The Only R.E.M. Album Ranking You Will Ever Need
I’ve had it. Enough with the distortion of R.E.M.’s legacy and the celebration of Out Of Time. I’m here to properly rank the R.E.M. albums based on how I SAY THEY SHOULD BE RANKED.
Listen, I love R.E.M. And I promise you this ranking is how I actually feel - these will not all be popular opinions but A) I’m not going against the grain just for the sake of going against the grain and B) I KNOW there will be plenty of people who completely agree with me. So if you’re looking to dig in to R.E.M.’s body of work this will be a great guide for you. I got on board with R.E.M. when my brother bought me Chronic Town on vinyl for I think my 16th (?) birthday in 1986. So yes I was slightly late to the game, but I dove right in before they hit the mainstream and played the crap out of the first four albums at the time so I’m pretty comfortable with my R.E.M. street cred as a fan of almost 37 years.
I don’t care if an album sold 100 million copies if it sucks. I won’t say an album sucks because it sold more copies, but yes - unfortunately that is indeed sometimes the case. Not everyone wants to be challenged by the music they hear and sometimes simple sells better. And sure sometimes simple IS better. Sometimes.
But sometimes watered down sells better. Sometimes trendy sells better. Sometimes gimmicky sells better. Sometimes cheesy and sappy sells better. Sometimes all of these things lend themselves to mass approval and consumption. And sometimes the mass approval and consumption of real subpar crap happens. These things have ruined some bands - they seriously damaged U2 and Metallica and yes, R.E.M.
Fight me.
Okay so I’ve digressed a bit. In the ol’ “make ‘em sick, make ‘em well” tradition let’s get to ranking this glorious body of work of the boys from Athens because despite some missteps this band still means a lot to me.
The Only R.E.M. Album Ranking You Will Ever Need
15. Around The Sun (2004) Not much to say. Bad album by a bored and uninspired band at the time. Don’t bother. The opening track Leaving New York isn’t horrible. There I said something nice.
14. Collapse Into Now (2011) This album is a below average album disguised as a good one. R.E.M. had come roaring back with one of their best in Accelerate - an album that rocked and had depth, and the follow up Collapse Into Now sounded like it would be more of the same on the surface on the first couple listens, but it became clear that the songs just aren’t there after a while. I wanted to love this album but I can’t. Now there are a couple of good songs sure - It Happened Today is worthy - building towards a pleasant end with nice soaring harmonies. Mine Smell Like Honey is a good uptempo jam and Walk It Back is nice. But three really good songs and a bunch of forgettable ones ain’t enough…
13. Out Of Time (1991) Okay let’s get this out of the way. I don’t care that the band says they were taking risks by putting a mandolin on the first single and that they felt great about this batch of songs. I don’t care that this album was a #1 selling over 4 million copies. It’s NOT very good. That’s right - Out Of Time is absolutely not a great album. R.E.M. deserved to be massive. They deserved to be massive well before this LP. But instead the success came not with kick ass songs with depth and feeling, but with a mid tempo whiney snoozer called Losing My Religion that got played 800 million times everywhere. Ugh. My first impression of that song before it blew up was that it was an okay song. That’s it. Like R.E.M. lite. There were very few songs that I thought were just okay on the previous records and suddenly this one was what the greater world was introduced to as R.E.M. - not Driver 8 or Catapult for example. Not much different than the world thinking Metallica greatness was based on Unforgiven and not No Remorse or Battery. And if the rest of Out Of Time was great it would be forgivable, but only some of it is. Belong, Country Feedback, Me In Honey and Half A World Away are all amazing. Genuinely amazing songs - Belong is a strange spoken word thing that really works. It’s got that weight to it that gets you in the feels and it’s hard to explain why. Country Feedback is brilliant - a slow burn building of emotion to the point where Michael Stipe is reduced to lamenting “It’s crazy what you could have had - I need this!” with a real sense of resignation that resonates, and when he first starts to feel it with the admission that “I had control, I lost my head…” it’s ten times more convincing than the lame drivel in Losing My Religion of “Oh no I’ve said too much, I haven’t said enough". It’s night and day really. Half A World Away is gorgeous and I enjoy Peter Buck’s mandolin here much more. Me In Honey utilizes Kate Pierson’s powerful vocals as she and Stipe harmonize to close out the album - way better than the overly cheesy and silly Shiny Happy People. Shiny Happy People is a song that could be fun like Stand but it’s just too childish - it would work fine if the band made a kids album, and it’s no mistake that it worked so well as “Furry Happy Monsters” on the Muppet Show. If that’s all it was it would be fun. But to put it on an actual R.E.M. album? Yuck. Texarkana and Near Wild Heaven are BOTH sung by bassist Mike Mills who is a great musician and fantastic BACKING vocalist. His backing vocals and harmonies are actually a secret weapon for the band on their albums. But as a lead vocalist? Nope. Not even a little. Like listening to Kermit the Frog when he’s featured, and he’s barely featured at that. Both songs sound like they simply forgot to ADD lead vocals. They’re both awful, and Near Wild Heaven in particular is just so bland and lame - no teeth at all. Endgame is a waste - an unnecessary instrumental with a couple la la las that goes nowhere. Low is……low. Boring. The opener Radio Song is actually pretty good - funky and with the hip hop teacher himself KRS-One who provides some goofy hey hey heys before adding a too-brief rap at the end. Granted the song is ironic starting an album with KRS-One’s previously & often stated legit beef about radio DJs not playing good hip hop on an album with watered down R.E.M. songs that would dominate the airwaves ad nauseam. So there it is. And I’ll just add here that while many people may scoff, I am indeed a fan of AllMusic.com. I do not always agree with ALL of their reviews and yes music is subjective blah blah blah blah blah blah, but this album gets 2 1/2 stars there out of 5, so I’m not the ONLY one who says it pretty much sucks. You know why? Because it does. It does suck. There are a few great songs here yes, but not close to enough of them to save this album.
12. Reveal (2001) This is the album where I finally gave up on R.E.M. for a while. I didn’t like it much at all, but I did just pull it out recently for the first time in years since there won’t likely ever be another R.E.M. album and I thought that maybe this one could be redeemed with fresh ears. I think many of us do that with albums that we want to be better right? Well this one did age slightly better than I thought it would. It’s no masterpiece but it’s……pretty good. It’s a bit of a vibe - mostly mellow and reflective but not in a depressing way and so I’m prepared to say I might even kind of like Reveal even though there aren’t too many real standout tracks. The best song here for my money is The Chorus And The Ring which reminds me of Country Feedback a little but prettier.
11. Automatic For The People (1992) The other massive blockbuster R.E.M. album that way too many people (apparently) consider a masterpiece that isn’t all that great. It’s starts off strong enough with Drive with the string arrangements by John Paul Jones which is pretty cool and Try Not To Breathe is solid too. Then things start to get questionable. The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight sounds like a lame Near Wild Heaven rewrite with the sense enough to not have Mills sing it, and yet Michael Stipe’s overly goofy upper register delivery here is just as bad. Next is the pretty but impossibly sappy Everybody Hurts. And I get it - it’s…..nice. It probably means a lot to a lot of people, but can you really sit and listen to Everybody Hurts? Tell the truth. I can’t. New Orleans Instrumental No. 1 sounds like exactly that - some random undeveloped idea they put on the album. Sweetness Follows is next and it’s the best song on the album. It’s bittersweet - a reflective and gorgeous song about loss that hits hard. Really incredible. Monty Got A Raw Deal is okay but forgettable and Ignoreland is just kind of dumb. Not because it’s political, it’s just not that good. The next track is the other one that reaches greatness - Star Me Kitten (actually Fuck Me Kitten with the “star” serving as a bleep for the title). It’s just so unique - no chorus and Michael Stipe and Peter Buck mirroring each other with the melody with vocal and lead guitar for a great effect even with the lyrics being indecipherable, the only percussion being Berry on (I think) a ride cymbal. Man On The Moon is nice - yes it was overplayed and a bigger hit than I thought it deserved to be but I guess that’s okay - it’s a good song with a catchy chorus. Nightswimming is pretty. Find The River is okay. The end.
10. Up (1998) Okay finally the albums are getting better on this list. This was the first album without drummer Bill Berry after he suffered a brain aneurysm and called it quits, so instead of just making a standard R.E.M. album with a new drummer they went a bit experimental and they really lean into the mostly mellow vibe here which helps make this album work so well - a similar feel to Reveal in some ways just better. My only complaint is this album would have been better with 11 tracks instead of 14. They could easily have eliminated You’re In The Air, Walk Unafraid, and Parakeet - all 3 are fat that could have been trimmed. Highlights here are the wonderfully spooky-ish Suspicion, the cool electronic-ish Hope, the absolutely gorgeous (and my wife Ally’s favorite) At My Most Beautiful, and the poignant closer Falls To Climb where the subject defiantly steps up to take the fall - I tried to find the meaning behind this one but like plenty of R.E.M. songs it seems to be very much subject to interpretation. It would be another decade before R.E.M. would make another great album.
9. Green (1988) The last great early era R.E.M. album and yet some cracks that keep it from being truly elite. With Out Of Time following it I can’t help but look at this one as the beginning of the downturn where they started to lose their edge in the overall quality (they did eventually get it back if a bit sporadically). The first five songs are fantastic. The Doors-inspired (Hello, I Love You) Pop Song 89 is a fun opener, and I was about to write something about the video as I remember it - the bare chests of Michael Stipe and the three women dancing behind him were all blacked out on MTV but all I see on YouTube is the uncensored version…. lol - I never knew there was an uncensored version! The only place I see the censored version now is in this Beavis and Butthead clip from back then. Get Up is great, You Are The Everything is beautiful, Stand is absolutely silly and absolutely perfect in its silliness, and World Leader Pretend is also really good. The Wrong Child is….a wrong turn, and maybe the very first flat out bad song to ever appear on an R.E.M. album. At the time that was like wait, huh? What’s this? I don’t get it - never have. Orange Crush is a banger, but Turn You Inside Out sounds like….filler? A Finest Worksong rewrite? It’s not “bad” but what’s going on here? This isn’t supposed to happen on R.E.M. albums. Hairshirt is pretty, I Remember California is just pretty good. But the last uncredited track is one of the few songs that actually made me cry once. I had a moment in the car around this time thinking about a certain loss when I heard this song. Any song that can do that to me is really something man…
8. Monster (1994) The R.E.M. ROCK record. The story goes that Bill Berry had enough of the mellow / sappy / cheesy / low energy stuff and wanted to rock or he was out. Now this isn’t exactly a HARD rock album but it probably has the loudest distorted guitars in several spots of any R.E.M. LP and it’s really good. There’s real energy here which was lacking in the previous two and it was much needed. It still sounds like R.E.M. even though by this point there’s really not much connection to the early jangle pop days (which they would never really return to fully) with a couple exceptions such as the dreamlike-yet-slightly-menacing I Don’t Sleep I Dream and there’s not a dud on this album. Not everything is a classic but nothing is less than very good. The big hit was the opener What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? and it really sets the tone for the album. Funnily enough one of the standouts is the non-rocker Tongue which is mostly just an organ, a piano and Michael Stipe singing in a falsetto the entire way. Bang and Blame, King Of Comedy, Crush With Eyeliner, Let Me In, Strange Currencies, Circus Envy, You - all great.
7. Fables Of The Reconstruction (1985) The least of the first five albums from the original and best era of the band but still great, containing one of the very best R.E.M. songs in the classic Driver 8. To me this song is quintessential R.E.M. - maybe the purest distillation of their aesthetic ever recorded. Just a slice of life (?) in the American South as seen from a passenger train but there’s something deeper to it that Stipe refers to in not being able to reach the destination - that it’s still a ways away…. Stipe is frequently good with the cryptic metaphors that don’t totally reveal their meanings. Feeling Gravity’s Pull is a great opener - a fantastic hook. Can’t Get There From Here is a good jam and Life And How To Live It is a rollicking classic and it’s classic Stipe in that you will not understand a single word except maybe the title. If you know this song and you’ve never looked up the lyrics they will make you smile just in the fact that you’ll see you had NO chance.
6. Accelerate (2008) The last great R.E.M. album and a great one for roadtrips. I didn’t expect to get another one of these since it had been a decade since a great R.E.M. album and longer than that for one that rocked. It kicks off with the shot-out-of-a-cannon blast of Living Well Is The Best Revenge and boy was I excited to hear this the first time. What a great song! This LP is bittersweet because it made me feel like they still had this in them and yet they never did it again. Michael Stipe sounds invigorated - belting out vocals like a rock front man but not overdoing it. Artists aren’t always the best judge of their own music but even the band was spot on knowing that the last album Around The Sun was garbage so they were determined not to go out like that. The album was received pretty well and sold well too. The rockers Man-Sized Wreath, Hollow Man, Supernatural Superserious, and Horse To Water all kick ass and the softer tunes Houston and Until The Day Is Done are also fantastic. The title track, Mr. Richards, Sing For The Submarine and even the goofy closer I’m Gonna DJ are all pretty solid.
5. Reckoning (1984) The sophomore full length is a classic. The album starts in very R.E.M. fashion with indecipherable double tracked and harmonized vocals - you can’t understand more than a random word here or there and it’s….awesome. Everyone has always joked about not being able to understand the vocals on the first few albums (heck the debut is CALLED Murmur) and this LP might be the most mumbly. The album lives in the alternative jangle pop genre here with plenty of Byrds influence, and it’s funny that I don’t listen to a bunch of The Byrds. I wasn’t raised on The Byrds and didn’t get the connection right away in my teens when I discovered all the 1st wave alternative bands that were influenced by them. I should probably dig into their catalogue at some point but I digress…. Either way this was the sound that R.E.M. made theirs and the sound that defined their greatness early on. So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry) is another R.E.M. classic which people know by the “I’m sorryyyy” refrain. 7 Chinese Brothers (reimagined as the faux gospel tongue-in-cheek Voice Of Harold on the Dead Letter Office B-Sides collection) is another great mid-tempo representative of the sound of that time. I’m also a big fan of Time After Time (Annelise) and I don’t care if Stephen Malkmus sang that it was his least favorite song on Pavement’s ode to R.E.M. Unseen Power Of The Picket Fence - I heartily disagree. I think it’s beautiful. The other real classic here is the wonderful (Don’t Go Back To) Rockville later covered by 10,000 Maniacs. Every song here is great.
4. Document (1987) The albums start to become relatively interchangeable at this point in the order. I don’t think R.E.M. has ONE single masterpiece album that stands above the rest - I can’t seem to get comfortable with what I have ranked where as we near the top and I’d be fine with an argument for any of these 4 as #1. Document is really the culmination of all the sounds they perfected up until this point and the album was a huge college radio hit. This album should have been 10 times bigger than Out Of Time - it even had multiple ready-made radio hits on it like The One I Love, Finest Worksong and the amazing word jumble haplessly immortalized 8 years later in the film Tommy Boy by Chris Farley and David Spade, It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine). Meanwhile as I’m writing this…I just Googled the Document album as I do when writing these to research a little, and a few days ago I was watching a Helmet performance at KEXP on YouTube where Page Hamilton was talking about the band Wire and how he was influenced by them. Wire had been on my radar but I hadn’t ever listened to them really, so I downloaded their debut Pink Flag album. I got about halfway through it the other day - it’s great. Now today I’m finding out the the R.E.M. song Strange is a Wire cover and the original is on the back half of that album. Sure enough there it is in my Apple Music…. how weird is that? I never knew it was a cover and I just happened to download it unknowingly as I was starting work on this piece! Strange…..indeed. As for the rest of the album there are plenty of gems such as King Of Birds, Disturbance At The Heron House and Exhuming McCarthy. This album was a big hit, just not the international blockbuster that Out Of Time was even though it’s significantly better.
3. New Adventures In Hi-Fi (1996) I think this is my favorite R.E.M. album (?). I don’t know - who knows. I would feel strange ranking it #1 just because it might be my personal favorite - trying to be somewhat objective in a subjective endeavor I know. All I do know is this one is my top R.E.M. roadtrip album choice. Great for scenery, great for battlefields, it’s varied, it rocks, it’s pretty, it’s deep, it’s everything good about this band and it was largely created on the road. It’s also epic - at over 65 minutes it’s the longest R.E.M. album and unlike Up which sounds too long this one doesn’t waste a second - it’s all killer. It contains the longest R.E.M. song by a wide margin at over 7 minutes Leave which is somehow anchored by a siren going off throughout the entire song once the drums kick in - it never stops, sometimes in the background, sometimes it’s all you hear over the drums and it’s genius. It’s a call to action to “leave it all behind”… There are plenty of rockers here like The Wake-Up Bomb, Departure, Binky The Doormat and Undertow which all work, but the best of them that just sounds like it should have been a huge hit to me is So Fast, So Numb. It wasn’t even released as a single - a missed opportunity I guess… one of my favorite R.E.M. songs. E-Bow The Letter has one of the best lines ever in “Aluminum tastes like fear” - because it’s somehow totally true. I don’t know how it’s true but it is, and it includes a haunting vocal by Patti Smith on it while Michael Stipe goes mostly what sounds like stream of consciousness throughout the somewhat spoken “verses”. Brilliant. This album also includes the best instrumental (really their only great instrumental) they ever recorded in Zither which includes Scott McCaughey on……wait for it…….zither. I’m bouncing all around here but a shout out to the opener as well How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us - this one eases us in and preps us for the journey a bit before the blast of the aforementioned Wake-Up Bomb. This one along with Undertow allow for a loose feel that sounds great as you’re driving through the mountains or wherever you’re driving. There are beautiful songs here too - New Test Leper, the absolutely gorgeous Be Mine and the absolute classic closer Electrolite. I love the flow of this album because Zither gives you a brief reset before the final three tracks which to me represent the strongest closing sequence of any R.E.M. album - So Fast, So Numb, Low Desert and Electrolite leave you wanting more after over an hour.
2. Lifes Rich Pageant (1986) The only reason I’ve got these two ahead of New Adventures here is because I still feel the true R.E.M. legacy is represented by their early jangly sound. Keep in mind I think I’ve been pretty clear that I’m not some R.E.M. purist that thinks that’s the only R.E.M. sound - they eventually expanded their sound with plenty of success among some of the misses. The fact that New Adventures is my favorite is proof of that. But can I rank it ahead of Lifes Rich Pageant or Murmur? That’s a tough one. As I said earlier the top 4 are interchangeable for me. Lifes Rich Pageant was the first full length R.E.M. album I bought so it’s still definitely special to me, and the opener Begin The Begin is the first heavy opener - it kicks ASS. So this album is really a lot like New Adventures in mood and feel to me. It rocks harder than the albums that came before it, but it does still have several jangly tunes on it that the band mostly moved away from by the Green album. So really this album has a lot of the best of everything. Fall On Me is gorgeous and a real R.E.M. classic that I feel is sort of forgotten - an environmentally conscious beauty and the same can be said for Cuyahoga. Hyena starts with Hyena-esque cackling before kicking in with some lovely piano and according to a contributor on genius.com in introducing the song on tour Stipe said “This one involves the food chain. United States is the big fish. Mexico … (then) Guatemala. Ones eats the other up. One gets bigger.” This was definitely on the band’s mind as they addressed it in the gorgeous The Flowers Of Guatemala as well. Every song here is fantastic - rockers I Believe, These Days, Just A Touch and the closing cover of The Clique’s Superman are all amazing. Swan Swan H references the Civil War but I have no clue what it’s about, What If We Give It Away? is really nice and even the curiosity Underneath The Bunker is cool. Great place to start but not to be missed regardless.
1. Murmur (1983) This album is just pure R.E.M. It’s the first full length which is worth noting because it’s not the debut. Chronic Town is the debut and it’s incredible but it’s only a 5 song EP and hard to rank on a list of albums - if I had to I would probably have it….5th-ish? You could easily make the case for a chronological approach and to start with Chronic Town, even if Murmur is more fully realized and an amazing batch of songs. A young and hungry band but with a mature sound beyond their years. I wonder how many people who discovered this band with Out Of Time ever went back and spent time with this album. It’s not the same band at all in the best way. Starting out with the energetic and soaring Radio Free Europe, this album is tough to describe. It sounds ridiculous to praise an album that you don’t understand at all at least in terms of the lyrics. Like who does that? The funny thing is that as I’ve touched on already even when you can understand Michael Stipe on later albums he rarely gives away the meaning anyway so you can sort of make it your own. Catapult is a prime example - “Ooooh we were little boys, ooooh we were little girls” sounds wistful - a song about childhood perhaps? Who knows - the only thing you’ll understand after that is “Did we miss anything” and “Catapult” - I don’t get what he’s referencing but that’s okay - it’s an absolutely gorgeous song. It’s just a perfect album - Sitting Still has a kick ass bridge where Stipe amps up the delivery of…..huh? I’ll take a stab at it - “Up to fine ah caney pasta kitchen time a not may an, sitting top of the big heap wasting time sitting still”? Lol - apparently he’s never confirmed them and if you go to the different lyric sites you’ll see multiple translations - I know the chorus is “I can hear you" which sounds significant for some reason and then ending the song with “Can you hear me?”. So yes I’m focusing on the indecipherable vocals a lot but the fact is all of these songs sound of a piece and firmly in the jangly style and yet don’t sound samey - each is a distinct gem that brings something different to the table. 9-9 with its bass line opener and jagged riffing throughout, the sublime Perfect Circle, the beautiful and soaring chorus of Shaking Through - just wow. I could listen to this album 1000 times and never get sick of it. My favorite song on this one is probably Talk About The Passion with the perfect line that seems to be so relevant today for me when it comes to mental health even though I suspect that wasn’t what he was singing about when he says “Not everyone can carry the weight of the world” - I saw a comment on a message board that dates from 2007 that I think sums it up perfectly regarding Michael Stipe: “It's not unusual for him to be deliberately obscure -- probably in part a habit he developed so he could write about his personal emotional struggles without giving away his secrets.” I suspect this is spot on, and I’m cool with it as a fan. Regardless, Murmur is a classic and a masterpiece. A singular otherworldly moment that will never be repeated and will stand the test of time. It has aged like a fine wine and will always be an album I’ll pull out from time to time.
So there it is. This was a long time coming. I expect the comments here and on social media to be lively - in agreement and disagreement alike! Bring it!!!
M10 Social is owned by Doug Cohen in West Bloomfield, MI and provides social media training and digital marketing services from the Frameable Faces Photography studio Doug owns with his wife Ally. He can be reached there at tel:248-790-7317, by mobile at tel:248-346-4121 or via email at mailto:doug@frameablefaces.com. You can follow Doug’s band Vintage Playboy at their Facebook page here.
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