Category: Up

At My Most Beautiful

Chris BickleyLeave a comment

Release date: 08/03/1999 | Length: 3:35 | Release: Up | SuE: #56 | UK: #10

You always say your name
Like I wouldn’t know it’s you

The elephant in the room is that this is a Beach Boys song. The Beach Boys’ organic and original sound is utterly woven into the fabric of music, and it’s difficult to think of a band who haven’t attempted their own pastiche. It was pop at heart, but outside of the constraints of what you’d expect from fenced-off genres.

In the 1990s, bands like Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips and XTC had experimented with a lush orchestral sound that had a spiritual connection to California’s finest, but took this feeling and made it their own. R.E.M. however decided to screw forging their own path, and instead made one of the most transparent homages to the Beach Boys committed to wax.

It’s true that after the loss of drummer Bill Berry, R.E.M. were at a bit of a quandary. Up is an album of mixed ideas and directions, capable of some of their greatest ideas but also some of their tamest hits. It’s no surprise then that when searching in vain for their own texture, their biggest success from the album was explicitly riding off someone else’s shine.

This love ballad is pure, a rare instance of an R.E.M. love song that isn’t tainted by some underlying jealousy or complex feelings. The banal ways in which the narrator shows their love is touching: “I save your messages, Just to hear your voice”. This isn’t a showy song, this is a song that showcases the tiny unsaid flourishes that keeps love ticking.

There’s no dramatic shift from the fairly anodyne verse to the moving chorus, but it’s sometimes subtleties that elevate mediocrity into magic. Those cheeky “do dos” from Mike Mills, the big drum fills from Peter Buck, that organ layer. For there to be a pay off in the chorus there had to be some give earlier on, otherwise this smorgasbord of instruments wouldn’t have the same effect.

R.E.M. got away with this because ultimately At My Most Beautiful is a good song, and this deep into their career they had enough credit in the bank to pull off such a brazen mimicry. The cynic in me says that this was a roll of the dice for a band struggling with their identity, but listen to that chorus bloom and you no longer care.

Daysleeper

Chris BickleyLeave a comment

Release date: 12/10/1988 | Length: 3:37 | Release: Up | SuE: #55 | UK: #6; US: #57

My night is coloured headache grey

There’s a lot of love for Daysleeper out there, and there’s certainly a claim to be made that this is R.E.M.’s best final-third era single. I won’t be making that claim, but it can be made. It served as the lead single from Up but wasn’t hugely indicative of the loops and drones that peppered the record. It was a bit of a bait and switch for listeners, who may have bought Up expecting a return to the maudlin Automatic for the People, but this was the most obvious and safe pick as it sounded like R.E.M.. Not much around this time did.

I hear Try Not to Breathe when I hear Daysleeper as both songs have a nautical beat, by which I mean they both drift and flow to a gentle beat, and ride a smooth wave in the chorus. I think. It makes sense in my head. Both open with a little jingle and there’s a tiny rise in the beat as the songs roll into their choruses. Peter Buck’s notes are elongated and curve around Stipe’s voice at its most vintage and clear.

The lyrics are both poetic and dry, reflecting on the disturbed mental state of a daysleeper and the mundanity of a night job. ‘My night is coloured headache grey’ is a grossly vivid line, whilst ‘I am the screen, the blinding light’ is a sad, damning eulogy.

Everything I have to say about this song is positive (though I find the ending to be a little too staged for my liking), but I will not make the claim that this is their best post-Berry single. Why? It’s not timeless. Daysleeper is a strange R.E.M. song in that it could be on a few of their albums. I’ve made the Automatic for the People case already, but it also has that breezy trajectory synonymous with Reveal. Yet it ends up being a curveball single from a curveball album.

Hope

Chris BickleyLeave a comment

Release date: 27/10/1998 | Length: 5:02 | Release: Up | SuE: #161

You want to climb the ladder

You want to see forever

Ah Hope. The album gambit that never was. Up doesn’t have the grandest of legacies amongst the R.E.M. collective, but I feel that it’s unfairly overlooked as being the masthead for the band’s commercial decline and popularity. Objectively, I don’t think that’s all that incorrect. On the contrary though, I believe that Up represented R.E.M.’s peak in creativity against adversity.

Even before Bill Berry retired from the group, this album was always veering towards electronics, but his departure undoubtedly amplified this. The result was an unfamiliar sounding cacophony of loops and synths and drones, sprinkled with the familiar R.E.M. touch when necessary. Unsurprisingly, the Losing My Religion fans of R.E.M. were not happy, and sales of the album were merely modest. But that’s a moot point. Up was still a terrific album regardless of whether the hit-chasers liked it or not.

I mentioned at the top that Hope should have opened the album, and without wanting to dwell too much on the actual opener Airportman, Hope was the antithesis of this. After an overlong preceding record, the last thing R.E.M. needed to do was kick off another mammoth album with a slightly turgid and subdued song. It may have ushered in a new sound for the band, but Hope would’ve done exactly the same, but with added vigour. Instead, we’re left with the song coming in at #4 on the album. Like much of Up, it never saw a live outing post-1999, but criminally Hope only received a Stipe solo performance in the encore. But in fairness, if they could never figure out how to play The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite live, then I’ll let them off with Hope.

Extra song-writing credits go to Leonard Cohen here, and anyone with even just a flicker of musical knowledge will be able to observe the similarities between Hope and the Canadian’s 1967 song Suzanne. There was no collaboration here, but the rhythm is strikingly similar and Cohen’s direct, polysyndetic delivery is replicated by Michael Stipe:

And you’re questioning the sciences

And questioning religion

You’re looking like an idiot

And you no longer care

The religious imagery is strong, and follows a common theme in R.E.M. songs where the narrator is torn between faith and fact. It’s been mentioned several times in R.E.M. that the basis of Hope is in a person awaiting surgery and conflicted in what to hope for, and the most explicit this gets is where Michael states “You want to trust the doctors, their procedure is the best”. But as we see later on, this is only the backdrop to the aforementioned dilemma of where to put one’s trust: “And you want to bridge the schism, a built-in mechanism to protect you”. Even amidst this struggle, there’s room for such vivid metaphors of spaceships and alligators.

The singular words of “salvation” and “deliverance” hang so heavy on the mind, both chosen for their inclusive meanings and connotations, allowing the listener to decide whether they sit spiritually or not. There’s a raging debate about whether the person is accepting their fate or not: “You want go forever” or “You want to go out Friday”. With the looming divine mood setting over the track, it’s difficult to read the latter as being anything other than readying oneself to ascend into the afterlife.

It’s a whirling dervish of a song, as the electronic loops encircle the words and dominate the aura. Nigel Godrich of Radiohead fame had a hand in mixing this song, notably before the English band seriously entered their experimental odyssey with 2000’s Kid A. That’s not to say that OK Computer wasn’t experimental, but Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien’s guitars were still prominent. On Hope, you can just about hear an acoustic strum throughout the song, and then later an electric guitar acts as a drone to carry the song to higher places.

It’s the little things that make Hope. The 8-bit noises at 0.44, the stripping away of the drum machine at 1.24, the undulating noise at 2.02, the out-of-tune keys at 2.10, the downshift in tone at 2.20, the wispy backing vocals at 3.47. Then everything comes together in the final minute in a glorious, amorphous blob before poof, it disappears like a current of water cascading down a plughole. This is what an album opener sounds like.