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

And away we go with the final five albums!

Today we begin our discussion of Up. Lots of links below for background information, reviews, context and other miscellany:

Wikipedia: Up (R.E.M. album) - Wikipedia
Stereogum: Up Turns 20
Allmusic: Up - R.E.M. | Songs, Reviews, Credits | AllMusic
Spectrum Culture: Resequence: R.E.M.: Up - Spectrum Culture
Ultimate Classic Rock: 20 Years Ago: R.E.M. Find Their Way as a Trio With 'Up'
Hooks And Harmony: 'Up,' R.E.M.: A Second Listen
Rolling Stone: Up
R.E.M. Project Blog: R.E.M. Project Blog: February 2018
Pitchfork: R.E.M.: Up: Pitchfork Review

Track listing

Up Side

1. "Airportman" – 4:12
2. "Lotus" – 4:30
3. "Suspicion" – 5:36
4. "Hope" – 5:02
5. "At My Most Beautiful" – 3:35
6. "The Apologist" – 4:30
7. "Sad Professor" – 4:01
8. "You're in the Air" – 5:22

Down Side

1. "Walk Unafraid" – 4:31
2. "Why Not Smile" – 4:03
3. "Daysleeper" – 3:40
4. "Diminished" – 6:01
5. "Parakeet" – 4:09
6. "Falls to Climb" – 5:06

Personnel

• Peter Buck – guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, drums, percussion
• Mike Mills – bass guitar, keyboards, guitar, backing vocals
• Michael Stipe – lead vocals, guitar

Additional personnel

• Nigel Godrich – engineering
• Barrett Martin – drums, percussion
• Pat McCarthy – production
• Scott McCaughey – keyboards, percussion
• Joey Waronker – drums, percussion

Ratings

AllMusic 2.5/5
Blender 4/5
The Encyclopedia Of Popular Music 3/5
Entertainment Weekly A−
The Guardian 3/5
Los Angeles Times 3.5/4
NME 7/10
Pitchfork 6.1/10
Q 4/5
Rolling Stone 4/5
Spin 8/10

 

First song up (pun intended) on the LP’s ‘Up’ side is “Airportman”



Written by Buck/Mills/Stipe.

R.E.M. – Airportman Lyrics | Genius Lyrics
R.E.M. Project Blog: R.E.M. Project Blog: UP: AIRPORTMAN

 

I haven’t really been looking forward to listening to this or the next two albums, as they’ve never connected with me. But I wanted to give them all another chance, so each one is getting at least one proper, focused listen, so I can make some up-to-date notes on my thoughts. I’ll give the band credit for again moving in new directions. And there’s certainly music here that I really enjoy.

From the first seconds, Airportman makes clear that this is a sharp change in direction. A drum machine is under a musical bed mostly consisting of keyboards and some guitar noises. Michael mumbles the lyrics, which would be almost decipherable without a lyric sheet. It’s an odd song, seemingly about a man who spends much of his life in airports. It’s a challenging start to the album and certainly sets a certain mood; I think of it as an appetizer, but it doesn’t pull me in like many other opening R.E.M. tracks.

 

Airportman
This song has an interesting opening, but then it goes nowhere. REM has had some strange choices for opening songs through the years and this is easily the strangest. The mumbled lyrics are incredibly annoying. After about 1:30 or so I'm ready for it to end unless something interesting happens. And nothing worthwhile or listenable does happen.
UP is the last REM album I ever bought. There are a couple songs I like (including one classic), but it was due to songs like this that I stopped buying albums by the group I still consider the best band of the 80's and early 90's.
RATING: 1/5

 

Thanks @prymel. We are in good hands

 

Yeah, I agree. Placing Airportman as the album opener of the three-legged dog version of R.E.M. is audacious and sends a signal that the band would continue to expand their musical boundaries. Having said that, I think the song would have worked better as the last song on Up.

My problem with the album is that it suffers from CD (and some song length) bloat. I have a trimmed down Up playlist, which doesn't actually include Airportman, despite the fact that I think the song is kinda cool. It would have made a great and interesting b-side but it just is ill-fitting to me.

3.25/5 for effort.

 

Up (preview)

I’m not sure why I bothered purchasing Up when the album came out, since I had already given up on R.E.M., more or less. Berry’s departure added to the disincentive. I did give in and buy it but was completely disenchanted with what I heard. This was no longer anything remotely like the R.E.M. from the I.R.S years, nor even the band I tolerated through the first five WB albums. But I kept playing it to see if something would spark my interest, and gradually it broke down my barriers. I started to appreciate and enjoy the record’s low-key charms, and it really contains some of the band’s loveliest songs. The first half of the disc, in particular, is quite fantastic. I think the back half starts to run out of steam, so, overall, the record is not a complete success. But since I haven’t been overexposed to Up over the years, there’s a good chance re-listening to the songs some more for this thread might generate additional positive reassessment.

Airportman

This is a terrific sonic collage. It sounds like nothing else on the record or anything they had done before. It’s eerie and weird, but very inviting and strangely accessible and beautiful. I want to say it's kind of Eno-esque, but it's definitely not at that level. Still, on its own merits, I love "Airportman", and I would have enjoyed seeing them go this route with the entire album. 5/5

 

Airportman

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

2/5

 

Maps and Legends at #10???!!!

Wow, that is impressive. I'm surprised it beat out Rockville and Pretty Persuasion. It's an impressive top 10. Nice to see Begin The Begin so highly regarded.

I am surprised Maps topped Gravity and always my personal Fables fave: Life and How to Live It. Still it's nice to such an unheralded song so highly regarded. Though for yrs I thought the counter melody lyric was, "this life's a b... used to be easy".

 

Airportman: I distinctly remember my first exposure to this CD. An old college friend was visiting NYC, that loose circle of post-college folks that was slowly disintegrating into our 30s. We had gone to Tower, uptown on 66th Street, and saw this on sale the week it came out. New R.E.M. album! Let's go back to the apartment and check it out! How cool is this! It also seemed strange to both of us that we weren't waiting on the album and had no idea it was out, which demonstrates how far our interest had deteriorated by the late 90s.

In one of his Lou Reed pieces, Lester Bangs describes putting on Berlin at a party, and the music on that album somehow encouraged people to start fighting with and insulting each other. (For years, Berlin felt divisive among Reed fans, some immediately recognizing its brilliance, others put off by the bleakness.) We didn't have one of those Virginia Wolf episodes. But I recall this guy just shaking his head when not holding his face in his hands. "Airportman" may as well have been "Metal Machine Music A-1." This felt a million miles away from that shared R.E.M. mythology we wove together with the 80s and our youth. And while my reaction at the time wasn't far off from my friend's, I now think they were damned if they did (change their sound) and damned if they didn't. I like this! It's not blowing my doors off, but I like it. And I eventually doubled back to pull in at least half the album. It's funny how some of this stuff improves in quality when you remove it from expectations and where you were at that place and time.

 

I did preview ahead and 'The Lifting" from the opening of the next album is wikked.

 

"Airportman" - It's a bold move to open your first album without your drummer of 17 years with a one-beat drum machine pattern, burbling keyboards with the most minimal melody, some polite farting guitar sounds, and barely there, melodyless vocals, and I give them credit for taking pretty much a complete left turn from everything they've done before. If only it had been good. This is inoffensive and kind of nice as background music, but it's not anything I particularly want to hear again. Maybe they should've made an album, like U2 did with Passengers, as a standalone ambient/soundtrack project. I give them an extra half point for embracing the change, but otherwise, as Greek Nacho put it more eloquently, this is snoozeville. 2.5/5

 

Oh my god, I love "Airportman." It took a long time for me to get there. I got Up right when it came out and didn't understand it at all. This new REM was weird and I didn't like it. So I put the CD on a shelf and kinda forgot about it. The next year, I started college. I went to freshman orientation and it was pretty dumb, so I told a friend I was going to go home. He said "stick around, they're giving REM tickets to people that stay til the end." So I did the college kid thing -- I left and came back right for the ending. Got 4 free lawn tickets to see REM that weekend on the Up tour. Seeing the songs from the record live made me pull the album out again and all of a sudden, it made sense. I'll talk about the specific song that set that off in a few days. But now I was all in. Yeah, it was weird and different, but they were pressing forward. "Airportman" laid down the gauntlet just like "Everything In Its Right Place" did a few years later. It's cold and mechanical and so far from anything they had ever done. I love bold moves like that. It's calming but also uncomfortable. It goes on a little too long and makes you wonder what the heck they're thinking. It all falls together just right for me.

As a side note -- did anyone else have a CD copy of Up that seemed to only play a few seconds of this song before skipping to "Lotus"? I thought this song was just a tiny intro for a while until someone pointed out that it was actually 4 min long. I'm not sure if my CD was doing something weird or if I zoned out completely the first few times I heard it.

 

It’s a good album starter and statement of a new artistic intent. It’s cool to hear them start off with no drummer and still produce something worthy of consideration. But I don’t know how much I rate it as a song on its own. I don’t mind being arty and moody in the right context, but not sure this is it. 3/5

 

Up as an album is a pretty good EP. Where and what were they going without Bill. He did not want them to stop. I feel this is a Mike, Michael album. Peter is inspired in parts.

Airportman doesn't do anything for me. As @prymel noted its Eno-esque vibe and yes @ghoulsurgery there could be some Radiohead influence there. For those who love this song you could get on over to the Brian Eno thread that is now descending into his "Ambient" phase. He was an absolute genius and made some landmark recordings. Airportman has none of those qualities. I actually start "Up" a few songs in. 1/5

 

The song is a brilliant transition piece though. They're moving out of the Berry era, and Stipe was settling into his role as Santa. He reflected on his old days flying in airports. By this point he was traveling from show to show in his flying sleigh (expanded upon on "The Lifting" later on). He was reflecting on days gone by, when he still had to use commercial air travel and not magic as a means of transportation.

 

And now, we finally begin the post-Berry years of R.E.M. "Airportman" is, suffice to say, not really that interesting on its own. It's slow, plodding, and lethargic when taken out of context, and only really serves to build things up for, well, Up. R.E.M. have made plenty of slow-burning album openers before, but never before did any of them so heavily rely on needing to be attached to the album itself. This probably would've worked much better if it were a minute and a half long at most, acting as a crescendo into "Lotus", but I guess it is what it is.

All things said and done though, it serves its purpose as an opener well enough to make the album feel slightly more lacking if it were absent.

3/5.

 

This will by my first experience with Up. I really gave up on the band after New Adv., so I'm looking forward to finally delving into this period. To me, Airportman has a real Radiohead vibe--although it might be just as fair to say that the Kid A record has a bit of an Airportman vibe. I like that they come out of the post-Berry gate with a VERY different sound--or, I guess I respect it. The song itself is interesting as a rebirth sort of thing, but it does virtually nothing for me in terms of connecting with it.

I may end up not rating these songs, as it seems unfair to rate them relative to past R.E.M. songs and I can't yet rank them relative to other Up songs as I've never heard any of them. I hope the record gets more engaging from here.

 

I don't know how to rate these songs in a way that make sense or feels fair. I guess on an overall scale that doesn't try to rank relative to the band's past work, I give Airportman a 1? (and relative to the 4-legged dog songs, I guess that means it's a 0?)

 

Does this (and bear with me) qualify as "ambient music"? I like the delicate pinging riff, I am thisclose to remembering what it reminds me of - which will either come to me in a day or two or maybe never. Overall it seems very subdued for an album opener.

 

5/5 for me. I think "Airportman" is a brilliant pice of music. It's so beautiful, and yes, it's ambient art-pop, a complete left turn, and to me it really does evoke airports at late night in the dreamy world of jet-lag. He moves efficiently...great opportunity awaits...by itself the words (and Michael's melody) are no great shakes, but they do their job in the context of the music, which, with it's cold inhuman textures and gleaming sound strangely warm, the warmth of the amnesiac who's gone beyond that and lives observing the world and this paragon striding down the moving sidewalk.

 

If only the lyrics were more like this

 

Except I wrote "amnesiac"when I meant insomniac. Mornings...

 

Dreams, they complicate my life (Get up! Get up! Get up!)