Another Trip Around The Sun

It's hard to have a thirteen course banquet where you love every dish. There's always bound to be something you don't care for, like mashed turnips or something. Your choices are to either get them out of the way first, so they won't pollute the other dishes or to push them to the side and eat the other things you like. But no matter how hard you ignore them, those mashed turnips will still there. The other choice is to get the turnips out of the way first. That way you can look forward to eating the tastier dishes later.

Around The Sun is the mashed root vegetable of R.E.M. albums. So instead of going through their albums in chronological order and saving the mashed turnips for last, I'm going to go through them in alphabetical order, and get the mashed turnips out of the way first. Around The Sun is a lot like mashed turnips. Not terribly yucky, just not very distinctive. It doesn't sound bad in the background, as a side-dish, but if you try to listen more carefully, there just isn't a whole lot of there there.

I saw R.E.M. live shortly after this album came out and even wrote an internet review. I liked the concert quite a bit, but couldn't really get a handle on the new songs. At that point I still hadn't picked up ATS, and it wasn't until about a month later that I finally succumbed and picked up a cheap copy. A few of the songs ("Leaving New York","Aftermath","I Wanted To Be Wrong") aren't too bad, but the steady stream of samey mid-tempo songs gets tiring after awhile.

Of the thirteen R.E.M. albums, Around The Sun is my least favorite by far. It was the first of their albums with a title named after one of their songs, so hopefully it's just a coincidence that their upcoming album Accelerate also has a song called "Accelerate".  So far, there hasn't been a decent R.E.M. album with a title track, but every rule has an exception.