I’ve never been a huge R.E.M. fan, most probably because I was introduced to them by their Out of Time radio hits (Losing My Religion and Shiny Happy People still annoy the shit out of me) — I remember listening to their followup albums Automatic for the People and Monster, and then losing interest. I didn’t have anything against them, and over the years they’ve popped up on my radar from time to time (more for their videos than their songs — Everybody Hurts still holds up as an amazing work, and more recently, the Hammer & Tongs directed Imitation of Life was also quite good), but they they’ve just never resonated with me all that much.

That being said, after reading an interesting discussion on early R.E.M., I chased down their pre-90s work and will have to spend a day sometime giving it a listen. Also, their new album (Accelerate) isn’t bad (single). I’ve only given it one spin so far, although I’ve been deluged w/ new stuff lately and I guess in a different headspace at the moment (new things on rotation: Styrofoam, Cut Copy, M83).

Here’s a passage from a last.fm journal linked from the discussion:

Much like a hat I used to own, R.E.M. was perfect because it fit perfectly into the space where nothing used to be. They drew on the energy of punk without its harshness and nihilism, replacing growling distortion with chiming Byrds guitars and hoarse, angry shouts with pretty harmonies, and filtered out the cornpone from country/roots, leaving only its forthright beauty, in a way that made perfect and astonishing sense to white Southern kids of a certain age, to whom real country was a cliche beloved by redneck uncles and to whom real punk, however satisfying its aggressive pleasures, was music about New York, and London, and Southern California, exotic places that bore scant resemblance to the tree-lined streets of our hometowns. R.E.M.’s sound validated a kind of modern-South lifestyle that we were already living, and made it seem both mythic and earnestly real. You couldn’t buy drugs that did that. Not consistently, anyway.