Posts Tagged Alternative Rock

Accelerate by R.E.M.

24 September 2008 at 11:43 pm · Filed under Music ·Tagged , , ,

Accelerate

Accelerate

I’ve been listening to Accelerate for a couple weeks now, and it’s been an interesting experience.  I went into (too much) detail here about my decision to buy my first R.E.M. album in almost thirteen years, but in short, they were a favorite in high school and early college, but after that I lost interest and stopped paying attention to the band.  As a result, hearing R.E.M. now, after so long, is of course going to have that warm feeling of nostalgia – particularly when the record is a back-to-basics record like this, with the band stripping their sound back to a fairly spare rock n’ roll approach.

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Some additional R.E.M. reading

11 September 2008 at 2:45 pm · Filed under Music ·Tagged , ,

Via Stereogum, I found Pop Songs 07-08, a blog that examines every pre-Accelerate R.E.M. album track, along with key non-album cuts. And the amazing thing is, the project is actually done, as of yesterday. WOW! I only wish I’d found this earlier, so I could have read along on a day-by-day basis. But I think I’m going to be digging into this site.

And really, somebody needs to start a similar blog chronicling every Replacements album cut – I can’t wait for the post on “Gary’s Got A Boner”.

I wrote the other day about my decision to buy Accelerate (after largely ignoring R.E.M. for the past fourteen years or so), and am hoping to post my thoughts on the album soon (short version: it’s growing on me, this might be a pretty damn fine record). In fact, that decision rekindled my interest in the band, and I’ve been listening to R.E.M.’s back catalog (specifically their early Warner Brothers albums) a lot the past week or so. So there may be a couple R.E.M. posts in the near future.

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Deciding to buy R.E.M.’s Accelerate

7 September 2008 at 8:04 pm · Filed under Music ·Tagged , , ,

Accelerate

Accelerate

I picked up a copy of R.E.M.’s (relatively) new album, Accelerate, this afternoon – the first R.E.M. album I’ve bought since Monster in 1994. Which sort of fits into the conventional storyline about R.E.M. (Monster sold well, but was a disappointment, and the fans never came back), but it’s not really true in my case – the fact that I had Monster at all seemed more of an act of nostalgia at the time, as I’d already lost interest in the band several years before.

(long, pointless, wanky walk down memory lane below the fold …)

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