The Ultimate Pointless Exercise (Pat McCarthy REM revisited)

The Pat McCarthy-era R.E.M. albums don't get much love here, or anywhere, really. It's actually pretty hard to track where most people on this board disembarked the R.E.M. bus - some people seem to have lost interest as soon as they moved on from Mitch Easter, others once they signed with WB, others when Bill Berry left, etc. But I stuck with them to the very end, and I actually like the McCarthy albums just fine, though I definitely understand most people being cool towards them.

They all suffer from Berry's absence, since he was the acknowledged band disciplinarian who kept R.E.M. from wandering too far up their own butts. With him gone, Up, Reveal and Around the Sun got very fuzzy around the edges while also settling into an overarching sameyness on each album. Up's electronic explorations were cool, and I think that it's overall the best of this era, but it's too long and too many of the songs were anonymous. On Reveal, they indulged in their interest in the Beach Boys and Glen Campbell and came up with a nice, sun-drenched tone, but again, too many of the songs hovered at the same tempo and same mood. On Around the Sun, R.E.M. were clearly exhausted, by the W administration and its hard-on for Middle East adventurism, by being a band for 25 years, and by the material itself, which they overworked until most of the edges were sanded off and too much of it crossed the line into MOR. None of these three albums were actually bad at all, but all could be patience-testing and earned repeated listens out of loyalty to the band rather than for the music itself.

But there were some really good songs spread across all three albums, so I decided to see if I could condense a single very good album from the three okay-to-good ones. No one but myself is going to give much of a damn about the result, but whatever. Here is the tracklist for Reveal Sun Up, 12 tracks (13 on CD) clocking in at 50-55 minutes, which was about the length all three of the separate albums were.

1. Airportman
2. At My Most Beautiful
3. Imitation of Life
4. Daysleeper
5. All the Way to Reno
6. Electron Blue
7. I Wanted To Be Wrong
8. Hope
9. Walk Unafraid
10. The Lifting
11. Why Not Smile
12. Beat a Drum
13. Around the Sun (CD bonus)

So you start off with "Airportman," which was a good kickoff to the entire era, with its minimalist electronics and lyrics. It's a good tablesetter. Then comes "At My Most Beautiful," which is one of their better Beach Boys pastiches, so it's setting up the entire focus of the album in the first two songs - REM decides to mix Eno with the Beach Boys. It's two lower tempo songs up front, which could be a problem, but they're of sufficiently different moods that they shouldn't cause fatigue - which was an issue for "At My Most Beautiful" in its position on Up, as listener patience was already beginning to be tested and another slow song just felt exasperrating. Up front, it's strengths are more easily appreciated. Next comes "Imitation of Life," an uptempo reminder of the classic REM sound and probably their single best post-Berry song. It was another song buried too deep in the sequence of its parent album, coming too late to cause any sort of excitement.

Then it's back to a lower tempo, but one with a rousing chorus, "Daysleeper." That's followed by "All the Way To Reno," which is of a similar tempo but a completely different mood, with a countrified twang to it. Then comes Around the Sun's best offering, "Electron Blue," which again is of a similar tempo but completely different mood from the two songs prior. Next up, for a mid-album deep breath, "I Wanted To Be Wrong," the best ballad off of Around the Sun.

Now it's time for an injection of energy, so it's a good place for "Hope," the electronics drenched semi-rewrite of the riff from "Disturbance at the Heron House." "Walk Unafraid" brings the tempo down a bit, but brings the energy up, with one of the most rousing choruses of this era of REM. "The Lifting" gets moved from the opening track of Reveal to the lead-in to the closing stretch of this newly configured album. "Why Not Smile," with its tinkling music box backing that morphs into guitar noise gets the penultimate spot. "Beat a Drum" closes things out on bright, Beach Boys-inspired note, with Stipe vowing "This is all I want, it's all I need," which strikes me as a nice sentiment to send an album out on.

Then if one wants, "Around the Sun" can be added. I always thought it was a pretty good closing track, but the album is already pretty long without it, and I really got attached to "Beat a Drum" in the closing spot. And there's nowhere else that "Around the Sun" would fit except at the end, so it becomes a CD bonus track.

Anyhow, I made a playlist of this and have listened to it a couple of times and think it flows pretty well and has enough changes in tempo and feel to keep things more interesting and lively than any of the three original albums did. It'll most likely be my go-to in the future when I want to visit this era of REM. It captures their obsessions at the time - electronics, Brian Wilson and Glen Campbell - and pairs those with the most REM sounding songs of that time.

So yeah, it's a deep dive in the least loved era of REM's career and likely won't change anyone's minds about anything. But what the hell. I didn't have anything better to do the last couple days.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/05/2025 01:18PM by breno.

Hey, I appreciate it! I collect fake Beach Boys songs - played 2 hours worth on my show after Brian Wilson died - so I'm diggin these suggestions.

(For the record, I'm in the "once they signed with WB" camp)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/05/2025 03:55PM by MrFab.

Guilty confession about these three albums. I borrowed all three CD’s from the local library, burned them onto blank cd-r’s, and then never listened to any of them, ever.
…I’m not sure if I feel more guilty about ‘stealing’ them like that, or for never listening to any of them. Maybe your post can be a way in for me.

Guilty confession number two. When I was 16-17 (early 80s) some friends and I would get drunk/ stoned and sneak into a local golf course late at night, go into one of the ponds with tube socks and retrieve stray golfballs which we’d feel with our feet. It was a beautiful way to spend a quiet warm boring summer night. (We’d sell the balls to golfers in egg cartons).
…I’m not sure if I feel more guilty about ‘stealing’ those golfballs or how I tear up every time I hear REM’s ‘nightswimming’, wishing I could go back to those simpler and better times.

I appreciate this as well. I thought I had no interest in these albums, but maybe I'll re-evaluate that. It's been a long time since I've attempted to listen to any of them. My collective impression of the three is that they are dull.

Also for the record, Monster was the final straw for me. Since that album was atypical at that time, I tried again with New Adventures in Hi-Fi but ended up selling that one back as well.

I scoop probably everyone on the point at which I disengaged from the R.E.M. bus. I was a fan from the Hib-Tone 7" which was so ubiquitous in Orlando at the time that I never got around to actually buying a copy since whenever I left my home, it would be playing at wherever I was! So I bought the EP [can't even remember the name right now] and "Murmur."

By the time the first EP dropped, Orlando already was developing an "R.E.M. clone band" scene! I even suggested a name for one of these bands; Kickstand, which didn't fly in spite of how right I thought it was. I think they went with 7000 Gifts. And I designed the first logo to Orlando's Murmur Records. Anyway, within months after "Murmur," I just got sick and tired of having R.E.M. shoved down my throat and that was it. I flipped the two records and never paid attention to them again.

I don't even recognize the album titles bandied about in this thread past a certain point of cultural saturation. Though I did trek out to St. Pete in the mid-80s with a friend to see Let's Active open for R.E.M. in some arena! It was their "Big Plans For Everybody" tour and though it was Mitch minus the others who started the band it was still mighty awesome! They encored with my favorite Deep Purple-slash-Joe South jam, "Hush!" And I was thrilled that I can say that I saw Let's Active on the tour for my favorite album.

Former TP subscriber [81, 82, 83, 84]

[postpunkmonk.com]
For further rumination on the Fresh New Sound of Yesterday®

Great thread, this one. I continue to favor the Eighties R.E.M albums the most, including their Warner Bros. debut Green. They became inconsistent after that, but still, to me, there is no such thing as a worthless R.E.M. album. Even Around the Sun has its value: I've found it a remarkably soothing album to listen to when I've had a hangover.

My wife is a longtime R.E.M. fan too, but like the esteemed Monk, she felt the clone-generating effect went too far. When she started graduate school, she (and a lot of her friends) jokingly called the college radio station WREM.

Still, like me, she doesn't shun any of their records ... and, like me, she looks back fondly on the sole R.E.M. concert she saw. (Hers was at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans, on the Fables of the Reconstruction Tour; mine was at the Rainbow Music Hall in Denver, on the Reckoning Tour, with The Dream Syndicate opening.)

As for the "pointlessness" of the exercise, well, hey, I'd rather re-evaluate R.E.M.'s catalogue than listen to The White Album all the way through, eight days a week.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/07/2025 08:43AM by Delvin.

I may be a bigger R.E.M. fan than most here. I grew to like all of their records with Bill Berry quite a bit. Most of the I.R.S. ones and Automatic for the People I loved immediately, but the rest took time because I thought they were too uneven. I've since come to appreciate the "lesser" moments, and even Monster (arguably famous for being the most common find in the dollar bins) won me over as a great sounding album, an enjoyable visceral experience even when the songs themselves were often lacking in lyrical substance.

I steered clear of the post-Berry years, but I decided to give them another chance. My expectations weren't great, but I thought it was reasonable to expect something that I liked about these guys - they may do worse work and increasingly inconsistent work, but it's not like their talents are going to completely disappear overnight.

I ended up kind of liking Up - it does feel too long and I'm not sure it was completely realized, but it was an admirable attempt to try a different direction. The rest I wasn't too crazy about it, but they did have their moments. For various reasons, I don't see myself warming to these later records as a whole, but they did manage to hit some fine and enjoyable peaks if not too often.

I ended up creating this reference disc, pretty much all of the post-Berry recordings I need, though again I do have Up. I still included a few selections from that album just to have the era fully represented:

1 Lotus
2 At My Most Beautiful [radio mix which is not that different from the album mix]
3 Daysleeper [official single edit which only has a brief section cut out, I used it because I was a few seconds over the disc limit]
4 The Great Beyond
5 I've Been High
6 All The Way To Reno (You're Gonna Be A Star)
7 Imitation Of Life
8 All The Right Friends [IRS-era outtake they re-recorded for a Cameron Crowe movie]
9 Bad Day [IRS-era song they finished and re-recorded for a "best of" compilation]
10 Leaving New York
11 Electron Blue
12 Living Well Is The Best Revenge
13 Man-Sized Wreath
14 Supernatural Superserious
15 Hollow Man
16 Houston
17 Discoverer
18 Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter
19 Überlin
20 Oh My Heart
21 It Happened Today
22 We All Go Back To Where We Belong [one of the new songs released on a new "best of" compilation that coincided with their official breakup]

I'm a big fan of Accelerate - I think it makes a far better case for R.E.M. as "rock" band than Monster. Plus it has "Until the Day is Done," which shows off a fetching Fairport Convention influence I didn't know they had. (My R.E.M. fandom has always been pretty casual.)

I will admit that my affection for this record may also be the result of watching the band perform these songs while taping Austin City Limits before the album came out. That was the only time I ever saw them perform.

Thank you for this Breno! I love these kind of playlists.

I too stayed on the REM bandwagon all the way through the Berry years. Although "Monster" and "Hi-Fi" are spotty affairs, there is enough greatness there that I still return to them periodically. Not so with the next three albums. I have collectively listed to each of them once and never returned to them. I appreciate the effort you went through to find the gems and craft a well sequenced album out of it.

Creating the Spotify playlist now :-)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/08/2025 07:49AM by jothoma.

Track Five was always going to get a run.

Ha! That one was actually on the bubble, but I included it because its countryish arrangement made it different enough to stand out amongst all the mid-tempo tracks that made these three albums a bit of a trudge. There were other songs from Reveal that I considered - "I've Been High," "Disappear" and "Summer Turns To High" specifically, but they blended in with their surroundings too much.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/08/2025 02:57PM by breno.

I do not love Reveal, but "I've Been High" was one of the moderately-OK songs from that record that benefited from some of the exploration on the REM:IX download, where dance and electronic people remixed tracks from that record. I can't remember which remixes I liked - there were four - but the one by Her Space Holiday was one that stood out.