Wild Heaven" is wonderful and "Endgame" is way underrated. I even kind of like "Shiny Happy People". But then there's stuff such as "Radio Song" dragging it down. "Automatic" may be the only R.E.M. album that worked perfectly from the beginning to the end. And there are wonderful songs such as "The Man On The Moon", "Drive", "Try Not To Breathe" and "Find The River" - all among their career highlights.

Document and Green = great, wonky arena pomp. POLITICS!!
Automatic For The People and Out Of Time = great, wonky schmaltz. LOVE AND DEATH!!
Monster = great, wonky '90s arena pomp. IRONIC SEX!!
New Adventures In Hi-Fi = A Use Your Illusion style data dump of everything left in the coffers

Schmaltz wins because Love And Death, yo. Out Of Time because its a little more the former. The most gawky and innocent album by a band I associate with the gawky innocence of precocious youth.

"Automatic" may be the only R.E.M. album that worked perfectly from the beginning to the end.
!? One word: Reckoning.

(ar, yes, I realize it's all subjective. I can't listen to Automatic from beginning to end without losing the thread.)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

A few months back I listened to Green front to back for the first time in years. Parts of the record sounded really ace, mostly the more acoustic recordings, while some of the more pop rock songs sounded really overcooked.

One thing I kind of liked about New Adventures in HiFi was that it kind of blurred up their sound and got rid of the big sheen. It was a bit more like the early records.

i dunno if it feels like the early albums to me, but HiFi definitely gets a great sound and ambience out of the whole process of it being largely written and pieced together on tour.

I enjoy its weird bits, but the rural south reconstruction cosplay is tiresome.

It's a Man Ray kinda sky

Let me show you what I can do with it

Time & distance are out of place here

Alfred, I think an R.E.M. that ended after Fables might look, in some sense, like a minor band at this juncture, but only in a state of amnesia. I can't tell you how much it seemed like they were revered at that time, but they had a serious, growing vibe for years. People were fanatical about them. That's my memory of them in the '80s - the shows getting bigger every year, people buying the records the day they came out, listening to them all the time.

Sure! That's why context matters. To speculate about these guys breaking up in 1985 is to write slash fiction. Since 1981 they wanted to be the biggest band in the world.

There wasn't even time to say

Speaking only for myself, hearing Fables, Green, Reckoning, LRP, Out of Time, and Document as a teenager seemed exactly right.

Going backward to Murmur or Dead Letter Office or forward to Monster and Up was nice but not crucial, because the records I already had were pretty good.

when they were a Nuggets-oriented dance band, before originals took over their live set.

I love the pre-Chronic Town demos ("Wait," "Narrator," "Body Count," "Baby I,") etc., and the occasional later tracks like "Just a Touch" that seem to me to gesture back to this prehistory

"All the Right Friends" and "Pretty Persuasion" too

Listening to the Stephen Hague demo from an old boot and sheesh - there are synth flourishes in "Catapult" ffs. Producer should be tried at the ... nevermind.

xp Oh yeah "Pretty Persuasion" definitely. It's not one of my inner circle favorite songs of the IRS era but if you said I could time-machine to an REM show in 1984 and see them play one song I think that might be it.

I really like the Stephen Hague demo despite its place in the band's origin myth. the vocals sound amazing.

A friend of mine who’s an audio engineering said he’s pretty certain there’s drum machine on part of that.

engineer, I mean

Wow - I had never heard the (apparently) OG version of “Wolves,” or knew the story behind it (at least as discussed in the comments).

Incendiary!

I mean, this is a band whose intentions were clear from the beginning. I didn't discover them until Green, but Stipe and (especially) Buck explained in their expert, crisp interviews (boy, could they court journalists!) that they wanted the big time, wanted to sell albums.

Since 1981 they wanted to be the biggest band in the world.

Yeah I'm just not buying this. Maybe in the later part of their career, but I pored through interviews with them as a teenager and they were always saying stuff like this. They never talked about being big.

“I will never, ever, ever, ever play another general-admission show, ever. Ever. And I will never, ever, ever play a place that's bigger than the place we played tonight, ever.” A pause. “Did I put enough evers in there?” It's one day later, and Peter Buck isn't feeling so fine.

Which is from this RS article. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/r-e-m-in-the-real-world-rolling-stones-1987-cover-story-185336/

The place they played that night was a college audiotorium, this is right after Document came out.

“I think U2 tend to go for it more than we do,” says Buck. “I had the feeling when I bought the first U2 record that they understood where they wanted to go a lot better than we did. They wanted to be the biggest band in the world. For us, fame and being on the world platform is a not really a necessary by-product of what we want to do — making records and playing when we want to play.”

“We wanted to be successful,” says bassist/keyboardist Mike Mills. “But, for me, we were successful the day in 1981 that I didn’t have to have a day job.” (He ran an inserting machine at the Athens newspaper.)

https://trouserpress.com/r-e-m-nice-guys-still-finish-first/

https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/rem-interview-michael-stipe-mike-mills-monster-reissue.html

It seemed like, if you’d wanted to, you could’ve been the undisputed biggest band of the ’90s. You didn’t want to play the game?
Mills: We never wanted to be the biggest band in the world. We just wanted to be the best band we could be. The whole point of every record deal we ever signed was to give ourselves complete control over when we recorded, what we recorded, how we recorded it, where we recorded it, and with whom we recorded it. We were perfectly willing to sink or swim on our own efforts. If it didn’t work, then we owned that. If it worked, we owned that, too.

Americans tend to be wary of ego; it's in their blood.

They protest too much as each album gets certified a higher grade of platinum.

agreed, though in their defense, there was very much a glass ceiling for independent band's success in the 80's, consigned to 120 minutes at best.

And I can't imagine another act handling the change to formidable global success with such grace and class. Kurt Cobain otm.

Don't think I ever heard that early jam "Baby I" (just listened) – good one! I know others, like "Narrator (for the Jacques Cousteau Show").

Note: Ariana Grande has a song titled "R.E.M." Ariana and R.E.M. both have songs titled "Baby I." How deep does this go(??)

Ariana Grande is 5'1". Michael Stipe was 51 when REM disbanded. Think about it.

Bought the new vinyl pressing of Collapse Into Now and it sounds really nice. Strikes me as more of a compressed sound than their ‘90s/‘00s albums, but still quite warm sounding.

Been poking around a lot in the second “Complete Rarities” set. That thing is 8 1/2 hours long!

Instead of three VU covers, two Beat Happening covers!

Really? Which songs?

Realised today R.E.M. are potentially my most-discussed band ever. It's between them, the Beatles, Blur and XTC.

Woah, never heard of this, would love to hear them do Red Head Walking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_Rarities:_Warner_Bros._1988%E2%80%932011

Disc 39: From the "Hollow Man" (Released June 2008)

"Horse to Water" (live in Vancouver) (Buck, Mills, Stipe) – 2:36
"Indian Summer" (Calvin Johnson) (non-album Beat Happening cover) – 5:01

Disc 42: From the "Supernatural Superserious" CD single (Released February 2008)

"Airliner" (Buck, Mills, Stipe, Scott McCaughey) (non-album track) – 2:21
"Redhead Walking" (Calvin Johnson) (non-album Beat Happening cover) – 2:11

!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij7tcJXPc10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4NZJAbcf2s

man that indian summer cover is pretty rad, i know that song has been done a lot but it's *Stipe*

I think my two favorite covers of theirs are on that, Richard Thompson’s Wall of Death and Mike Mills’ beautiful vocal on Three Dog Night’s Out in the Country.

I like those Beat Happening covers!

Indian Summer was made for Stipe/Buck-this is great.
is there a fave rem cover thread somewhere? quick top 5:
Crazy
Superman
Femme Fatale
Moon River
Hello In There

Dark Globe
First We Take Manhattan
Arms of Love
Wall of Death
Last Date

Last Date! Great one.

I like the version of Magnapop’s Favorite Writer a lot, too.

(unordered)

Femme Fatale
Last Date
Superman
King of the Road
Strange

(but when I get a chance I'm gonna listen to Indian Summer and see how that rates)

i've never really considered R.E.M. among my favorite bands but when i think about their first ten albums, it's just a real dominant run of quality and it's impossible to pick a favorite. listened to Fables of the Reconstruction today and it sounded amazing.

btw i always associate Automatic for the People w/Too Short, bc i bought it and Shorty the Pimp at the same time at a record store in Iowa.

my man

t/s Shorty the Pimp vs Binky the Doormat

Been going through the 90s REM music video archives and Buck's mutton chops in the "Bang and Blame" music video sure are something.

v. good article

https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-123-winter-2023/was-it-cooler-back-then?utm_source=pocket_saves

also uh-oh! and: I don't know that I've ever heard him talk about his career in this way

When talking about the person he was forty-plus years ago, Stipe can be endearingly honest, particularly when it comes to the immodesty of his teenage ambition. “My intention in 1979,” he told me matter-of-factly, “was to start a band and become world famous.” It didn’t seem like you could do that in Athens, though after entering the Arts School at the University of Georgia, Stipe was able to locate and attach himself to what was brewing in town. “The Athens scene was very small,” he said, “thirty people, maybe thirty-five people, when I arrived in ’79. It was so underground I didn’t know about it for the first six months I was here.”

Enjoyed that article, but advise readers to brace themselves for this line: They are almost never identified as a Southern band

yah that was wild and insane