Welcome to Vinyl Stylus, a blog about good music, and what makes music good.

Here, you'll find Rocks In The Attic - a disc by disc journey through my entire vinyl collection.

In a world full of TV talent shows, greatest hits CDs and manufactured pop, take a stroll through something that's good for your ears and good for your soul.

Monday, September 3, 2012

Rocks In The Attic #146: R.E.M. - ‘Document’ (1987)

Document is R.E.M.’s fifth album, but their first with producer Scott Litt. You can hear how important this addition is, with not only a fantastic sound overall (the album, released on the independent I.R.S. Records comes across like a major label release) but a more channelled direction.

Earlier R.E.M. albums sound to me like a random bunch of Michael Stipe’s poetry set to Peter Buck’s jangly guitar. Here, they sound like a fully fledged band, readily placed on the brink of mainstream crossover.

Hit: The One I Love

Hidden Gem: Finest Worksong
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5 comments:

  1. UnknownSeptember 18, 2012 at 6:06 PM

    I'd say that they were a fully fledged band by their second album. I was listening to Reckoning on the way to work this morning and I think that it's as good as anything they ever did.

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  2. Johnny AndrewsSeptember 19, 2012 at 8:27 AM

    I have Reckoning but I can't listen to it - jangly nonsense. Perhaps I'm not hip enough...

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  3. UnknownSeptember 19, 2012 at 6:32 PM

    There's nothing wrong with jangly, but I don't think that Reckoning is all that jangly anyway. REM's career is full of good stuff, but can basically be reduced to two briliant albums: Reckoning and Automatic for the People. Automatic... being the better album of course, even if Don't Go Back to Rockville is their best song.

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  4. Johnny AndrewsSeptember 20, 2012 at 7:53 PM

    Automatic is fantastic and then I'd go for - unpopular choice here - Monster. I think I'm the only person on earth who thinks Monster is any good. It must be the rocker in me.

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  5. UnknownSeptember 20, 2012 at 8:23 PM

    I'm not such a fan of Monster, I liked it at the time but I can take it or leave it now. It has some outstanding songs on it though. New Adventures in HiFi is pretty good too, but a bit overlong and a bit over similar - probably the last really good album they ever did. Although I haven't heard many of the albums they did after that, so I don't really know.

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