Of course, this will be subjective. No two R.E.M. fans are likely to rank or rate the 15 studio albums in exactly the same way or for exactly the same reasons.
My take on the R.E.M. canon reflects the story of how I became immersed in the music of Messrs Stipe, Buck, Mills and Berry in the first place. I think it was around 1992 that I got hold of a cassette tape with Out of Time copied on one side. I was 12 years old, and it was that record that introduced me to the band. I was mesmerised, baffled, elated all at once, keeping the tape on loop and lost in the sheer variety of moods and emotions awakened in me by this particular sort of music. Once Automatic for the People came out, I had that recorded on the other side of the cassette tape and loved that record just as much, if not more. I started learning guitar around this point, Everybody Hurts was one of the first songs I learned to play.
Somewhere in here my Mum bought me the Best of the IRS years on tape which introduced me to highlights of the back catalogue, and I began working my way back through the albums, saving up my pocket money and purchasing them all on CD, right the way back to Murmur. By the time Monster was released in 1994, I was there at HMV on the day of release buying the album on CD, and got to Milton Keynes in 1995 to see them on that tour when they came through the UK. After that, and despite growing to love all kinds of music, seeing many bands perform live through the Britpop years in London and amassing a huge collection of albums on CD from a variety of genres, R.E.M. had firmly established themselves as my absolute favourite band, and so it has remained ever since.
I say all this to point out that most of my top R.E.M. albums seem to come out of that early to mid-90s heyday. Those who followed the band from the start will probably have more to say about Murmur, Reckoning or Fables. I guess I’ve just preferred things once we could hear Michael’s voice and lyrics more audibly circa Life’s Rich Pageant and beyond. I’ve met others who really arrived as fans after the turn of the millennium and who have a lot of time for Up or Reveal or the In Time… songs like The Great Beyond and Bad Day, but I feel something fundamental to the R.E.M. sound was forever lost once Bill Berry left even if they were beginning to find their way again, in my view, with Accelerate and Collapse into Now.
Or, it could simply be that I was a young teen blown away by this band, their sound, their story, their lyrics, their ethos, their aesthetic, their live act and I was soaking it all in at an impressionable age. I had some good friends who were tracking this too, and this was something we were exploring together. I think there’s a Michael Stipe quote about this somewhere: “People’s favourite R.E.M. albums often reflect when they were at high school,” or something to that effect. I guess that’s true for me.
The story will be different for others. And that’s all part of the fun. R.E.M. make up the soundtrack to a thousand lives.
And so, this is how I would rate the R.E.M. albums out of 10.
10/10
Life’s Rich Pageant / Automatic for the People
9/10
Monster / New Adventures in Hi-Fi
8/10
Green / Out of Time
7/10
Murmur / Reckoning / Fables of the Reconstruction / Document / Accelerate / Collapse into Now
6/10
Up / Reveal
5/10
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