Goodbye, R.E.M.!!!!

Last week, REM announced their break up; the news came as a surprise to a lot of their fans including myself. Partly because they just recently released a solid album, appeared to be rejuvenated and ready to move on to the next phase of their long and storied career. After reading the press release, the break up is completely understandable as well as admirable. The band did not want to stick together long enough to a point where they begin to hate each other’s guts (see New Order).

I became a fan of R.E.M. about 3 years ago, this was the period when my ears where beginning to soak in different sounds and pay attention to various types of music and genres that I previously ignored, or simply dismissed as lame. Luckily, the first R.E.M. albums that I got my hands on just so happened to be their first two records, “Murmur” and “Reckoning”. Initially I wasn’t that impressed by either and did not understand what the fuss was all about and why they were highly admired by critics and musicians. So, I figured there has to be something good about them, at the very least, there has to be one song that I can enjoy. To make a long story short, after repeated listens I couldn’t stop playing both albums from start until finish and I grew to love them.

In a way, my exposure to their music is analogous to that of a teenager in the early eighties who stumbled upon the band when they were just getting started. The experience was completely unexpected and out of the blue. Those releases ushered me into the world of independent music and helped me discover a number of other notable bands and artists. Besides “Murmur” and “Reckoning”, I almost never listen to anything else in their discography because I have history on my side that tells me that the later material didn’t rival the early stuff. So with that, R.E.M. will remain in my little world a band that only made those couple of releases and I will remember them for “Murmur” and “Reckoning” and act as if their future clunkers (see “Around the Sun”) never happened.

Song of the Day is "So. Central Rain"