Another band I "discovered" via the J-town library, which I guess was the Itunes/Napster of those way bygone days. R.E.M. is the highest ranking American band in this survey of Dolberry's memories.
R.E.M's career trajectory is essentially a chi-square distribution w/ four degrees of freedom (see plot). By the way, this is how I write at work. I express some fact/opinion and then say "see plot" usually in parentheses like above. Then I state some other fact/opinion which has its own plot, or sometimes for variety's sake a table.
Anyway, R.E.M. started in the early 80's, out of the University of Georgia, with their signature Peter Buck jangly guitars and Michael Stipe's mumbly, mostly incomprehensible lyrics. This style is most evident on Murmur, Reckoning, and Fables of the Reconstruction. In Dolberry's opinion, R.E.M. peaked with the fantastic Lifes Rich Pageant album which was produced in southern Indiana with Mellencamp's long time producer. In these days of Live Earth concerts and star-powered environmental conciousness, it's neat to remember that R.E.M. was crafting melodious treatises on why fouling our atmosphere and water (e.g., Cuyahoga) is not the best route to sustained life on this planet since 1986. And while the acid rain problem has more or less been mitigated through the use of market-based control measures (whereby utilites buy and sell pollution credits in an environment of a declining cap on those emissions) "Fall on Me" nails the oddity of a company having the right to inject large quantities of SO2 into everyone's air.
"Buy the sky and sell the sky and tell the sky and tell the sky, don't fall on me."
Anyway, Stipe et al., stayed at the top of their game through 1987's Document and 1988's Green. Somewhere along the way though, R.E.M. started morphing from a cool college rock band to a pretty much insufferably huge pop band. 1992's Automatic for the People was really the worst IMO w/ its whiny "Everybody Hurts" and "Man on the Moon". The story is that Kurt Cobain was listening to this album shortly before his suicide and while I don't think it's that bad, it certainly is something best avoided. They bounced back a little w/ 1994's Monster (a somewhat late entrance to the Nirvana-led early-90's scene). And while Dolberry consistently bought their next three albums hoping for a return to form, it never happened. I didn't even get their last album. At some point, everything R.E.M. did seemed to be highly, almost-transparently calculated, which was an abrupt departure from their early free form days. Wikipedia says they're currently in Ireland working w/ Jackknife Lee (sometimes U2 collaborator) on a new album. Dolberry is adopting a cautious wait-and-see attitude.
Best Songs: The One I Love, It's the End of the World As We Know It (and I feel fine), Harborcoat, Green Grow the Rushes, Disturbance at the Heron House, Begin the Begin, Fall on Me, I Believe, South Central Rain, Driver 8, Pop Song 89, Radio Free Europe, Losing My Religion, Bad Day, Binky the Doormat, What's the Frequency Kenneth.
Worst Songs: Man on the Moon (I loathe this song in a way that bold and red font'ing cannot capture.), most of the songs on New Adventures in Hi-Fi.
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