Albums - page 4

R.E.M. - Collapse Into Now

Maybe it’s because I’m on album 15 of 15, and it’s exceedingly late, but at this point, as delighted as I am by R.E.M’s late career rock flourish, I’m cursing them a tiny bit for...

R.E.M. - Accelerate

What makes Accelerate a great album is not just that it followed the largely unremarkable, humdrum and painfully middle of the road Around The Sun, and followed it by heading in the opposite direction. No,...

R.E.M. - Around The Sun

It’s safe to say that Around The Sun is the one R.E.M. album that would be the easiest to lose forever. Once you get past its first single and opening track Leaving New York there’s...

R.E.M. - Reveal

After the uncertain times around Up, to the relief of many, R.E.M. elected to continue recording. Reveal would take until 2001 to appear; in the meantime the band scored music for Man on the Moon,...

R.E.M. - Up

If ever an album needed a bit of revisionist loving, it’s Up. Coming after the departure of Bill Berry, to some it was the first post-R.E.M. album, to others it felt like a long time...

R.E.M. - New Adventures in Hi-Fi

After the fairly uncompromising rock of Monster, on their 1996 album New Adventures in Hi-Fi R.E.M. recaptured some of the variety and creativity of earlier albums. Largely recorded on the road at soundchecks during the...

R.E.M. - Monster

In nature, generally speaking, smaller animals tend to have a higher metabolic rate, and live shorter, more hectic lives than bigger creatures. To put it another way, the light that burns twice as bright burns...

R.E.M. - Automatic For The People

After the introduction of so many slower songs in Green, and the mostly becalmed, acoustic, mandolined Out of Time some observers were expecting R.E.M. to follow-up by turning again, and heading back into rock territory....

R.E.M. - Out of Time

So the burning question is this: after all these years, even allowing for the fact that it was the album that introduced R.E.M. to me, allowing for the fact that its the album that led,...

R.E.M. - Green

In some ways, after the move to Warner Bros, it was a case of much the same for R.E.M: their first album after leaving I.R.S. was produced by Scott Litt, just as their last album...

R.E.M. - Document

Document - surely people’s choice for most divisive I.R.S.-era R.E.M album. Some love it, some maybe only bought it on the strength of The One I Love, many no doubt rarely investigate it fully. It’s...

R.E.M. - Lifes Rich Pageant

After the much-questioned production sound of Fables of the Reconstruction R.E.M. headed off in an altogether different direction for its follow-up Lifes Rich Pageant, opting to work with Don Gehman. Where Fables… producer Joe Boyd...

R.E.M. - Fables of the Reconstruction

And so to the first R.E.M. album that disappointed me. I forget the order in which I acquired my collection, but it’s entirely plausible that I worked backwards through the I.R.S years, perhaps tentatively afraid...

R.E.M. - Reckoning

Between the release of Out of Time in 1991, and Automatic for the People the following year, I embarked on an unwavering quest to make up for lost time and buy the complete R.E.M. back...

R.E.M. - Murmur

Like Chronic Town before it, Murmur hasn’t aged badly, if at all, in the very, very nearly 30 years since its release. Not that it sounds new, in any way. There’s a certain old-timeyness, a...

R.E.M. - Chronic Town

Recorded in a spirit of independence, experimentalism and a touch of music concrete, and produced by fellow Athens musician Mitch Easter, Chronic Town was recorded at Easter’s Drive-in studio in October 1981. Already the familiar...

Morrissey - Your Arsenal

It’s a curious sensation, reviewing an album I know so well. Normally I find I have to listen about a dozen times to make sure I’ve caught the hooks I want to catch, and heard...

St. Vincent - St. Vincent

I’ll make this easy for you: Annie Clark’s fourth solo album recording as St. Vincent has received almost universally good reviews; I’m not about to buck the trend. St. Vincent is her best work yet;...

Bombay Bicycle Club - So Long, See You Tomorrow

Some bands can change their sound as often as their underwear (some, possibly more often) and get nothing but praise for re-invention, for being true to their muse, pioneers. When Peter Buck sat cross-legged, invented...

Tindersticks - Across Six Leap Years

The idea behind Tindersticks’ new album Across Six Leap Years was to recapture songs that had somehow got lost along the way, or that hadn’t been recorded quite the way the band envisaged. Listening to...