zuckina

The anonymous person is right for once... but let's disanonymize!

Half a World Away nobody understood what sense it made... only Stipe knows! Shiny Happy People comes from the guitar riff of Peter Buck... Stipe found it funny and amusing and decided he would try to write the silliest and most carefree lyrics he could... PURE NONSENSE!

The review should focus more on the true essence of this album rather than on the millions of copies sold... there’s a lot to say, but it seems that even the fans of R.E.M. don’t know anything about it!

The voice of stipe, after the political fervor of recent years, returns to a whispering tone; some lyrics are either comprehensible but deliberately designed to be misunderstood, or they are utterly bewildering in their nonsense. The album was indeed supposed to be called The Return of Mumble, a return to the band's early records. How many know the meaning of Losing my Religion? Come on, let's hear it!

This was the best strike from R.E.M. in terms of their playful and irreverent side. A bit like Elio e le Storie Tese winning SanRemo '96 with "Italia sì Italia no" in front of a crowd of rich folks clapping happily, oblivious to the fact they were the target of that song, here we have R.E.M. selling millions of copies of their most incomprehensible and misunderstood album since Murmur. It cannot be defined as a record made to sell millions of copies because, except for the case of "Losing My Religion," the album does not justify its success. It is by no means a commercial album... even today, I can't wrap my head around its sales. After the album, R.E.M. did not go on tour to promote it, and think about how many millions they would have earned from the tour. They simply wanted to take a break, and no longer identifying with their old songs, they wanted to accumulate new material to propose in their live performances. How many would have done that after their biggest success?

well done

Looking back, I wrote it this way because I thought it was important to explain how this album was born and why "long suites + songs by each individual author" was the hallmark of those years... and it will be the last example of this compositional style of the Floyd. I would like to know your opinions on the record, beyond the rating you give it... especially from easycure, since I wrote this review after our back-and-forths about Pink Floyd, more or less in his honor ;)

Anyway, perhaps more than from a fan, the review is written by a meticulous journalist... so many curiosities, little review... a bit too official as a response, don’t you think? Well, maybe the fact that I’m not too attached to this period of Pink Floyd’s production made me lean towards a more factual than personal and emotional style... I hope at least someone finds it interesting for the information. Dispersive, I agree, I’ll try with an album I know better...

The best thing about the post-Barrett era must be something that diverges from it... and then I find Set The Controls to be even more pretentious than Echoes, not to mention a bit of a crowd-pleaser. In fact, it seems to want to imitate Barrett’s style a bit, almost to move safely, and by the way, Waters "stole" the lyrics from an Eastern story or poem (or something else, I can't remember)...

Psychopomps, at least vote for me!