When my brother and I were kids our parents would play a bunch of their favorite music. My dad would always play CDs from U2 and Led Zeppelin, with some occasional AC/DC thrown in. My mom had a playlist of ripped CDs and iTunes purchases that she keeps updating to this day (Man, I need to get my hands on that track list, pure nostalgia.) The standouts from that were various songs from Grays Anatomy, the Gilligan’s Island theme, and the Indigo Girls, whom I still consider one my favorite acts. My brother took his taste from dad, and I took mine from mom. But one act that fell in the middle, that both parents played at varying levels, was R.E.M.
I’ve always liked R.E.M., but I think my biggest exposure to them for ever, or the thing I thought of when I thought of them, was a parody of shiny happy people written for Sesame Street. Another bit of odd connection is with a traffic safety video that my brother and I both saw in drivers ed. I won’t link it, but it was a PSA showing endless scenes of people in (staged) car crashes set to R.E.M.’s Everybody Hurts. The running joke between Sam and I for years was that we couldn’t listen to that song in a car, it was certain doom.
But recently going through my parent’s giant binder of CDs, I ripped maybe 6 or 7 R.E.M. albums and have been going through them for the first time. I love them all, Document and Automatic for the People standing out, but I chose Life’s Rich Pageant for this review to represent this whole era of the band. Keep in mind I still haven’t listened to their newer stuff, basically past Monster, so this isn’t a complete look at their style (Hey, I never said these were comprehensive reviews!
Theres something almost ethereal about Michael Stipe’s voice on top of the relatively bare instrumentation. Some songs like Swan Swan H and Fall on Me are bordering on haunting, while other tracks on the album are more up-tempo and positive. I like when the band goes for a more melancholic vibe, though, it works really well. I almost view it as two different acts, R.E.M. the mellow and R.E.M. the rock-y. I get Hyena stuck in my head all the time. I highly recommend giving this album and the entire R.E.M. discography a spin, you’ll be surprised at how many of their songs you know, and how many you’ve yet to fall in love with.
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