One Band One Day - page 3

After three albums of increasingly easy on the ear orchestral vignettes, Tindersticks decided to shake it up a bit for fourth album Simple Pleasure. The strings are still very much in place, but now they’re...

On Tindersticks’ third album Curtains the band stick largely to the familiar: lush orchestration, sweeping strings, tales of love, lust, and desperate dependency. And just as they refined and cleaned their sonic make-up for the...

On a number of levels, Tindersticks Second Album is a continuation of where the band left off at the end of their début eighteen months earlier. The orchestral grandeur is there, the lovelorn tales, the...

Tindersticks’ debut album is a smoky piano bar; a doomed love; a long dark soul. Arriving in the Autumn of 1993, just before Britpop stormed the barricades of a nation’s musical conscience, it stands in...

Looking back, it's a little disappointing that one of my most treasured musical moments took place in a city center branch of a well-known high street music chain. I could have at least been in...

One Band One Day is a series of mini-projects in which I spend an entire day listening to one artist and one artist only. The goal for the day is to write a review of...

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...

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,...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...