Night Garden: Berry, Buck, Mills, Stipe [R.E.M.]1981-1996 Song-by-song*

I totally agree. Their last 4 or 5 albums can't touch this period. Memorable chorus and killer bridges abound...I hear nothing like this on the later albums.

 

I always liked Stipe’s lyrics because they’re so open to interpretation, at least at this stage of their career. You never had to guess what Morrissey was singing about. He beats you over the head with it. That’s kind of his strength (or his limitation, depending on your view of his writing). I’ve always been more partial to impressionistic and dreamlike lyrics. So REM became my favorite band

 

Fall On Me - As many others have said, the vocals are just elite all-around on this song. Stipe delivers one of his best performances and the multi-part backing harmonies are just surreal. Just when you think it can't get any better, the bridge kicks in and the songs goes to an even higher level and never lets up until the fade out.

If I'm ever trying to win over someone that hasn't heard much R.E.M., "Fall On Me" is the song I play them. It's not necessary my favorite R.E.M. song (Although it may be top 10) but I think it showcases R.E.M.s strengths incredibly well and also is very accessible on first listen. In a previous post, @Lance LaSalle beat me to the Beach Boy's comparison. The Byrd's comparison is evergreen with R.E.M. It's a short list of bands that could pull off these kind of harmonies.

I previously made a comment that the first 3 songs on Fables are my favorite 3 songs to start an album of all time. The first 3 on Pageant have to be a close 2nd for me. Pageant starts off like gangbusters.

"Fall On Me" is another song that 5/5 doesn't even do justice to.

 

I love The Smiths while knowing Morrissey is a tough pill to swallow sometimes. But Marr is just an immense guitar talent and his music compositions while in The Smiths are just some of the finest in the alternative era.

@John Porcellino - I agree and if you haven't read his autobiography, I would suggest doing so. It's not an easy read as it's he's very verbose, but it couldn't have been written by anyone else and I found it a pleasure to read so well crafted text.

Apologies for the brief derailment...

 

He's also a good lyrical thief lol A lot of Smiths tunes had lines lifted from poetry. I believe Morrissey said, "Talent borrows, genius steals," or something along those lines. Somewhere out there is a website that shows where he got a lot of his best lines. Still, he used them to good effect.

A lot of folks compare REM to the Smiths, and the assumption when I was a kid was if you liked one you automatically liked the other, but that's certainly not the case. I do love both, and no two other bands have influenced me more as a guitarist and a bassist, and since I can't decide between the two, I love the Cure more (there's zero logic in that, but it satisfies my OCD). Those two bands have a lot of similarities, but also a lot of core differences. One big similarity is they have amazing guitar players who are super nice guys - and will play with darn near anybody. We've shared Peter stories here, and I've heard stories about Johnny really being good to fans...even when they ring his doorbell!! Every story I've heard about Stipe, though sometimes strange, he's also very nice and approachable. Morrissey, however, refers to himself in the third person plural. The hell with that. And it's THAT sort of attitude that is a fundamental difference within the two groups and, perhaps, the major fans of each. I read or maybe saw an interview with Robert Smith once saying that he saw Cure fans as quiet, polite, and introspective, and Smiths fans as basically football* hooligans. I'm not sure if extreme Smiths fans are that bad, but I do see REM fans much the same way I do Cure fans, as is proven here on this thread. Oh, that was a compliment, by the way.

*That's "soccer," not American football. LOL

And I would be remiss, if off topic, if I didn't include one of my favorite Mad Bob Hates Moz quotes...in meme form (like the kids do it)...

 

Maybe he should have been a writer or a poet instead of a singer in a rock and roll band...

Exactly. Next.

 

I have a friend that every few years we try to whittle down Sandinista! to at least a manageable double album. No dice. And I also, as recently as last week, will go on a long drive to visit a friend and purposely put on that album just to get all the way through it. No dice. Again, why the Lord invented the skip button. But the songs that hit...unbeatable.

 

the sprawl is a feature not a flaw.

 

I get it; just doesn't work for me...

 

It’s hard for me to comment on Fall On Me, because it’s like adding to the conversation on , say, a Bach Mass, or Chartres Cathedral. I mean, all you can really say is “yes it’s perfect “. , or “the world is a better place because it exists “. That’s how highly I regard it. A true pinnacle of 1986, and the 80’s altogether. That last chord of the chorus each time gives me goosebumps every. Single. Time.
5/5

 

It's a lovely song, and probably the best to show to a first time listener to represent them in 1986. For me, it's just shy of my all time REM playlist. I think I appreciate it a little more than I actually feel it as a great song. 4.5/5

 

He should have used the "artsy" defense he used for his aversion to possessive apostrophes (he liked the way the words looked better without them).

 

I've "met" Stipe three times over the years in NYC, i.e., been in the same room and exchanged pleasantries. There's a good vibe coming off him. He sees you ... you'll know what that means if you've spent time around famous people. The shyness is no routine or affectation! The other guys, never met outside that graveyard in Lewisburg, PA.

I never had an either/or thing going with R.E.M. and The Smiths. Man, I hated The Smiths when they first came around. It became a regular feature of young adulthood, while wooing young women, to have Friday evening phone conversations with the more "complicated" ones about going out that night (often to no avail), and always, always, always, in the background, The Smiths were playing. Amidst the sound of numerous cats. Ten years earlier, it might have been Joni Mitchell. But Morrissey really seemed to get that forlorn demographic.

Of course, I was wrong about The Smiths. "Vicar in a Tutu" changed my mind. The doors opened, and I came to love them, something about their vibe particularly suited late 80s NYC when I moved here. Morrissey and Stipe were about as far apart as you could get as singers and lyricists ... and I preferred Morrissey. I suspect meeting him would be nightmarish or a letdown at best. Funny how these things balance out in life.

 

I suspect that's a typically tongue in cheek comment by Robert Smith. Fans of The Smiths in my experience are more bookwormy. naval gazing types, rather than footy fans, let alone hooligans!

Pretending for a moment that Smiths Morrisey is a different person from who he's become recently, he was a brilliant lyricist; funny (no, really he was!), witty, clever and he worked so well with Johnny Marr. Much as I love Johnny Marr's guitars and songwriting in the Smiths (what a run of songs they had together) I don't think he's ever managed to recapture whatever it was he and Morrisey had as a partnership. (And yes, he's a really top bloke, have a friend who's met from his time at Salford University and confirms what I've read in a number of places about how approachable and genuine he is.) He is an absolutely brilliant guitarist too.

 

Fall On Me

This is a "like", but not a "love". Also, I prefer it near the end of the album instead of near the beginning. I'm not going to say anything bad about it though because it has plenty going for it. Great harmony and backup vocals especially.

 

Off topic anecdote: I had an English friend in Denver who I used to have coffee with. He was from London. I asked him if he liked the Smiths he looked at me like I was insane and said "They're from Manchester: bunch of wankers." (No offense meant from me @DiBosco.)

Despite the jangle and a general harkening back to the mid-sixties, I don't think REM and The Smiths sound very much alike AT ALL. (Or The Cure, for that matter.)

I don't like The Smiths quite as much as I like R.E.M. and I'd probably rate the Cure's 1978-1989 output in between the two but I really think the Smitihs have a good 30 songs (at least, at an estimate) that I'd rate 5/5: A very, very high batting average.

I think a lot of their songs are pretty funny, too.

I don't care for Morrissey solo at all, though (other than Viva Hate.)

 

I love it. Even the flawed parts. It’s my favorite Clash album.
By far.

 

One thing I tried that finally made Sandinista "work" for me was that I took all the non-reggae tracks + a few outtakes and Bsides and put them together on a playlist that's probably two discs long at 45-50 min each, and then I took all the reggae tracks and their dub versions and put them on a disc, even blending a few of them into each other with a .WAV file mixer. Now that's less of a "sprawl", and when I want to hear the reggae I get all of it together, and I even included the Bside "Armagideon Time" and its various mixes as well. The reggae side of The Clash is something I grew to love after first being attracted to the punky side, and it enhances the experience to hear them together.

As you might guess from my posts in this long-running thread, I am one of "those guys" that has to tinker with the running order of seemingly every album. Well, we aren't limited to vinyl discs and 20 min. per side any more, so why not?

As for REM, I generally don't **** with the albums except to add songs, not to subtract. In the case of LRP though, the alternate tracklisting is right there in the artwork so why wouldn't I try it? Why did they include it if I wasn't supposed to do anything with it!?

 

It’s a mystery to me why REM never did a bootleg series of live shows. Especially the early days.

 

I am also a big playlist maker, but generally R.E.M. is a band I don't mess with R.E.M. They got it right in my opinion, generally. The one exception is that I might cut a bit of New Adventures in Hi-Fi which is too long for me.

I do make playlists from their B-sides, etc, though.

 

Looking forward to the release of “New Adventures…..” deluxe box. Loved “Monster” with the blu ray of “Road Movie”.

 

If we’re rating bands from the 80s, I’d put REM first with the Cure just below them and the Smiths on the bottom. Joy Division/New Order, however, are neck and neck with REM

 

I see an important dynamic here. The band came in with an idea, “let’s make a sprawling double with little interludes, etc”. Doesn’t mean it’s a fully developed plan, but an idea nonetheless.

Producer says, “no, let’s get focused”. Band listens and produces their most direct album. Given they hired the guy who just made Scarecrow, this is exactly what they should have done.

It’s in contrast to Fables, though, where they were resisting and asking for their parts to be turned down. They seemed ready to take on the world now and were willing to accept help to do that.

 

I’ve always dreamed of a hi res physical disc of “Fables…..”. That will never happen. I certainly love my copies of “Murmur” snd “Reckoning” on the Gold discs.

 

Falling just barely short of the 3-minute mark, R.E.M. demonstrates once again their ability to make entertaining and appealing songs that make their runtimes feel criminally short. "Fall on Me" might not be as bombastic as the tracks before it, but it's no less compelling: this was the first song off of Lifes Rich Pageant that I ever heard, back when I was probing the band's material outside the realms of Out of Time, and this in effect acted as a great gateway from there into 80's R.E.M. It was close enough to their 1991 megahit to draw a connection, but close enough to their 80's material to entice me towards visiting more of that. Even when divorcing it from the context of Out of Time, it remains a fantastic track that shows R.E.M. embracing both their earlier opaque side and their newer, open, and message-driven side. On Pageant itself it acts as a great bridge between "These Days" and "Cuyahoga" while still remaining good in its own right.

Stipe's crooning delivery particularly propels "Fall on Me" forward: the instruments already provide a solid base for the track, but the way the vocals alternate between rhythmic verses and soaring choruses against Mike Mills' contemplative backing lines drive it up from a decent album track to a major highlight that very much deserved its place as a leadoff single. "Begin the Begin" and "These Days" built up to something great, and "Fall on Me" in turn acts as the album's first major payoff of that greatness.

5/5.