I rate this one somewhere near the middle of the pack of R.E.M. albums. I think it's the weakest of their IRS albums, and it's dogged by Don Gehman's uber-80s production, but it's certainly more energetic and exuberant than their recent records. The band obviously had a lot of fun making the album.
The first half (like the first half of Fables) is super solid, but they kind of ran out of material in the second half, which is why they had to dig through their back catalog of unrecorded chestnuts ("I Believe" was a re-worked Fables outtake, "Hyena" dates from the Reckoning era, and "Just A Touch" and "Give It Away" are from their prehistoric days), loopy covers ("Superman") and on the fly genre experiments ("Underneath the Bunker"). All these songs are at least interesting, but it's fairly obvious that R.E.M.'s constant album/tour cycles had taken their toll on their songwriting.
This makes the omission of outtakes like "PSA (Bad Day)" (which was recorded for Pageant but not released until it was revamped the In Time compilation in 2003) all the more puzzling. Maybe that song didn't fit the flow of the album.
The main lesson I learned from Lifes Rich Pageant was that it was okay to like The R.O.C.K. The album was recorded at John Cougar Mellencamp's studio with his producer, and they even covered "Toys In The Attic" for one of the B-sides before it was legal for post-punk bands to non-ironically cover "pre-punk" rock. It was even a few months before Aerosmith were "re-discovered" by Run DMC. Some hipsters decried them for courting the mainstream when the album came out, but even twenty plus years later, Lifes Rich Pageant still sounds like an R.E.M. album, even with the beat up cars and guitars and drummers going Crack-Boom-Bam!
2 comments:
Interesting thoughts. I remember when I first heard this, starting to worry they were turning into a boring rawk band. (Christ if only...given that instead they ended up releasing Around the Sun...) But the best of these songs won me over. And despite the recycling, I was thrilled to hear "Hyena" (which I'd heard a couple-few times live by this point), and "Just a Touch" is one of their best barn-burners. "Underneath the Bunker" is short enough not to matter, and while "Superman" is certainly a reflection of their coming up short in the songwriting department (isn't it the only cover to have made a regular album?), it's still a very fun song. At this point even running on fumes they were extraordinary.
They also covered Wire's "Strange" on Document. But I'm sure you knew that already.
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