Project A.L.B.U.M.

Hundreds of CDs. Thousands of words. The Long Play.

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That there, that’s not me in the spotlight. “New Adventures in Hi-Fi (25th Anniversary Edition)” by R.E.M., “KID A MNESIA” by Radiohead, and the Return of the Blog

Here’s the hilarious thing: a major reason I started this blog, going disc by disc through my physical music collection, was to stop buying CDs for a while.

My shelves runneth over, jewel cases squeeze together like dead sardines, and as a freelancer, my employment is not always secure. I had already signed up for a Spotify Premium subscription as a way to “save money”-- a 10 buck per month bundle of EVERYTHING EVER RECORDED (except for mysteriously grayed-out songs on nearly every pop soundtrack out there) instead of paying the same amount for each plastic pressing of an increasingly-unfashionable format. ‘Listen to what you’ve already got,’ went the mantra, ‘and then you can buy more.’ I was probably in the J’s before I caved.

Blog publishing-wise, far quicker than that. I gave myself a year for this project-- that was in the halcyon days of 2017, when we could still feel shock at the News. Aw, how like babes in the woods we were, I just want to pinch our little cheeks! The idea of abstaining from the new and writing about what I owned was inspired by two columns on The A.V. Club: Noel Murray’s “Popless” and Josh Modell’s “Binge And Purge”. As professional pop culture writers, their work ethic was much stronger than mine has been-- even setting aside the productivity-vaporizing neutron bomb of the year @0@0 (cursed date censored for the reader’s mental health), I ran out of steam 1,000 days ago.

Those opening paragraphs you just read? Written 10 months ago, rescued from another aborted attempt to reignite the blogging furnace. But it’s funny what will suddenly start the fire (or at least that little pilot light).

I’m midway through This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s “Kid A” and the Beginning of the 21st Century by Steven Hyden, yet another alumnus of A.V. Club (man, I used to enjoy that site, unfortunately it’s gone downhill). Stumbled upon and started just as the band in question released a curious, combined anniversary edition of the very L.P.s Hyden explores and contextualizes in his writing, it feels like kismet. It’s the same kind of accessible, measured, but still ultimately fannish prose that I attempt here (which has likely reached book length on its own.)

Now, I can't work up as much enthusiasm for Kid A as Hyden does, and I regard Amnesiac with more warmth. The “difficult listens” are actually difficult in the way contemporary critics painted Kid A, yet the more straightforward melodic tracks hit me in the solar plexus so strongly that those bleeps and squealches all feel like necessary connective tissue. (One of my more heretical Radiohead opinions, along with my strong draw to Hail to the Thief).

Here’s the rub with KID A MNESIA: I’ve decided not to buy it in physical format. So I’m breaking my own theme! Put down the pitchforks, please. Not long before the set was announced, I upgraded my copy of Amnesiac to the 2009 special edition, full of b-sides that annoyingly do not make it on to this latest edition. But the previously unreleased tracks that comprise the new disc got me curious. Spotify payed for itself again (now if only it will pay artists as consistently).

They are largely more in line with the stolen, threatened-to-be-leaked, then swiftly officially “leaked” OK Computer tapes. Less polished b-sides than sketches in which one can discern the aural building blocks that became songs that formed unshakeable experiences for a lucky slice of the listening public.

“Like Spinning Plates - ‘Why Us?’ Version” is the lead-off of disc 3. It’s closer to the Bonnaroo 2006 live version I fell in love with, the looping piano figures recognizable as such and Thom’s vocals unaltered by Black Lodge time-reversal shenanigans. But he’s singing the verses in an alternate order, and his titular moan of “Why Us?” floats among the fluttering synth effect heard in the official album version. So it’s close but no cigar to my ideal recording of the song.

“If You Say The Word” is the standout unheard track. A dark, ominous shuffle jam with Johnny Greenwood’s beloved Ondes Martenot lifting Thom’s voice to queasy new heights: the hovering flying saucer that stalks the band finally nabbing them with a 1950’s tractor beam.

“Follow Me Around,” in contrast, never quite takes off. A wisp of a chorus, verses in search of a bridge-- maybe try a nice bubblegum pop key change? I’m reaching, here! It feels like a bedroom demo with a stereo mix, and I’m honestly a little shocked they chose to build a music video around it. Appropriately for the song, the Guy Pierce-starring paranoia piece also finds its conceptual rut and stays there for 5+ minutes.

“Pulk/Pull - True Love Waits Version” seems more like a fan’s experimental mashup than a concept the band itself would toy with. But considering the many years in which the band struggled to commit those words & melody to a satisfactory recording (‘95 to 2016; world wars have been fought quicker), they were clearly willing to try any deconstuction necessary to shake something loose.

The alternate versions continue: a THIRD edition of "Morning Bell" (each album had their own pet imagining), this one subtitled "In The Dark." It's the lullaby for a sleep paralysis episode, proving just how malleable a song can be. “How To Disappear Into Strings” closes the disc out, and it’s undeniably moving, even without Thom’s voice/acoustic strumming. A gentle 20-years-later reminder that Johnny Greenwood is becoming one of our Great film composers.

They are all ultimately curiosities, the result of digging into the Myth and finding the Truth: that a rock band writing in the studio will travel down blind alleys, stumble upon riffs or strangely pleasing sounds and then, one hopes, construct with them a sprawling tower. (A mix of the tedious and the divine that is likewise made plain in the new Get Back Beatles doc.)

This concept is given shape in perhaps the most evocative tie-in to the triple-disc release: Epic Games’ KID A MNESIA Exhibit, a trippy digital art installation in which Stanley Donwood’s iconic work for the albums (from the mixed-media covers to the beguiling little liner note sketches and snatches of lyrics) becomes an explorable 3D space.

It’s a video game where the goal is to be subsumed in the essence of the recordings. My favorite section is the “How To Disappear Completely” room, which offers the experience of floating through a snow globe while you seek out Yorke’s voice, represented as a discreet auditory object in space that you move your first-person avatar through the storm to face. Just like the albums themselves, it’s built for headphones, a dark room, and optionally, your favorite chemical substance.

It’s a similar surround-sound situation that inspired me to pick up the new anniversary edition of New Adventures in Hi Fi by R.E.M. (My favorite band, with Radiohead at #2 and The Beatles squeaking in at #3, so it’s been a very good fall for me). I’ve written at length about this soundtrack to my college years, so no need to repeat myself.

Though the second disk has its share of bonus tracks as well (mostly alternate live versions and one or two b-sides), the included Blu-ray disc was the selling point. The idea of mixing a quarter-century-old rock record into Dolby 5.1 can be called revisionist, but the prospect of having these tracks literally fill a room, of being able to sit inside the recordings... well it almost takes the sting out of never being able to witness these guys live.

Let that siren loop from “Leave” scar your eardrums and scare your cats. Patti Smith’s guest vocal on “E-Bow The Letter” will murmur over your shoulder as you stare out your living room window at the gray outdoors.

And join me for more entries in the future. The collection’s gotten bigger. guntonfilm.com

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Spineless bastards, all. 205. “The Smiths,” 206. “Meat is Murder,” 207. “Strangeways, Here We Come” by The Smiths

The process of listening/writing for this project has meant a conscious change in the way I consume music for 2 years.

Used to be, my ideal method was to load up my varied collection and hit that Shuffle mode. Once I began to listen to albums as a linear sequence of tracks, it meant having to make a deliberate choice, each time, about what I was in the mood for. Even when I was putting together playlists or serving as unofficial DJ, I could no longer just be random: a million minute decisions would flit through my head about sequencing, about what song flowed naturally from another. Now that I’ve listened through my discs [Note: writing is a lot slower than rocking out; my blog posts will be catching up for a while], I hit those twisty arrows again, and… it’s discombobulating.

Right off the bat, my iPhone put songs that I know but that I’m not super-familiar with into my ears: a George Harrison deep-cut here, an obscure Flaming Lips album track there. The best part of the random ordering was the creation of juxtapositions I never would have thought of: a song from Trout Mask Replica into a bit of Blonde on Blonde, and somehow it WORKS? You crazy robot mashup artist, you!

This ping-ponging between eras has its antecedent in the music industry’s time-honored money grab: the Best Of set. It’s still a useful entrée into a band or artist you’re trying for the first time. No need to start at the start and wait for them to find their voice through underwhelming debuts or sophomore slumps. Look at this list! Clearly there has been a consensus, determined through sheer popularity, that these songs are the cream of the crop— collected sonic evidence that THIS ARTIST IS IMPORTANT. All killer, no filler!

The deluxe edition of The Sound Of The Smiths was such a useful primer that for a long time I questioned the need to buy the studio albums at all. For instance, more than half of the tracks on The Queen Is Dead, arguably their most iconic album, show up on that compilation in some form. It was re-released in 2017 with bonus material, so the value feels right. But for now, these are my companion discs to the hatful of Morrissey solo releases I’ve written about previously.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure that I would have become a fan had I started with their 1984 self-titled debut (#205). It takes a while to kick into gear, playing mostly as what critics of Morrissey’s moaning sad-bastard image accuse his whole output of sounding like. In the first handful of tracks, his singing paints outside the margins of what Johnny Marr, et al, are doing, sometimes settling into the groove, but often sliding along on its own frequency. Track 5, “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle,” which shuffles along for 4-and-a-half-minutes, almost but never quite getting in the neighborhood of a melody, is usually the point when I think about putting something else on. The next group of 4- “This Charming Man,” “Still Ill,” “Hand in Glove,” “What Difference Does It Make”- are classics, and tellingly, they kick off that best-of.

Meat Is Murder (#206) fires on all cylinders, starting with the jangly immediacy of “The Headmaster Ritual,” my favorite Smiths song and probably in my top 5 tracks about cruel English boarding schools (I think the other 4 are all on Pink Floyd’s The Wall?) A sizable fraction of that personal goodwill might be due to Radiohead’s admiring cover, but I crank the original when it comes up in the queue. Buying the album was justified by the non-Best Of deep cuts that follow that opener, “Rusholme Ruffians” and “I Want The One I Can’t Have,” which rock fast and tight, and contain the kind of darkly comic lyrics Morrissey-deniers ignore (choice samples: “Scratch my name in your arm with a fountain pen / That means you really love me” and “If you need self-validation / Just meet me in the alley by the railway station”).

Their final studio album, Strangeways, Here We Come (#207), might be their most elaborate sonic affair, with atmospheric intros on opener “A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours" and “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me,” and touches like the brass-bolstered chorus of “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish” creating a Phil Spector-esque Wall of Sound vibe. But there’s also the bouncy “Girlfriend in a Coma,” with Morrissey’s most memorable meter lingering in the mind for decades and giving comedian Paul F. Tompkins infinite applications.

It really seems like I’ve rewired my brain in an interesting way. Tellingly, since building my Smiths LP collection, I’ve rarely, if ever again, dug out that Best-Of. And while there’s no better shortcut than Shuffle for bouts of indecision, I’ve continued to create listening projects with start and end points and chronological progression— I made it through Bowie’s discography from self-titled to No Plan in a few weeks, and now I’m in the mid-90’s with Elvis Costello. (If even one person is waiting for THAT blog… let that held breath escape.)

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Such a perfect day. 203. “Transformer” by Lou Reed, 204. “Some Girls” by The Rolling Stones

Whenever I’m in a town outside of my home base, whether for work or in a trip planned specifically for the purpose, my route is predictable. I head for the local bookstore and then the local record store, and often, conveniently, they are the same place. (Often their business model will also include previously-owned movies and TV shows, and then I’m really in business. If they have an espresso machine as well, I will consider canceling my hotel res and unfolding a sleeping bag next to the relative quiet of the “Local Authors” section.)

Edward McKay's Used Books and More in Winston-Salem and Greensboro and Mr. K’s Used Books in Asheville were invaluable to a post-collegiate media brat building an unwieldy collection. Despite the format focus of their weirdly similar names, I tended to exit with a bag more full of CDs than literature. Those regional chains are responsible for a good deal of the discs written about on this blog, and buyer’s remorse is very rare. I have achieved completion with R.E.M. and Talking Heads and Warren Zevon thanks to these stores, spent hours and an amount of money that I’m queasy to compute (though of course it’s a fraction of the total that even online bargain hunting would have yielded) within their walls.

Built up from local trade-ins, their racks contain popular favorites and rare delights, and yes, you will never want for copies of Monster. But there are some strange omissions that I’ve run into. Those maroon and navy Queen Greatest Hits compilations? You’re covered. But the studio albums are curiously absent from my searches. Same with The Kinks. And for a long time, same with The Rolling Stones, putting aside my lack of interest in either Steel Wheels or Voodoo Lounge.

So it was a rare and happy privilege to find Some Girls (#204), considered by most arched-eyebrow rock critics to be their last top-to-bottom classic. It’s definitely some of the most fun I’ve had with their catalogue, second only to Sticky Fingers (why is that missing from my CD shelf, I hear you ask? It was one of those I ripped from my college library’s enviable collection). That “Miss You” riff, flirting with disco rhythm but shot through with bluesy grit, a perfect lead-off. My go-to jukebox selection, “Beast of Burden,” all slink and pleas for affection, a fitting denouement (before the spoken-word mutant-doo wop of “Shattered” closes us out). The title track, waxing rhapsodic about a global coterie of groupies with the broadest stereotypes possible, is one of those artifacts of classic blues-rock, like “Sweet Little Sixteen” by Chuck Berry, where you whistle past the lyrics if you dig the performance.

Lou Reed’s Transformer (#203), by contrast, is such a specific evocation of junkie, queer, art world, pre-gentrified New York, it has paradoxically aged well ("the colored girls” notwithstanding). No matter how scuzzy or surreal the lyrical imagery, the Bowie and Ronson stardust sprinkled over Reed’s muscular guitar work, peeking through in honeyed backup harmonies on “Andy’s Chest” and “Satellite of Love” and Ronson’s Percy-Faith-on-China-white string arrangement for “Perfect Day,” keep the entire endeavor eternally accessible. That an unflinching fable of gender fluidity and sex work was instantly embraced by rock radio with little interrogation in the intervening 40+ years is insane, but that sliding double-bass work on “Walk on the Wild Side” is the most seductive delivery system.

From here I moved backwards to Velvet Underground (to be covered in this space in the future) and forward to more of Reed’s contemporaneous solo work. But Transformer will always be his foremost contribution to The Great American Rock Novel.

**Hey, I managed not to drone on too long this time! This is intended as patient zero of newly brief entries in this series. For perspective, I published my first “Album Project” write-up in February 2017. With Year Two bearing down, I’m hoping to get these out more quickly, and make reading them a little more tempting than the usual formidable wall of text. Let’s go!

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All the best. 200. “Accelerate,” 201. “Collapse Into Now,” 202. “Unplugged 1991/2001: The Complete Sessions” by R.E.M.

After exhaustive touring, a greatest hits disc, and a dud album, the lovable lads from Athens, R.E.M., wisely took some time to figure things out before regrouping.

The four-year absence didn’t register with me, as I was collecting the back catalogue during that break. As far as I was concerned, new material was everywhere I looked, filling up my burgeoning record collection as I finished high school and started making my way through college. By the time Accelerate (#200) burst onto the scene in March 2008, I was a junior in film school, about to attend my first documentary festival. I put aside an extra $15 from my work study job to pick up the CD the day of release— the first time I’d been able to perform that record store* ritual for my favorite band. *(Though I didn’t have access to any record stores at the time, so it was likely procured from the closest Wal-Mart.) 

Fast, lean, gritty, produced by a guy who goes by “Jacknife,” this set of songs could not be more of a deliberate course-correction from the overly fussy, mid-tempo Around The Sun. Peter Buck’s skills on the axe, often mixed way down on the previous album, here announce Accelerate's punk-ish purpose in the intro to “Living Well is the Best Revenge,” leading off with a dexterous riff before the drums come trampling in. Stipe spits furiously, with the best use of his full-throated tenor since New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and the rare bar to inspire a Fuck Yeah fist-pump: "Don't set your talking points on me / History will set me free / The future's ours and you don't even rate a footnote.” Recorded and released in the tail-end of the Bush years, there are unmistakable references, drawn in anger and in weariness, to the emotional tolls of that reign.

“If the storm doesn’t kill me, the government will,” Stipe muses at the top of “Houston,” a hair over 2 minutes but suffused with poignancy. It’s an acoustically-driven Western-tinged ballad that hearkens back to “Swan Swan H” or “Monty Got A Raw Deal,” but here the drums are splashy and blown-out, the organ serves a bleating counterpoint to the vocal, and bowed electric guitar bleeds through into the verses, serious as storm clouds. The intriguing production choices are what mark it as the Accelerate twist on familiar R.E.M. tropes. The chorus: “Houston is filled with promise / Laredo's a beautiful place / Galveston sings like that song that I love / Its meaning has not been erased” is stirring, as if to absolve the Lone Star state for spawning the political dynasty that led to 2 disastrous presidencies. "Belief has not filled me / And so I am put to the test” are the last words before distortion drowns out the melody like a fatal wave. The song has never left my head.

“Until The Day Is Done” is a more familiar flavor of the band’s earnest political identity— it even ended up scoring a CNN-produced piece on environmental issues. The lyrics approach the first two verses of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” in reflecting a distressing capitalist landscape, and to read them is to find that the “business-first flat earthers” have only doubled-down in the decade since the song was released. But the lack of idiosyncrasies leaves us with a folky protest song, and it has a tendency to become oatmeal to the ear, nestled amongst the bolder sonic moments.

By which I mean the muscular guitar sounds and fast n’ furious arrangements on tracks like “Man-Sized Wreath,” “Accelerate,” “Horse To Water”— the revitalized band blowing up the electronic, art school solemnity of the preceding Bill Berry-less records. I remember I once put on Accelerate during a day of recording drive-by b-roll footage with some new coworkers, who enthused, “We were a little worried when you said you were gonna play R.E.M…. but this is really good!” I just glided past the implied criticism and took the positive note.

In early 2011, songs for their follow-up began to be released on YouTube and rolled out by the pop culture press. I’ll admit I was underwhelmed by what I heard. Accelerate’s novelty, its flouting of the band’s cliches, had me expecting another quantum leap in a wild direction. Collapse Into Now (#201) was feeling more like a greatest hits mashup.

“Discoverer” at times sounds like an interpolation of “Man-Sized Wreath” (compare the chorus of the former to the verses of the latter.) That exultant wordless harmonizing on “It Happened Today” is straight from “Belong” on Out of Time (plus special guest Eddie Vedder.) “Blue,” the closing track, takes equal parts New Adventures’ “E-Bow The Letter” (dark grinding minor key, Beat poetry, plus Patti Smith-voiced chorus) and Out of Time's “Country Feedback” (the chords sound similar, and the aching Peter Buck solo is back). I’d never before been able to identify the sonic inspirations so easily. However, for all my creeping dissatisfaction, as a true fanboy I knew the record would grow on me. The prophecy was indeed fulfilled.

The song that most represented the sound of a modern-day R.E.M. was “Mine Smell Like Honey.” It was unmistakably them, with the inscrutable lyrics, Michael in gravel-throated rock mode, a Mike Mills vocal harmony line designed to carry its own trajectory while lifting up the chorus, Buck with an indelible riff that doesn’t show off for its own sake— but it would fit right on modern rock radio in 2011, if that still existed. I had another one of my Best Buy PA system epiphanies, clicking this track into place, proving sometimes you need some huge speakers with good bass to truly experience certain songs. In a similar mode, “That Someone Is You” rockets by in under 2 minutes; a live-in-the-room ode to the feeling of meeting that exciting new person who'll lift you out of the mud. 

The mid-tempo balladry is back as well, diversifying the sound from the previous release. In “Oh My Heart,” a direct sequel to “Houston,” Stipe croons a New Orleans spiritual with "a new take on faith," while Buck's mandolin comes out of retirement for another sweet, sad melody, and Mills fills in the mournful choir. As with the song’s predecessor, it’s a high-point in the track listing that moves me whenever I hear it.

Before I had warmed to Collapse Into Now, I comforted myself with the idea that New LP equaled New Tour. I could finally catch my favorite band live! They told the press they had no plans to tour behind the record. Odd, but they were an institution, so they could take a pause. I’d recently witnessed Paul McCartney tearing through his hits in person, and he’d already blown past age 64. Then in September 2011, R.E.M. announced they had decided to “call it a day as a band”— a phrase designed to wave away the idea of Beatles-esque acrimony. I was, you can probably imagine, more than a little heartbroken. The previous tour had come within 2-and-a-half hours of my town back in ’08. At that point in my life, that seemed like a hassle: why not wait, see if they made it a little closer next time? Now, I wish I had put in the extra effort.

With this announcement, the sense of Collapse as R.E.M.’s tribute album to themselves came into focus. Stipe is even waving goodbye, for god’s sake, on the first album cover photo to clearly feature the faces of the whole band since 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction. "It's just like me to overstay my welcome, bless” he sings with sheepish glee on “All The Best.” Shrouded by the spirit-radio-filtered effect of his “Blue” recitation comes his clearest statement of purpose: "I want Whitman proud. Patti Lee proud. My brothers proud. My sisters proud. I want me. I want it all,” and then Patti Lee (Smith), one of his earliest lead singer inspirations, draws the narrative to a close… before the ringing jangle of opener “Discoverer” reprises and concludes. The book’s been closed shut… but the story of the band’s music continues.

There was the inevitable plundering of the vaults. An over-arching Best Of record, finally combining songs from the I.R.S. and WB catalogues (didn’t buy it), with 3 brand new recordings (they’re ok). Two digital-only “Complete Rarities” collections, encompassing hours of b-sides and soundtrack cuts (lotta great stuff, but this week WB removed all of theirs from Spotify, so I’m pretty perturbed).

In 2014, 3 years into my mourning period, they announced Unplugged 1991/2001 (#202), a 2-CD set of their appearances on the MTV show where bands play intimate, stripped-down acoustic sets… you know, in front of multiple TV cameras capturing every angle. Now this got me excited, maybe more than I had been for their swan song record— Bob Dylan Unplugged, Paul McCartney Unplugged, and The Unplugged Collection Vol. 1 had all got a lot of play in my home through the years. Other than my favorite version of “Half A World Away” closing out the Vol. 1 compilation, and a burned, hand-labeled CD-R I had once glimpsed on a coffee table during a realtor’s house tour, recordings of R.E.M.’s appearance on the show didn’t seem to exist until now. I pre-ordered that bad boy.

The set is a snapshot of two very different eras for the band: Disc 1 features them on the cusp of superstardom fueled by Out Of Time’s success, with the classic lineup of Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe and support from Peter Holsapple. Disc 2 finds them down to a three-piece, supporting Reveal, a record that never got its due, with their frequent contributors Scott McCaughey and Joey Waronker filling out the sound. “Losing My Religion” is on both discs, of course, from the bright new hit that pumps up the crowd to a warmly-recieved old friend.

The treat in hearing these shows is also two-fold. There’s the way that familiar tunes get adapted to the setting: “It’s The End of the World...” is transformed into a Friday night Americana hoe-down, while “The One I Love” is slowed down to a gritty lament with a slightly varied vocal melody. After the 2nd chorus and an instrumental bridge in “Country Feedback,” Stipe folds lines from Dylan's “Like A Rolling Stone” into the tune, a goosebump-inspiring moment.

Then there’s the added benefit of songs that I’d once slept on revealing their power in the live arrangements. The 2001 show closes with several tracks from Reveal, and free of all electronic touches, the choruses of “Disappear” and “Beat A Drum,” well, revealed themselves to me, becoming new earworms and spawning a personal reevaluation of the album. “Find The River” had once been a pleasant-enough closer on Automatic For The People, but a step down from the iconic “Nightswimming” that precedes it. Now it’s a new favorite, and I’m prone to singing it loud with embarrassing over-earnestness.

With the band truly well and dissolved (and no cynical cash-grab “reunion tours” planned, those damn jerks and their integrity), the repackaging of older material is the only avenue left for unheard R.E.M. music. The studio albums are greeting their landmark anniversaries with special editions: Automatic’s 25th was recently celebrated with various configurations of physical release, including one with a disc of demos and a 5.1 surround sound Blu-ray that I WILL possess one day, damnit! Just this week, their social media team announced a sprawling set of BBC sessions and interviews, hopefully to be made available on streaming services in addition to the fancy 9-disc set (I know, sacrilege in my blog about physical media, but space is at a premium and I haven’t even COVERED the live DVDs and music video collections I already have of these guys).

There’s even a podcast exclusively about the band! The exceedingly silly interplay between Scott Aukerman and Adam Scott was enough to get me to listen to several eps of their previous U2-centric show (a band that I’m fairly positive towards), so "R U Talkin’ R.E.M. RE: ME?,” in which they go album-by-album through the discography, was appointment listening from the jump. I couldn’t help but sprinkle inside jokes from the podcast into my first entry. Fuckin’ stoked!

It’s hard to articulate how much R.E.M.’s music has meant to me. There’s undeniable power in finding art when you’re young and unsteady. To ally yourself with a favorite band, especially one that clearly creates from a place of conscience and empathy, is to find a solid stone floor that supports you when you’re at your most weighted down. It’s easy for me to hold onto nearly 2 dozen discs because there’s so much variety. They could uplift, interrogate the status quo, offer humor or succor or an outlet for the uncertainty we struggle with. Michael Stipe sang about identity, queerness, nature, hypocrisy, anger, tenderness, artists, politicians, outsiders, expressive freedom, and quiet contemplation. These lyrics came from what he saw and felt but they were conjured by the instrumentals constructed by Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and for years Bill Berry. Jangle-rock or country-western or chamber pop or folk or glam or electronica— they busted through genres with grace and power; immutability was not an option. They couldn’t finish a record until Michael had the words; Michael had their blueprint on tape to fill his ears until the images flowed.

“Here’s a little agit for the never believer / Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah / Here’s a little ghost for the offering,” Stipe sang in his 11th hour, one-take performance of “Man On The Moon.” Now I offer a 20-song Document of the R.E.M. songs that mean the most to me at this moment. It nearly killed me to whittle it down, and your favorite probably isn’t on it. The song I just quoted isn’t even on it! But that’s the power of R.E.M., where the subjective experience rules all.

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At my most beautiful. 194. “Up,” 195. “Reveal,” 196. “In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003,” 197. “Around the Sun,” 198. “And I Feel Fine… The Best of the IRS Years 1982-1987,” 199. “R.E.M. Live" by R.E.M.

If New Adventures in Hi-Fi was part of the score to my college years (along with a sudden influx of Talking Heads, Nine Inch Nails, and Bob Dylan), my hesitant, unsure 20's were captured by Up.

Up (#194) was a bold recalibration of R.E.M. as a three-piece after the departure of Bill Berry. The compilation In Time (#196) had helpfully introduced me to the electronically-inflected chamber pop of “Daysleeper” and “At My Most Beautiful” (which only now, years later, do I recognize as a Beach Boys pastiche.) So as big of a stylistic departure as it is, with gentler melodies, burbling distortion, processed or programmed drums, and an air of the retro-futurism that had begun creeping into late 90’s aesthetics, I wasn't taken aback the way long-time fans were. The songs didn’t need to reassure me that the band was still A Thing after losing a founding member; by the time I got around to Up, it was simply another entry in the canon.

“Airportman” sounds like what it is: a transitional piece; a low key, glimpsed-through-a-keyhole preview of a new sound. The lyrics are murmured, the pre-programmed beat and keyboards nearly chintzy. The bass is a single note, repeated percussively, that provides the counterweight to the tinkling, echoey vibraphone; the only guitar presence is trembling feedback floating in the ether. I know it’s considered an odd choice for an opening gambit— it was even the first number they played publicly as a three-piece, to the collective head-scratching of an arena. But like “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box" or "All The Love In The World,” it's a song that isn’t necessarily representative of the album as a whole, but it's one that never fails to put me in the right headspace for the journey: ready for the unexpected. 

“Suspicion” is a track that I return to often. On my 70th or so listen, I recognize that the lyrics are about meeting someone and wanting to luxuriate in the fantasy. "Please don't talk, don't make me think / Order up another drink / Let me let imagination drive.” Don’t break the spell by bringing real life into this. Radiohead covered similar ground on “Jigsaw Falling Into Place,” but the sonic approach here is much mellower, almost a satire of spacey cocktail lounge music.

Bleating forth from the soft outro of “Suspicion” comes “Hope,” a dramatically out-of-the-box composition for this band: busy loops of synth, organ, piano, rattling guitar feedback, and stanzas with no chorus. As a weirdo hymn about "looking for deliverance” while trying to avoid the traps of recognizable religious dogma, it channels the itch for transcendence in me. “You look up to the heavens and you hope that it’s a spaceship” and "You’re looking like an idiot, and you no longer care,” two lines for the spooky seekers among us. Befitting a song about searching that offers no answers, the melody doesn’t resolve so much as boil over into cacophony and then cut itself short.

Up was largely overlooked on release, but it has gained a comfortable reputation over the years (the singles never really stuck, but “Walk Unafraid” is the classic track of the record). Which has opened up a spot for Reveal (#195) to step up as The Underrated R.E.M. Album. It’s a further journey into trippy, sunny pop, shot through with electronica. The titles of these records could easily be transposed: the angst and introspection of the tracks on Up suggest something the artists Reveal, whereas the modus operandi of “Summer Turns To High” and “All The Way To Reno (You’re Gonna Be A Star)” is to convince us that things are looking Up.

It could be easy to get the shakes from the taste of so much sugarcane (that’s a reference to “Imitation of Life,” y’see), but the band adds a dash of bitters with the stirring balladry of “She Just Wants To Be,” featuring Peter Buck’s most aching solo since the New Adventures days, and the cracked Americana of “Disappear,” which transforms the string arrangements that sweep through the lighter songs into scritching dissonance. The bubbly production can at times threaten to shave the edges off of solid songs like “Beat A Drum” and “I’ll Take The Rain.” For the first several years of owning this record, the 2nd half tended to melt into a candy-colored mass in my brain. Unplugged recordings unlocked the re-listenability, and the whole disc has become perfect for summertime spinning.

Around The Sun (#197), consensus pick for the weakest album in their catalogue, has some strong melodies and biting political sentiment hidden behind some anemic performances and shrug-worthy production. I’m probably fonder of it than most: I groove on “The Outsiders,” for instance, which gives some folks palpitations due to the mere presence of hip-hop in the mix— but Q-Tip’s guest verse is the high point, not a repeat of KRS One’s cornball contribution way back on Out of Time. Opener “Leaving New York” is a bittersweet ballad for Stipe’s adopted home, still overcast by recent tragedy and a lifetime of personal associations. While the band was never shy in the press about throwing a spotlight on political issues, the post-9/11, middle of the Iraq War atmosphere couldn’t help but flow into the lyrics to a larger degree than ever before.

“Final Straw” is an electro-bluegrass reaction to the feckless villainy of Bush and Cheney in the midst of a million little cuts to civil liberties: "As I raise my head to broadcast my objection / As your latest triumph draws the final straw  / Who died and lifted you up to perfection? / And what silenced me is written into law.” The righteous anger within the singer tussles with his empathy and belief in love’s ultimate victory against hate. “I Wanted To Be Wrong” follows, a look at the strange contradictions of America revealing themselves in the light of a conservative sea change. Stipe follows a verse about the milk and honey, bread basket bounty of America that he’s enjoyed in a largely privileged life, with the reflection: "Mythology's seductive and it turned a trick on me / That I have just begun to understand.” There’s a diseased streak of greed and inequality winding through it all, and it became impossible to turn your eyes from.

These tracks flourished a bit more on tour, out of the stifling studio environment that lead Peter Buck to describe the results as "a bunch of people that are so bored with the material that they can't stand it anymore.” There’s a heavy focus on the Sun songs throughout the band’s first live album, the straight-forwardly-titled R.E.M. Live (#199). Not a huge surprise, as it was recorded in Dublin during the tour supporting what would end up being their last studio release for four years. Everyone is in fine form on those maligned songs, but the exciting inclusions are performances like “I Took Your Name,” in a recording that made me take notice of that gloriously surreal kiss-off song I had ignored in the back half of Monster. That qualifies as the most obscure pick in a setlist that reliably digs up the hits and a few fan faves. My favorite moment might be the soulful intro to “Walk Unafraid,” just Michael Stipe’s voice over sustained church organ, before the rest of the band crashes in.

Where Warner Bros’s In Time compilation had served me as a helpful primer, And I Feel Fine… (#198), released 3 years into my assured R.E.M. fandom, was worth it for the remastered versions of I.R.S. Records tracks that only existed on 80’s-era CD’s. The rarities were a major draw for the 2-disc version, though it feels like a bit of a joke now, in the light of our current Everything Streams! age (just check out the literally hundreds of b-sides and alternate mixes and live recordings on Spotify or iTunes). But you get new liner notes, as any physical media fan will stump for, and there’s a personal curation hook to the deep cuts selected by all four original band members.

After recovering from the loss of Bill Berry’s contributions, and in the light of their first truly disappointing LP, R.E.M. took a look at their past to gain insight into a bold future. It wouldn't last long, but it would be on their terms.

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Radio songs. 189. “Green,” 190. “Out of Time,” 191. “Automatic for the People,” 192. “Monster,” 193. “New Adventures in Hi-Fi" by R.E.M.

For R.E.M., signing to Warner Bros Records meant reaching more people, in the U.S. and abroad. It meant a bigger promotional push behind their albums.

It meant an exponential increase in their touring schedule, to the point where all four were pretty burned out by the idea after being on the road for most of ’88-’89. But for me, it was a move that meant my favorite music in existence was allowed to sprout from the fertile loam of commercialism.

If you’ll remember from my previous post, it was a compilation of songs from the WB era that first made me a fan. And it was the first few albums under that banner that made R.E.M. superstars, i.e. a band established enough that I would be aware of them growing up. It’s hard for me to grasp the amount of R.E.M. saturation that existed from roughly ’88 - ’94. By the time I was humming “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” and “Orange Crush” in high school, it was 2005 and the band’s incandescence had faded to the soft, respectable glow of “Dad Rock.” They were hipper than the Billy Joel & Electric Light Orchestra discs that they had replaced in my repertoire, but as far as my peers were concerned, barely. 

The first Christmas after I had announced myself as a fan brought, in shiny happy gift wrapping, Green (#189) and Out Of Time (#190). A veritable Mandolin-apalooza: in the campfire folk trance of “You Are The Everything,” mournful character study “The Wrong Child,” and midnight hippie spiritual “Hairshirt” that are scattered through the mix of Green, and powering the über-hit that secured their legacy, “Losing My Religion,” on Out Of Time. My relationship to those tracks has dipped and risen through the years— I was much less open to strange acoustic explorations back then (or in the case of “LMR,” its overfamiliarity), so I tended to skip them. I grooved on the electric menace of “Turn You Inside-Out” and the poptimism of “Untitled.”

“World Leader Pretend,” in which all the band’s instruments, including Stipe’s voice, seemed tuned to a lower register than ever before (now THAT’S some counter-programming to the bubblegum of “Stand”), has become a God-level composition in my mind. It’s gained some resurgence recently, seen as a pointed critique of the venal and power-hungry who are obsessed with controlling geopolitical barriers. "I raised the wall / And I will be the one to knock it down,” the protagonist intones, and yeah, “the Wall” has a connotation for current events in 2018, as it did 30 years ago (roughly a year after the album’s release, Berlin’s concrete schism was demolished). But I hear the divided self in “World Leader Pretend”: the man erecting the walls of his own isolation chamber, shoring up his fragile ego against outer pain, denying the possibility for connection. "I decree a stalemate, I divine my deeper motives / I recognize the weapons / I've practiced them well, I fitted them myself.” In other words, I hear myself.

Fortunately, he concludes that it’s within his power to level these barriers he's constructed, and I feel I can learn the same lesson. There’s a triumphant slide guitar in the bridge, an iconically Country-Western flavor that the band returns to on one of the most indelible tracks on Out of Time— the descriptively-titled “Country Feedback.” Heartache on an epic scale, deliberate, hypnotic tempo but bubbling like a volcano, the words a stream-of-consciousness chant over Peter Buck’s searching electric guitar and Mike Mills funereal organ. “It’s crazy what you could have had,” Stipe laments, his voice rising, and then, “I need this. I need this.” Is it the confession that he needs, or the connection slipping away from his grasping fingers? He’s called it his favorite song in the band’s canon; they’ve performed it with Neil Young providing the wailing guitar counterpart, like a Dead Man end credits song that never happened, and there’s a clever mashup on the Unplugged set that bowled me over (I’ll mention it when I get there).

The acoustic arrangements and sonic experimentation continued on Automatic for the People (#191), with a purge of the bubblegum (“The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” is a notable exception, but for a goof, it’s gorgeous.) Much has been made of the album’s apparent preoccupation with mortality and loss. For sure, there's the straight-forward teen suicide deterrent “Everybody Hurts,” predating It Gets Better by a couple decades; “Sweetness Follows,” about the steady, plodding journey through mourning, and the peaceful plateau you can reach; “Monty Got A Raw Deal,” a steely Western ballad inspired in part by the tortured, bisexual film actor Montgomery Clift. But it’s a hopeful album, not a dour slog.

To me, the common thread is The Past: that personal history that’s less about the agreed-upon facts and more about the feelings tied to events, coloring your reminiscence. “Drive,” the darkly insinuating opening track, takes inspiration for its rhythmic Beat poetry vocal from David Essex's “Rock On,” a song that Stipe might have heard as a teenager, one that itself looks back a further 20 years to the birth of rock n’roll. Add the string arrangement by rock royalty, John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, and it’s nostalgia brined in nostalgia.

We’re looking at the reflection of the old photograph as caught by the passing streetlights: several layers of removal from the events. But in looking back, our feelings strike us clearer than whatever life we’ve built for ourselves in the interim; we’re still dwelling on whatever innocence we think we’ve lost. "I have seen things that you will never see / Leave it to memory me,” are the parting words of a person at the end of their life in “Try Not To Breathe” (often in the running for my favorite R.E.M. recording). "I will try not to burden you,” they promise, holding in secrets of a time gone by in hopes that the listener will forge a new path.

“Find The River,” which draws the book to a close with accordion and harmonizing voices, is another in a line of R.E.M. songs drawing on the river as a symbol of lost harmony. In youthful exuberance, there was “Nightswimming,” but "The ocean is the river's goal / A need to leave the water knows,” and time moves inexorably forward. The past feeds into the unfathomable depths of the future. Automatic for the People draws its title from the slogan at a soul food joint in the band’s hometown. It’s that sense of their own history, 8 records in and on top of the world, that merges with their innate creative restlessness, compelling them to shoot off in a new direction.  “I have got to leave to find my way."

This fuels their mission statement with each album since the WB era began: “Let’s write songs that don’t sound like ‘R.E.M. songs.’” If Automatic is self-reflective, Monster (#192) is about adopted personas. The sound of a middle-aged Art Rock band pretending to be a 20-something Glam Rock band, adding more neon and guitar distortion and posturing than you can shake a Mott The Hoople at. “What can I make myself be? (Faker!)” 

The video for “Crush With Eyeliner” furthers that sense of playful irony: the band members pushed off to the corner of the bar as a new generation, from a different cultural background, expresses the song for them. The entire radioactive orange LP kind of encapsulates every messy teenage feeling I've had since high school. I'm still a "faker," pretending to sing this song. And looking good doing it. (Though, full disclosure, the first time I did karaoke I went with “Bang and Blame.” I don’t mind telling you I nailed it.)

Monster is marked by the most prevalent sexual overtones in R.E.M. canon, as if they were embracing that self-aware Rock Star trope. It’s hard to get more on the nose than the title “Star 69,” but “I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” wins the prize with “Are you coming to ease my headache? / Do you give good head? / Am I good in bed?” As the public debated Michael Stipe’s sexuality, he parried the question in the press and played with his image in the lyrics. The topic of his “Crush” is gendered “she,” giving hetereos like myself plenty to appropriate for our own impossible Cool Girl daydreams— never mind that it’s an ode to his friend Courtney Love. “King of Comedy” addresses a legion of Rupert Pupkins getting their big shot by whatever means necessary, but it also contains the lyric "I'm straight, I'm queer, I'm bi,” a few years before he revealed publicly where the needle pointed on that dial for him. “Tongue” is a lilting, falsetto performance: piano-driven cabaret written for a female protagonist lamenting her inconsiderate lovers. More masks for a closely-scrutinized celebrity to find freedom behind.

New Adventures in Hi-Fi (#193) felt as appropriate a title as any for my first year at a university— trading my hometown for a cinderblock dorm-room, starting down my career path with all the film courses they’d allow me to sign up for. The road-grit guitars, open road expansive sound, Stipe’s tour-shredded front man vocals: the album is alternately weary and electrified. Choruses and riffs fit to fill a stadium (as many basic tracks were recorded at live soundcheck) beside intimate 3AM tour bus confessionals. I scored this huge chapter of my young life with the strutting, T. Rex glam of “The Wake-Up Bomb,” arena-ready choruses of “Bittersweet Me” and “So Fast, So Numb,” felt inspired by the dreamlike inscrutability of “How The West Was Won and Where It Got Us” and darkly-reflective poetry of “E-Bow The Letter.”

I’m not overly surprised to hear that this LP didn’t hit with the same impact as the previous ones— it’s always felt like an acquired taste that I couldn’t impart to anyone else. “You haven’t heard 'Leave?’ Ah man, it’s over 7 minutes long, and there’s a constant siren loop in the background! But trust me, when you hear the acoustic riff from the opening interlude reprised by double-tracked electric guitar, the goose pimples will be visible from space.”

Where Monster boasted the straight-arrow torch song “Strange Currencies,” the hushed, surrealistic “Be Mine” seemed as if it emanated from my own bruised heart. "I'll be the sky above the Ganges / I'll be the vast and stormy sea / I'll be the lights that guide you inward / I'll be the visions you will see”— it’s a cross-spiritual devotional that funnels the tenets of world religions into a promise for total intimacy. I would pay top dollar for the raw footage of Thom Yorke’s guest interpretation. 

Despite the public’s anemic response, the band’s estimation of Hi-Fi’s strengths is justifiably high. It’s an accomplished, energetic record that shows every member playing at his peak. It’s now frozen in history as the last document of the band as a foursome. In the next entry, I’ll delve into the CDs released after drummer Bill Berry retired and R.E.M. dramatically changed gears, rocketing into the 21st century.

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R U Talkin’ I.R.S. R.E.M. RE: ME? 183. “Murmur - Deluxe Edition,” 184. “Reckoning,” 185. “Fables of the Reconstruction,” 186. “Lifes Rich Pageant,” 187. “Dead Letter Office," 188. “Document” by R.E.M.

If you’ve been following this blog with any regularity, you may have noticed how often references to R.E.M. weave their way into my appraisals of other artists. That’s because the band has become a bit of a Rosetta Stone for my musical taste: eclectic, ever-evolving, beautifully melodic, with evocative (or downright inscrutable) lyrics. I delved into their decades-long catalogue- piecemeal and out of chronology in the pre-Spotify days- at the exact point in my adolescence when I was forming what that taste would be. And now I must ask the question that has so ignited the public's curiosity: When did I first hear of the band R.E.M.?

My answer, at long last, is… "Hmm, not sure." As recounted in my entry on Barenaked Ladies (or “BNL,” as befitting such an essential band): during a high school trip through Europe, a bus ride from Ireland to Wales was scored by an all-over-the-map mixtape.* I was definitely already familiar with “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” when it popped up. And I remember, sitting there as misty green hills moved past the window, that it sparked a web of associations: I likely thought of “Losing My Religion,” probably “The One I Love.” After watching a Comedy Central documentary on Andy Kaufman, I became briefly obsessed, and my mom helpfully told me that there was a song written about him, titled “Man on the Moon.” She pulled Automatic for the People, the only R.E.M. release she owned, off the shelf and played that track for me. I think I liked it, but I didn’t go further than that.

So, sitting on that tour bus, I figured that when we reached the London leg of our whirlwind trip, I would use my personal pilgrimage to Virgin Megastore (remember those?) to pick up a greatest hits collection. And I did, getting the recently released In Time: The Best of R.E.M. I loved it so much, I barely noticed that half the songs I knew, including the one that had inspired the purchase, were nowhere to be found.

As I later learned, that compilation was put out by Warner Bros Records, and as such was solely focused on the songs the band recorded while under contract to that label. And it’s true, several of their biggest hits came out of those first few WB releases. But wither “The One I Love?” Well, before they signed that lucrative deal, R.E.M. made their bones putting out arty, jangly, pastorally pretty rock music under the banner of I.R.S. Records.  

It’s been awhile since I first heard their debut full-length Murmur (#183), but after the slicker, weirder, string-flavored tunes I was used to, hearing the upfront immediacy of the young-and-hungry band, playing as a tight group over a chasm of reverb, was a bit revelatory. Recorded at the now-defunct Reflection Sound Studios in Charlotte, NC (a liner note discovery that filled me with no small amount of regional pride), Don Dixon and Mitch Easter's production makes the jangle rock dreamy and beguiling while avoiding cheesy 80’s pitfalls. It’s all killer, no filler (I even love “We Walk,” all bouncy repetition and ever-climbing arpeggios)— right now, I’d say the earnest “Talk About The Passion” and the almost hiccupy hook of “Catapult” rank as my favorite moments, but that changes and shifts unpredictably.

The sonic muscle of Reckoning (#184) is cleaner, with opener “Harborcoat” immediately shaking loose the spooky cobwebs of Murmur. Again, the immediacy surprised me when I first heard it: I was hearing the version of the band that tore the roof off of tiny venues in sleepy college towns throughout the South. For a time, it was the comparative lack of the fussy arrangements and earnest, soaring melodies I’d come to expect from my R.E.M. that dismissed this album to a dusty gray corner in my mind. But the mark of a Favorite Band means that you can return to their work at different times in your life and find that while the music stayed the same, you’re hearing it with different ears. There’s not a weak link in 10 tracks, and songs that I’d once had trouble even recalling became new favorites: "So. Central Rain,” with its ringing Rickenbacker guitar line, melodic bass, and keening chorus (“I’m sorry”) is a fan favorite for a reason, and “Camera,” which recalls a departed friend of the band’s, builds to a shattering chorus. And of course, the one straight-up, tear-in-your-beer country rocker in their catalogue, “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville."

I remember driving to night classes in my first year of community college, listening to my newly-purchased disc of Fables of the Reconstruction (#185). Now this was immediately my speed, with the spooky, menacing, string quartet-inflected “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” and incantatory “Maps and Legends" leading the pack. The band had a lousy experience recording it, and they badmouth the way the songs were mixed, but to me the thick-as-kudzu production is a big part of this album’s hallucinatory power. I love the surreal, umber and burnished gold and chartreuse cover art as well: though the layout looks a little too cluttered on the CD, I bought the vinyl record from a second-hand store just to frame it, with the “Reconstruction of the Fables” ear-box side facing out from my wall.

Not every track does it for me. “Can’t Get There from Here” is fun but a little too affected in its whimsy, and “Auctioneer (Another Engine),” already a bit monotone, is the track most hampered by sludgy sound. But sandwiched in-between are “Green Grow the Rushes” and “Kohoutek,” glimpses of the environmentally-conscious, culturally-sensitive side of Michael Stripe and Co that led directly into their follow-up, Lifes Rich Pageant (#186). They expand the promise of those two tracks with “Fall On Me” and “Cuyahoga,” to devastatingly pretty effect.

Where Fables was a nighttime drive down an inky-dark American highway, Pageant is a wide-eyed survey of virgin prairie, a longing to return to unspoiled harmonic existence. “Let’s put our heads together / Let’s start a new country up,” the natives of “Cuyahoga” resolve over the ashy remains of the river bend. "What you want and what you need, there's the key / Your adventure for today, what do you do / Between the horns of the day?” Stipe exhorts his listeners in “I Believe,” and the Southern beach rock behind the words pushes you to make your move. “We are young despite the years / We are concern / We are hope despite the times,” he belts out over furious riffs and annihilated drums in “These Days," Mike Mills calling out affirmation in his backup vocal.

Right down to the absurdist sea shanty “Swan Swan H” and infectiously fun cover “Superman” that close it out, it’s hard to find a more consistent document of the band’s strengths. And now, damn, I want that to be a crackerjack segue to discussion of their next studio album, but months before that final I.R.S. release, there was Dead Letter Office (#187). A collection of occasionally rather sloppy outtakes and covers of varying reverence, the main draw here is the inclusion of their debut EP Chronic Town (on the CD, anyway. I notice that Spotify separates those songs from the DLO tracks). The angular menace of “Wolves, Lower” and the subtle, melodic magic of “Gardening At Night” (Stripe’s almost unintelligible lyrics are Exhibit A for his early-years shyness) are justifiable fan favorites to this day— not bad for the first batch of songs from such a prolific group. A must.

Buying Document (#188) finally gave me easy access to “It’s The End of the World...” and “The One I Love” (rather than, you know, waiting to hear one or the other on the radio). It also meant first experiencing one of my favorite opening salvos on record: “Finest Worksong.” It sounds HUGE, to borrow an oft-accurate phrase from notable actor/R.E.M. podcaster Adam Scott. Bill Berry’s thundercrack drums echo as if recorded in a cavernous factory where the overlords have been overthrown, while Peter Buck’s guitar chugs and drones, a dramatic change from the nimble arpeggios that made up previous records. It, and the songs that follow— “Welcome to the Occupation” ("Listen to the buyer still / Listen to the Congress / Where we propagate confusion”), “Exhuming McCarthy” ("Vested interest, united ties / Landed gentry, rationalize / Look who bought the myth / By Jingo, buy America”), “Disturbance at the Heron House”— make the album, at 31 years old, feel like a queasy reflection of our current milieu. No one feels fine right now.

Luckily, the music is still driving, fun, singable, varied in its grooves and moods. “Fireplace,” coming right after the twofer of the most famous singles, provided me such an unexpected thrill with a rare appearance by sinuous be-bop saxophone, such a different color for this band. Sax in 80’s songs is usually an utterly cheeseball affair, but this is a dark, weird tune, and is nowhere near that register of power balladry. “Lightnin’ Hopkins” is just as unique, with a metalhead rolling drum beat and Stipe acting like a throat-shredded street preacher over echoey chain-gang backup howls.

This band takes up a whole shelf in my house, so hold on tight for several more comprehensive and encyclopedic write-ups. 

*It’s been over a year since I wrote that entry, and I recently realized my memory is jumbled up. I now have a clear recollection that the songs from BNL’s Everything For Everyone were repeating in my head ON THAT VERY TRIP! So I was already a fan.

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181. “The Eraser” by Thom Yorke, 182. “Amok” by Atoms for Peace

A lone figure, dressed in black, coat sweeping down to his ankles, hat pulled down almost over his eyes, like a plague doctor. Storm clouds and infinite waves are the sickness encroaching— acts of God coming to drown the world. With one extended hand, the man in black tries to hold oblivion at bay. But extend the cardboard gatefold, and see London already swept away in the rising waters. Whatever the man believes about his power, it’s inevitable that he’s the next to go.

The cover, illustrated by longtime Radiohead artist/designer Stanley Donwood, is the The Eraser’s (#181) modus operandi writ large. The main interpretation, perhaps the artist’s chief intention, is of a king, or politician, making an ineffectual gesture to dispel the ultimate devastating effect of global climate change. Certainly Yorke’s explicitly political tracks, like “The Clock” and “Harrowdown Hill,” fall right in line with that pointed social comment. "Time is running out for us / But you just move the hands upon the clock,” is his ghostly admonition on “The Clock," keening over dirty bass guitar and skittering beat-boxing. “This is fucked up, fucked up / This is your blind spot / It should be obvious, but it’s not” he purrs over the lunatic shuffle “Black Swan,” shining a spotlight on boneheadedness and misplaced confidence.

But, fuzzy-brained romantic that I am, I see the circle of white around the man holding, however temporarily, against the overwhelming tide. Maybe I’m just inclined to look for the “light in the dark” that eludes the singer in “Analyse,” who holds tight to the memory of candles gleaming in city windows like the orbs of luminescent Tesla-produced energy in Christopher Nolan’s paranoid masterpiece The Prestige. I don’t consider myself particularly optimistic or Pollyannish. I just have that lucky quirk of brain chemistry that finds a contented endorphin buzz in the raincloud tones and defeated lyrics of Yorke and his collaborators.

To the less squishy and more empathetic listener, the one clearly soothing spot in what is generally an angular and hallucinatory set of songs is “Atoms For Peace,” with its bubbly electronic bass notes and floaty falsetto and, heaven forfend, optimistic lyrics. When it came time to bring these Eraser songs out of the home studio and onto the stage, that Eisenhower-quoting title was the perfect moniker for a new combo act: Yorke, producer and musician extraordinaire Nigel Godrich, sworn enemy of shirts Flea, Beck-backing drummer Joey Waronker, and percussionist Mauro Refosco.

Amok (#182), their studio collaboration, is a manipulated mixture of jam sessions and electronica that carries on the beat-focused vibe of Radiohead’s King of Limbs, released two years before. “Before Your Very Eyes...” kicks it off with thin funk guitar and restless afrobeat, reminiscent of Remain In Light-era Talking Heads, made trance-inducing by Yorke’s heavily reverbed, drawn-out and high-pitched vocal line. “Ingenue,” with its dirty synthesizer line and raindrops-on-tin beat, is a sequel to “Lotus Flower,” complete with another idiosyncratic Thom Yorke modern dance cycle in the video. Translated to acoustic piano in this TV appearance, it’s downright gorgeous.

The Stanley Donwood art packaging, portraying Los Angeles engulfed in apocalyptic flames and drowning in herringbone waves, solidifies the connection to The Eraser. Slightly taller than the average CD shelf, both cases create an amusing installation propped up at the top of my collection. Amok is a weirdly comfortable groove that I return to often, but the songwriting ultimately doesn’t engender the same gut-level connection as that previous record. Coming as it did in the 5-year pause between Radiohead releases, though, it was a diverting enough stopgap.

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177. “Hail to the Thief,” 178. “In Rainbows,” 179. “King of Limbs,” 180. “A Moon Shaped Pool” by Radiohead

Here we are. At that point where I have to defend my previous assertion that Hail to the Thief (#177) is closer to my heart than the widely-beloved Kid A. And here we go…

There are 14 tracks, far more than any other Radiohead album, and I only dislike one of them. And it’s not “We Suck Young Blood” (it’s “The Gloaming”). Like, “Blood” is a creepy, chain-rattling chiller with deliberately cracked vocals and that cool little jazzy breakdown between the verses. “The Gloaming” is like a ghost taking a nap.

Even stranger, my favorite songs are all in a little clump in the last third. Right after the aforementioned downers, this suite of winners begins with “There, There,” the lead single. Featuring one of the loveliest, slightly gritty guitar lines in the catalogue and a chorus lyric (“Just ‘cause you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there”) that stings, if not like a knife in the heart, than maybe like a sharpened icicle in the lower abdomen. “I Will” is one second shy of 2 minutes, but there is beauty in the utter simplicity of gently-strummed electric guitar and three-part Yorke harmony. It’s the soundtrack to staring into a dying fire. And it transitions right into “A Punchup At a Wedding,” slinky and pissed-off at once, sitting next to “You and Whose Army?” as the straight-up coolest piano numbers. One of these days, mark my words, I will master it, because it’s just fairly repetitive chords. But the distinct rhythm of the pounding on the keys has always slightly eluded me.

The escalating tension of this killer suite boils over in crunchy, foreboding synth and aggressive drums on “Myxomatosis.” “I— don’t— know— why I— feel so— tongue… tied” is, I believe, the exact cadence of the chorus, and I can identify with those moments when the churning chemical processes make articulate expression impossible.

15 years on, Thief remains hard for people to pin down. Though there are a few “angry” songs, the material is not explicitly about political leaders or Blair or Bush. That title pun was read as a pissy, middle finger salute as on-the-nose as a Banksy, despite any statements made by the band members to downplay that interpretation. Unlike the albums that made their name, this collection of songs lacks an over-arching thematic focus, which may still hurt its legacy. But I will continue to argue passionately for the music’s inherent strength. The follow-up, released four years later, requires no such defense.

In Rainbows (#178) was my introduction to Radiohead. It has and will probably fulfill that same purpose for a lot of others. From 2007-2010, I was in college, majoring in film production and spending a lot of time in a windowless room filled with iMacs. I give you the range of years, because I’m not positive just how fresh the surprise late-’07 digital release of that album was when my friend Seth handed me the thumb drive in that iMac editing lab. College is a time to experiment with new experiences, you see, and I really only followed that credo when it came to dadaist TV comedies and ponderous rock bands. So in that sterile environment, when I should have been working, I put in earbuds instead.

“15 Step” began with clapboard beats played through a glitchy hard drive. Thom lamented another repeat of the vicious cycle. Then Jonny’s guitar came in, soft and inviting as your pillow, bolstered by Colin Greenwood’s nimble bass. A sample of schoolyard cheers, and then we stepped off the sheer drop. The rest of the album was what I saw as I fell and hit the ocean’s surface, a sort of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” if the man dreamt of the noose tightening anyway. “Nude” is the haughty confirmation of the protagonist’s fear in “There, There”— “Don’t get any big ideas, they’re not gonna happen” is the lilting, falsetto admonishment. It shares DNA with R.E.M.’s “Tongue” from 1994’s Monster, to the point of sibling rivalry. But Michael Stipe’s feminine protagonist on that tune feels like an amusing pose in comparison.

To continue both the R.E.M. connection and the falling man’s dilemma, the split title of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” acknowledges the rapid, repeating guitar technique that that band’s Peter Buck made a staple, but here it sounds like water rushing overhead. I’m sinking deeper, but I’ve determined that the way out is through. By the time the clacking boneyard beat and flickering piano of “Videotape” laid the album to rest back in that college computer lab, I felt like I’d been through something. That some synaptic pathways had been rewired by a piece of art in that way that becomes neurologically harder and harder to achieve again as the years go by. The hypnotic draw of this series of songs is impossible to shake even after an ensuing near-decade of revisitation.

By the time The King of Limbs (#179) leaked onto the web in 2011, Radiohead had been taking over my brain one used CD purchase at a time. As I collected the discography, marveling at OK Computer and puzzling at Pablo Honey, the security blanket melodies and instrumentation of In Rainbows wriggled in ever deeper. So the murky production, polyrhythmic grooves, and murmured vocals of Limbs were not immediately arresting. “It’s a grower,” I gently warned people when handing them a burned CD-R. Meaning over multiple listens, not over the course of the album: at 8 tracks and 37 minutes, it’s as fleet as a couple of their EPs.

Opener “Bloom” is like the score to a Biblical epic as listened to through a glass pressed to a hotel room wall, all muted horns and a vocal that sweeps like sun rays. “Morning Mr. Magpie” and “Little by Little” are statements of Limbs’ groove-focused identity, and melody-wise tend to blend into each other with little resistance. Where the guitar on Rainbows was a hand to guide you, here it’s another rhythm component, along with the doubled-up drum kit: as the band took the songs on the road, they enlisted Clive Deamer to join long-time drummer Philip Selway. Four hands were better than two to create the beds these compositions required.

“Feral” jettisons pop song structure completely as a cut-up chord collage dashed against unstoppable train drums.  “Lotus Flower” is 2/3rds floor-rattling bass, 2/3rds hand-claps, and 2/3rds crystalline falsetto: as mathematically impossible as Yorke’s dance moves in the video. The album closes out with three pastorally pretty and almost terminally mellow numbers: the deep embedded roots of “Codex,” the treetop birdsong of “Give Up the Ghost,” the late Sunday morning wakeup of “Separator.” The melodies are sweet invitations, but I can understand if they sound, in their final produced form, like rock n’roll Ambien. The live arrangements, like those recorded for the “From The Basement” special, are generally thought to breathe extra life into the tunes. The recent Hans Zimmer/Radiohead reimagining of “Bloom” for “Blue Planet 2” makes that song’s cinematic ambitions more readily apparent, as well. But I’ve got a soft spot for any and all versions, and don’t feel any sting of disappointment that TKOL wasn’t In Rainbows Part 2.

The 4-5 year gaps between records has proven an energizing practice for the band’s members as they explore their own projects. Jonny Greenwood created an impressive body of work as Paul Thomas Anderson’s film composer of choice, Yorke (with producer Nigel Godrich in tow) collaborated with Flea on Atoms For Peace and indulged DJ-focused electronica on the self-released Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. Where Rainbows had drawn inspiration for its sonic approach from the close-miked intimacy of Yorke’s solo record The Eraser (more on that next time), 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool (#180) has Greenwood’s stellar orchestral composition work threaded throughout. 

Any hazy production cobwebs from TKOL are swept aside by the Bernard Hermann stabbing strings and depth charge bass line of “Burn the Witch,” the true paranoid opus of our surveillance state age. “Red crosses on wooden doors, and if you float, you burn,” Yorke hums and coos, deliberately juxtaposing his trademark vibrating falsetto against the dire warnings. “We Know Where You Live,” stated the cryptic postcards sent to fans, and it was true, because we’ve offered our whereabouts freely to whoever will listen. “Daydreaming” follows its own somnambulant trajectory, with piano that ambles along until periodically the notes catch a long wind, to paraphrase the Feist song, swirling like cel-painted animated leaves. The video closes the gap between Jonny’s prestige film work and his longest-running gig with P.T. Anderson helming a low-key gorgeous M.C. Escher puzzle of Thom moving purposefully through an endless series of doors, spaces, environments.

Before the album dropped, I saw a live clip of Yorke debuting “Desert Island Disk,” just he and his acoustic guitar. The studio version does little to distract from that simple backbone: it’s a sweet, dexterous garden party riff bolstered with gentle drumming and subtle synth washes. “Glass Eyes,” the shortest, most melancholy track, has taken hold like an itch in the mind. Watery electric piano and Yorke’s murmured phone message verses slip through like a dream you struggle to remember the details of, until suddenly the exact angle of a cold gray street corner sparks a complete deja vu, and the heart-rending string section swells.

I’ve taken to playing “The Numbers” at inappropriate volumes, lately. Symphonic rock is nothing new, but it’s rare to hear such a mid-tempo acoustic groove be so suddenly opened up by falling stomach cello courtesy of London Contemporary Orchestra. “We call upon the people / The people have this power / The numbers don’t decide / The system is a lie” is the undeniable political exhortation, and the strings are the wielded tools of revolution: if “Burn The Witch” was a warning against mob rule, “The Numbers” is a rallying cry for positive upheaval.

“True Love Waits,” and there’s no better evidence for that sentiment than the official release of this song from the era of “The Bends.” Live performances and bootlegs through the years featured variations on acoustic guitar or Rhodes piano. Repeated attempts in the studio every few years yielded nothing wholly satisfying. In its final version, closing the album, reverb-laden grand piano and Yorke’s ghostly yearning is joined by glittering ice crystal notes that steadily accumulate. In my head I see the scene from A.I. in which the artificial boy, David, patiently and gratefully beholds the Blue Fairy, as his systems freeze into a thousand years of sleep. Melancholy become manifest.

In the next entry, I’ll jump out of alphabetical order to revisit two of Thom Yorke’s extracurricular activities.

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172. “Pablo Honey,” 173. “The Bends,” 174. “OK Computer,” 175. “Kid A,” 176. “Amnesiac” by Radiohead

There's a fairly popular meme that was birthed recently, using the template "Each Radiohead Album Described with [TV Show],” in which the band’s discography is matched with clips that are meant to represent their individual tone and style. The compilation that grabbed guitarist/composer Johnny Greenwood’s attention, earning a shout-out on Twitter, sourced clips from Nickelodeon’s "Spongebob Squarepants," but every comedy show under the sun has provided fodder. To look at the various iterations of this meme is to see the popular stereotypes of Radiohead’s body of work writ large. As an Extremely Online person, I can piece together a list:

Pablo Honey: Pleasant, insipid, acoustic drivel The Bends: Inconsolable sadness OK Computer: "Modern society isolates us" Kid A: "Modern technology isolates us" Amnesiac: The weird jazz one Hail to the Thief: Radical political dissent In Rainbows: The pretty, melodic one King of Limbs: Bleeps and bloops (Alternately, a reference to trees) A Moon-Shaped Pool: Ineffable sadness

As with any meme, the underlying interpretation only touches the truth. The band’s debut album, Pablo Honey (#172), is certainly nowhere near the complexity of songwriting or performance that they would later reach. Other than their breakthrough hit, “Creep,” a.k.a. “the one that everyone on Earth knows and half personally identify with,” the tone of many tracks are up-tempo and nearly upbeat (but with far more crunchy electric guitar wailing than the acoustic noodling the meme suggests). It’s hard to imagine a Thom Yorke from 1997 onwards enthusing, “I wanna be Jim Morrison!” as he does on “Anyone Can Play Guitar.” The tracks don’t lend themselves to the kind of think-piece deep dive customary to the Band That Launched A Thousand Pitchfork Articles, but the lean, buzzy hooks of “Stop Whispering” and "Guitar” shouldn’t just be tossed away. Ultimately, Pablo represents a period in the band’s history where a college radio listener could have conceivably said, “Yeah, Radiohead’s pretty good, but they’re not, like, Oasis-level."

The Bends (#173) is simultaneously a step toward their destiny (with album art by Stanley Donwood, and once-and-future producer Nigel Godrich serving as engineer) and the source of the most “Anyway, here’s ‘Wonderwall…’” songs in their catalogue. The crunch and bombast of their previous record, carried on by new material like the title track and “Black Star,” lives alongside icons of sad bastard balladry “High and Dry” and “Fake Plastic Trees.” It’s the favorite Radiohead record of people who are put off by the dourness and eclecticism of the Modern Radiohead Sound. Which isn’t to discount the innate musical quality of Thom’s fluid falsetto melding with acoustic strumming. When the full band emerges from behind the extended syllables of “it wears,” taking us into the 3rd verse, only the terminally jaded emerge without goosebumps. “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” closes out the album with a glimpse of the kind of eerie, fatalistic, tone poem rock they would soon come to exemplify. The effect of ghostly harmonies courtesy of Thom, Ed O’Brien, and Phillip Selway over that arpeggiated guitar line is uncanny, and writing this sentence, I'm drawing a certain mental connection to “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M., specifically with the way the guitar winds down at the end of the track. (Note: Wikipedia links to an interview with Yorke that bears this out.)

OK Computer (#174) is Year Zero for the band as we know them, and the recent 20th anniversary OKNOTOK 2-disc set folds in b-sides and a few previously unreleased tracks. It also replaces my scratched copy that I bought used, which would consistently get stuck on “Paranoid Android,” turning it into a glitchy, endlessly looped remix. It kinda slapped, actually. “Airbag” opens the album without immediately giving away that you’re about to hear something dramatically different from The Bends. It’s still guitar-driven “alternative rock,” but the drums are tinnier, beginning to approximate the simulated sound of a drum machine. It’s the glitchy coda after the last chorus: of sleigh bells, wah-wah synths, and wordless harmonizing, that establishes the new sonic direction.

A lonely beeping takes us straight into the next track, “Paranoid Android,” a multi-movement odyssey of— wait. Am I seriously about to write more words about OK Computer, the most endlessly explored and celebrated work of the band’s discography until, well, the next one, Kid A? Moody tweens will be contemplating “Karma Police” in darkened bedrooms and having epiphanies to the soaring chorus of “Lucky” from now until the end of time— if they’re lucky. The big selling point of the 20th anniversary edition is the 3 “new” songs, which each prove that in this verdant period of Radiohead’s creativity, even the castoffs would be high points of another Britpop band’s album. “I Promise” and “Lift" sound enough like Bends tracks to make their exclusion from the bolder follow-up understandable. “Man of War,” somewhat like the much later single “Daily Mail,” begins with mid-tempo insinuation before exploding in the chorus: a ripping guitar line and the Royal Philharmonic suggest all the action and mortal danger of the Bond film from which it was rejected. It's instantly become a new favorite.

Nuclear Hot Take Imminent! I don’t feel the urge to listen to Kid A (#175) all that much. Looking at the track listing just now, I can pick out the handful of songs I love, but the rest begin to meld together. I once revealed on social media that I was far more likely to pick Hail to the Thief off the shelf than Kid A, to thundering shock (Thief has a reputation as scattershot and uneven). I’m not going to adjust my imaginary hipster glasses and pronounce the album, “Hnnnnn overrated!” to trigger a thousand simultaneous kombucha spit-takes. It’s a shattering aural document that cemented the band’s reputation once and for all, largely eschewing recognizable electric guitar riffs for keyboards, synthesizers, strings, vocoders, programmed beats and Mellotrons. It uses chilly effects and instrumentation to evoke the messy range of human experience. But I will straight-up skip “Idioteque.” If someone mentions “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” I actually have to sit and concentrate to remember the melody— it doesn’t help that the title is reminiscent of "Exit Music (For A Film).” I love the title track now, but the vocal distortion put me off for the longest time: it was only after hearing the 2006 live version from Bonnaroo that the descending vocal melody flipped the switch in my brain.

So that’s my controversial opinion about Radiohead’s Kid A, that only half of the songs are the best things I’ve ever heard. The watery electric piano and exultant howl of “Everything In Its Right Place” might one day tip me into a moment of pure transcendence. The darkly driving bass line and squealing horns of “The National Anthem” never fail to get the heart pumping. “How To Disappear Completely” is an annihilation devoutly to be wished. But here’s where I go full-body pretentious and say that I love Amnesiac (#176) more. 

Yes. The album that is represented in the “Spongebob" meme by Patrick the purple starfish adopting a chin-stroking hepcat look as chaotic free jazz blares. The album that Radiohead had to repeatedly insist was not a “b-sides” record of material not good enough for Kid A (despite containing a common song, “Morning Bell,” in an alternate arrangement). The album that includes a challenging ambient creation, with vocals even more distorted than Thom’s lead on “Kid A,” puzzlingly called “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors.” The previous album was the band dealing with frayed nerves and creative restlessness in the wake of OK Computer’s runaway success and their subsequent immersion into the slippery, ego-driven Music Business. Yet Amnesiac has an even more paranoid patina.

“Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box” is steadily built with simple but ear-catching ingredients: a thin, metallic drum, an 808-style programmed beat, then a warm, fused tone of bass and repetitive electric piano. “After years of waiting, nothing came,” is Yorke’s weary refrain, the words dribbling and humming with the crunchy, compressed loop. Glitchy echoes of his words skitter in the background as the chorus repeats: “I’m a reasonable man, get off my case,” more of a plea than a threat. “Pyramid Song,” with its strange rhythm in the piano chords, ghostly vocals, and gently swelling strings, paints a portrait of liminal space: between waking and sleeping, or between this mortal coil and whatever follows after.

“You And Whose Army?” and a live arrangement of “Like Spinning Plates” are two of my most practiced pieces in front of a piano. In its studio form, the somber backing instruments for “Army’s” resigned, radio transmitter vocals are gently-strummed electric guitar and muted bass. All the more exhilarating when the crashing piano chords and Phil Selway’s drums kick into high gear. When I eventually looked up that the lyrics to the chorus were, “We ride tonight / Ghost horses,” I knew my knee-jerk instinct to grab a lance and join in glorious battle was not misplaced. “Like Spinning Plates” only clicked after hearing the Bonnaroo 2006 version, free from the synthesizer burbles and “Twin Peaks" reverse-forwards vocals of the studio version. “While you make pretty speeches, I’m being cut to shreds” spoke to me at a time where all I could see were ineffectual thoughts and prayers flung limply at an escalating culture of violence, and moving my fingers rapidly and repetitively over the keys offered some discharge of anxiety.

Sometimes I like to lean into that anxiety, and the darkly chugging “I Might Be Wrong” evokes a dark brain space that’s oddly energizing. I feel like the kind of people who know what I mean find that effect in “Knives Out.” However, for reasons passing understanding, to me it falls into that same one-note trap as “Idioteque.” It’s one of the few times that Yorke’s moaning, sustained vocal technique just hits my ear wrong.

The blue spotlight, after-midnight jazz of “Life in a Glasshouse” closes the album with the perfect Radiohead slide from melancholy to cathartic, horns blaring like a New Orleans funeral procession. It’s exploratory and alive sounding, the perfect capper to the chopped-and-screwed and meticulously unpredictable preceding tracks. Of course I’d like to sit around and chat some more, but that will have to wait for my next entry. Someone’s listening in...

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Welcome to the machine. 169. “Wish You Were Here,” 170. “Animals,” 171. “The Division Bell” by Pink Floyd

I began strictly hearing the mid-to-late-70’s, Waters and Gilmore-centric, classic rock radio era of Pink Floyd, after Syd Barrett had gone mad and the remaining members wore less paisley and started writing tighter choruses.

So all the parts of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” from Wish You Were Here (#168) were my entrée into the prog side of the mood. The tight tempo changes, Minimoog soloing and serpentine sax courtesy of Dick Parry mark the combined 26-minute sonic odyssey as an endlessly repayable, inspired construction and not a spaghetti-at-the-wall jam band muck-about. Cleanly severed into bookends, the suite bolsters the comparably fleeter middle three tracks, including the title track.

The sweetness of that acoustic, poignant radio staple is the perfect balm after the darkly despairing “Welcome to the Machine” and mordant record company satire “Have a Cigar” (“The band is just fantastic / That is really what I think / Oh by the way, which one’s Pink?”). Writer Alec Sulkin, via Twitter, once described the Big Brother-fearing “Machine” as "dad Pink Floyd singing to baby Radiohead,” and the cold, whirring Eraserhead machinery at the top of the track would back him up.

I found plenty to sink my teeth into with the paranoid collage of Dark Side of the Moon and shell-shocked satire of The Wall, frequently borrowing them from my mother. In building my own collection, I investigated that same corner of the band’s history, putting on my shelf Wish You Were Here and the arguably even greater (or at least less overly-familiar) achievement Animals (#169). The sequencing approach is inverted from the previous album: the multi-movement middle tracks are sandwiched by the brief, lovelorn acoustic solo act of "Pigs on the Wing” parts 1 & 2. 

“Dogs” rockets you forward on furiously-strummed, double-tracked acoustic guitar and blasts of incoming ordinance from Gilmour’s lead, before shifting into an iconic Floyd groove of Richard Wright’s Rhodes and synth work. Weirdness points are provided by distorted dog bark samples in the background that are of questionable necessity. The 2nd half screeches in with Roger Waters in full strident exhorter mode, taking the vocal lead from Gilmour for the rest of the track, and the rest of the album, for that matter.

I’m at risk of becoming a broken record when I once again draw parallels between the music I listened to in 2017 and the feelings of acute political anxiety winding through life since the 2016 election. But when Waters pivots from “Big man, pig man” to “Hey you, Whitehouse / Ha, ha, charade you are” on “Pigs (Three Different Ones)," it feels much more like a time-traveling cry of disgust at the duly-elected President of Oozing Moral Abscess than a pointed dig at, uh… Jimmy Carter? As such, its cathartic properties cannot be discounted. Even the crunchy, misophonic vocoder in the pigs-in-shit instrumental exploration between the 2nd and 3rd verses.

“Sheep” begins as a dreamy, last call at the jazz hall electric piano groove, but with insistent bass guitar pulsating under the surface, suggesting lurking danger. Waters crashes in with a call to wake up and smell the abattoir into which the sheep are walking, en masse. Yes, a couple decades before “sheeple” became the portmanteau of choice for the mad as hell, secret genius online commenter, Pink Floyd were leading the charge. Perhaps inspired by the song, the Sheep rise up and tear out the throats of the murderous Dogs, and Gilmour’s guitar becomes the “wave upon wave of demented avengers,” triumphant and scrabbling like the horde trampling their oppressors.

Roger Waters continued his songwriting dominance in the band's follow-up The Wall, becoming my most revisited Floyd album. The copy I burned from my mom’s CDs and took to college, that is. Eventually I’ll pick up the recent remaster. Waters and Wright gradually bowed out of the band in the 80’s (Waters quite litigiously), though Wright continued to contribute keyboard work as David Gilmour periodically picked up the Pink Floyd banner. 

I had the impression that 1994’s The Division Bell (#170) was fairly well-regarded, as late-period work from 1970’s rock bands go. The instrumental “Marooned” had made its way on to the best-selling Echoes compilation, and the Easter Island-esque cover art was at least as recognizable to me as the flaming handshake. [I realized, while noticing a wardrobe choice in the first season of True Detective, that my father had sported the very 90’s black-and-primary-colored tour t-shirt throughout my young childhood, which helped the subconscious connection.] So it became my 2nd-ever used record store Floyd purchase.

If the band’s 70’s output helped define the sound of the decade, Division Bell more often than not tumbles into every production technique of the late 80’s to early 90’s. The drums are big, the keyboards are tinkly, and the reverb is strong with this one. But not a lot of Top 40 hits were using a synthesized Stephen Hawking impression as a motif, as in “Keep Talking.” Gilmour’s trademark dreamy guitar hooks likewise paint the songs with easily identifiable shades of Pink. Where Waters' lyrics for previous albums tended toward tales of dissociation or societal allegories, Gilmour’s pet theme for the length of the album is barriers of communication, between lovers or friends.

Many of the songs are credited to Gilmour and his wife Polly Samson, lending personal edge to tracks like “Take It Back.” The track with the most memorable hook, “What Do You Want From Me?,” can be read as the frustration of a rock god who has pivoted out of the public favor in his middle age, begging the title question of his indifferent audience. Or maybe that’s too overly obvious of an interpretation and it’s actually metaphorical, look, I’m not a mind reader, guys! Did you come here expecting deep readings with well-cited references and a bibliography? What do you— ohhh, now I get it.

Come back next time, as I move inevitably into the spiritual successor to Pink Floyd’s genre-stretching explorations in rock. Big hint, they start the “R” section of my collection.

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166. “Martinis & Bikinis,” 167. “Omnipop (It’s Only A Flesh Wound Lambchop),” 168. “Don’t Do Anything” by Sam Phillips

Sometimes blind-buying a record just pays off.

That was how I ended up with Sam Phillips’ 1994 release Martinis & Bikinis (#166), a slice of roots-pop gold and a gateway to a whole back catalogue. Her gritty barroom chanteuse voice carries shimmering harmonies with barbs of social commentary in the sugar pill. She takes aim at powerful hypocrites, environmental rapists, the spiritually hollow. "He wants to buy the things he doesn't understand / He wants all the credit / He wants the rights to the soul of every man,” is the portrait she draws of a particular soulless bigwig archetype in “Fighting With Fire."

T-Bone Burnett comes to her aid with his patented polished-jangle production, from the soul-lifting hook at the center of “I Need Love” to the rag-and-bone, chain-shaking dystopia of “Black Sky,” and Phillips' primordial, weary-toned take on John Lennon’s “Gimme Some Truth.” There’s a patina of Rubber Soul Beatles in the harpsichord-and-strings flavoring “Strawberry Road,” with yearning lyrics in a waltz time. “The things we’ve wanted, when we get them, are never enough, never what they seem / But they lead us to the road.”

There’s usually cause to worry when musicians start getting openly self-reflexive about the pop industry. To look at the cover of Omnipop (#167), from its winking title to the retro-futurist aesthetic of the cover photography, you’d be forgiven if you start having sweaty flashbacks to U2’s Pop or Madonna’s MDNA, where ventures into dance music come off as self-parodic clones of the real thing. And there are, for sure, lyrics in Phillips’ record where television is represented as a brain-sucking, false religious icon and the music industry as a plastic doll factory, which is pretty standard for this type of affair. But one could hardly accuse the tiki lounge vibes of “Zero Zero Zero!” or subtle menace of "Entertainmen” of trying to lure people into the discotheque.

It was worth another CD blind-buy (it’s the only one of her records not available on Spotify, which might've been a bad omen if I had checked there first). Unlike some other “message” albums, Phillips and Co. don’t lose track of her identity as an artist, preserving her voice even as she dons roles and disguises. "I think most songwriters have this urge to confess and it's just ... off-putting,” she said to Salon.com in 2002. “It’s not done with any kind of art. There's no humor. It's so serious and not interesting.” Her approach to lyrics is often elliptical and evocative, making the satire bite harder, as in “Animals on Wheels”: "Famous is fast / You don't have to be talented or do good work or be smart / It's perfect for me, but every time I go after it / My ideals run off with my heart."

T-Bone, her partner at the time, returns for production duties, and there’s some more surprising collaborators to be found in the liner notes. I’m pleased with myself for picking out the woozy tone of Jon Brion’s trademark Chamberlin playing on “Faster Pussycat To The Library!,” creating a sonic continuum with Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann. My biggest shock was to see the songwriting of the final track, “Slapstick Heart,” credited to Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe/Phillips, an R.E.M. joint venture that I’d never heard about. It’s not a cover, and I can’t find more information about the exact nature of the team-up (the closest I can figure via Wikipedia is the Pat McCarthy connection, who produced several of R.E.M.’s records not long after engineering this one.)

Phillips and Burnett had split by the time they wrapped up recording 2004’s A Boot and a Shoe, so it came to be that 2008’s Don’t Do Anything (#168) was her first solo-produced record. I remember the titular lead single being released on the web around the time I had become fully hooked via Martinis & Bikinis, and was entranced by the combination of her clear, unadorned vocal floating above the burbling bed of transistor radio guitar, hypnotic drums, and rising, percussive strings. It’s an approach also used on the opening and closing tracks “No Explanations” and “Watching Out of This World," where you sense the musicians gathered in a circle, while the instruments themselves are distorted and melded as to be nearly impossible to identify as individual parts. Others are more urgently present, like the fiddle that tears through the bridge of “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us,” or the ear-to-the-floor tom drums that drive “My Career in Chemistry."

Next up: the handful of Pink Floyd CDs on my shelf! Please do not be alarmed at any absences.

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159. “Full Moon Fever,” 160. “Into The Great Wide Open,” 161. “Wildflowers,” 162. “She’s The One (Songs and Music from the Motion Picture),” 163. “Echo,” 164. “Highway Companion,” 165. “Hypnotic Eye” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (159, 161, 164 solo)

2017 ably picked up the baton that 2016 passed on of absolutely, fucking, sucking. And I mean that, if you couldn’t tell, in a somewhat negative light.

In a time of oppressive suckitude, we lost many great American rock artists: dealers in our culture’s chief emotional release valve. It was the worst moment to remind the Gen X’ers, Y’ers, and Millenials of their impending mortality, but 2017 was a year that definitely did not know how to read a room.

I’d like to think that the silver lining to saying goodbye to Chuck Berry, Chris Cornell, Malcolm Young, Gregg Allman, and Tom Petty (and Bowie and Prince and all the other casualties of the previous year) was a renewed interest in the art they created. Grief, for a music fan, is expressed in not so mysterious ways: it may mean tears, but it’s swiftly followed by diving into the songs that first connected them to the now-departed artist. Petty, in particular, has more than 4 decades of vital work to delve into: from albums and tours with The Heartbreakers to side projects and solo work, he hardly missed a step.

They were one of those bands whose music was floating around the house and coming through the car stereo throughout my early life. There’s so many just plain perfect 3-and-half minute rockers to mention, with hooks that stick in your head for decades, and Petty’s “just plain folks” storyteller’s mastery of lyrics. That multi-colored Greatest Hits collection had all the building blocks I needed: the start-stop jangle opening of “American Girl,” the exuberant “hey” that kicks off the chorus of “Here Comes My Girl,” the spooky, stabbing synths of “You Got Lucky,” even the bizarre-o sitar and echo flavor of “Don’t Come Around Here No More.”

There was a substantial backlog of material to explore as my tastes broadened. A handful of tracks on the hits compilation overlap with two records Petty produced with Jeff Lynne (aka, Charlie T. and Otis Wilbury): the solo release Full Moon Fever (#159) and the Heartbreakers record Into The Great Wide Open (#160). Lynne’s slick, exacting production techniques bring splashy drum sounds and The Byrds jangle riffs to the fore on “Free Fallin’,” “I Won’t Back Down,” and “Learning To Fly.” And of course, that ultimate driving down a scenic highway, windows down, volume blasting, sing-along (I know all the words to this one), anthem to Journeys over Destinations, “Runnin’ Down A Dream.” That muscular, Harley-Davidson guitar line, a Mike Campbell special, weaves at top speed through the verses and takes us to the outtro.

Deep cuts nestled on those records include the rousing and hopeful “Kings Highway” from Great Wide Open, which the band pulled out on the 2010 tour that I was lucky enough to cross off my bucket list. I read a quote from Tom Petty saying that “Zombie Zoo,” the novelty-esque closing track on Full Moon Fever, spoils the album’s perfection, but I love it, and so does my 3 year-old cousin who requests it on every car ride (it’s hard to find quality, kid-friendly songs about zombies.)

When the mournful feelings took hold and fans were looking for musical context to grieve and remember, I noticed many on social media turning to his unassailably great solo release, Wildflowers (#161), especially the sweet, elegiac title track. The first song I reached for was “It’s Good To Be King,” a primarily piano-driven number drenched in strings and spiced up by ringing roots guitar. As the verses conclude and the orchestra becomes the dominant voice, it flirts with being overbearing, in appropriately regal fashion. Free from the expectations of a Heartbreakers record, Petty could draw deep and go stark, like on the stormy “Don’t Fade On Me”— just Tom, his guitar, and his voice, which had accrued grit from 2 decades of taking the stage. And, of course, to indulge his somewhat underrated, sardonic sense of humor, which is all over the fun as hell blues rocker “Honey Bee."

I don’t know a single thing about the movie for which Petty composed the soundtrack, She’s The One (#162), but the collection of songs here are some of my most revisited in his catalogue. “Walls (Circus)” is an appropriately kaleidoscopic expression of Petty’s brand of clear-eyed optimism: “Some days are diamonds, some days are rocks.” Others dig into the grit of breakups, like his recording of Beck’s “Asshole,” and the instrumentation is appropriately stripped-down. I don’t know what the general opinion is on this release, but it may be my most played Petty CD.

Echo (#163)… is not, but I enjoyed revisiting it for this project. Like Hypnotic Eye (#165), the final Heartbreakers record, it’s the elder statesmen of roots rock proving they can still swing with the best of them. Released over a decade apart, both have the specter of mortality hovering over them: as discussed in the Peter Bogdanovich documentary Runnin’ Down a Dream, Echo was the last record to feature the bass playing of Howie Epstein, who died of a heroin overdose in 2003. Adding to the sense of endings, lyrics to songs like the sprawling title track and winsome “Lonesome Sundown” were written in the wake of Petty’s divorce. But the confident playfulness of the band’s leader keeps things “Swingin’” (like Sammy Davis).

The ironic accompaniment to an artist facing down an ending is a renewed reflection on how it all began. 2014’s Hypnotic Eye was released in between two volumes of Mudcrutch, self-titled recordings from Petty’s reunited pre-Heartbreakers outfit. As such, it’s undeniably influenced by that down-home Florida garage rock sound, especially the swampy “Red River.” “All You Can Carry” is carried (sorry) by a gritty Mike Campbell special, and “Shadow People” brings the affair to a close, with Petty casting an uneasy look at the heavy psychic weather we’ve all been living under these last few years. "Well I ain't on the left / And I ain't on the right / I ain't even sure / I got a dog in this fight,” his protagonist drawls, articulating in the simplest terms that political exhaustion that makes withdrawing from the whole affair seem particularly appealing.

It’s enough to make you want to just hit the open road with the wind in your hair, like Tom sang about on his first solo record. If you do, I recommend you kick off the trip with the lean, 43-minute Highway Companion (#164), my most treasured and revisited Tom Petty work. From that galloping rhythm guitar lick and slightly eerie vocal that kicks off “Saving Grace,” you’ll be pressing down the accelerator, ready to leave “This Old Town” behind. Or maybe that’s your destination, to see some old friends and settle old debts. “So if I come to your door, let me sleep on your floor / I’ll give you all I have and a little more,” is the familiar refrain of the weary traveler in “Down South.”

I’ve spun this disc in every car I’ve owned, since a friend on the other side of the country mailed me a burned copy with a laser-printed cover, over a decade ago. I finally picked up a new copy this past year, weeks before Petty passed unexpectedly, to see that spine on my shelf with the others he and his collaborators created. But that homemade CD-R hasn’t gone anywhere: it’s a precious artifact of a time in my life when I didn’t have unlimited access to endless music, when I had to search through stacks and beg, borrow, and stop-just-short-of-stealing records to find those moments of grace. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers created more than their fair share.

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Eventually we find our way. 154. “Hesitation Marks” (Halo 28) by Nine Inch Nails, 155. “The Social Network” (Null 01), 156. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (Null 02), 157. “Gone Girl” by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, 158. “Welcome oblivion” (Sigil 04) by How To Destroy Angels

When David Fincher used a scratchy ambient remix of “Closer,” subtitled “(Precursor),” as aural accompaniment to the devil’s scrapbooking montage running under the credits of his film Se7en, the seeds for one of the most simpatico musician and filmmaker mashups in Hollywood history were sewn: a match made in Hell.

The fact that the Fincher/Reznor Cinematic Universe (I’m trademarking this now) really began in earnest with the talky legal drama about screwing your friend out of his corporate shares and NOT with the two flicks about the psychopathic murderers, speaks to the underrated emotional notes those guys craft. They both have other flavors beyond skincrawling, but when it comes to representing the itchy cacophony of a sick mind, these fuckers have the chops.

After “waving goodbye” to touring life and major label support as Nine Inch Nails, Reznor and “Ghosts” collaborator Atticus Ross enjoyed some creative recalibration. Drones, synths, textures, and rhythms were broken free of verse, chorus, verse guidelines— exploration was key. It was musical score- sometimes driving, sometimes insinuating- but it was also sound design: the layers of insectile clicking on “3:14 Every Night” from The Social Network (#155) suggesting the Harvard dorm room full of keyboard cowboys with bloodshot eyes coding through the night. A synth tone on “Please Take Your Hand Away” was matched by the pitch of a floor-waxer outside the rapist Bjurman’s office in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (#156). The cues that Reznor and Ross deliver to the filmmaking team become the pumping lifeblood that carry the emotional through-line of each film, scene by scene.

Like a more traditional orchestral movie score, motifs are established and then variations found. The lonely piano cue of “Hand Covers Bruise” follows the thread of Mark Zuckerberg’s self-imposed isolation by becoming progressively more distant, drenched in lonely reverb. A lilting, magical vibraphone riff swirls around Nick and Amy in a “Sugar Storm” that is reprised in an act of emotional infidelity later in Gone Girl (#157). And of course, no one is better equipped to score a climactic throat-slitting scene than the guy who wrote “Somewhat Damaged”— the machine monster wave of distortion in “Consummation” is arguably more nightmare-inducing than the waves of arterial spray on the screen.

The deviation from Nine Inch Nails continued with How To Destroy Angels, comprised of Reznor, Ross, Rob Sheridan, and Mariqueen Reznor, née Maandig, on lead vocals. The self-titled 2010 EP had some residual fuzzed-out texture of The Slip that kept it from fully breaking free of the “side project” stigma (though the opening and closing tracks hinted at an exciting new direction). But the first full-length, Welcome oblivion (#158), follows its own darkwave data string. The cut-up computer beats and synth strings underneath Mariqueen’s siren’s call voice sound like what’s spinning at the underground discotheque where Year Zero resistance fighters dance out their aggression. In most of the 13 tracks, the voices of both Reznors are blended in ways at once alluring and unsettling, weaving in and out of the instrumental layers. “Ice age” and “How long?” bring Mariqueen to the forefront, the former letting her sweetly explore a phrase over strange, dystopic bluegrass, the latter showing her as an accomplished belter.

When the initial singles were released ahead of the record, I remember making a weird intuitive comparison: “These new tracks are like Fleetwood Mac, in comparison [to the last EP].” I think I was just reaching for a band that represented “big, accessible chorus,” even if it was off base (though the off-kilter, pizzicato acoustic guitar of “Ice age” now kind of reminds me of “Tusk”). So imagine my surprise to read that Lindsey Buckingham was laying down guitar parts on new Nine Inch Nails songs. Especially as no one expected there to BE new Nine Inch Nails songs.

Hesitation Marks (#154) dropped out of the blue, led by “Came Back Haunted,” a squirmy, dark rocker with a chorus in comfortably familiar angst mode, and a seizure-inducing video by another American film god that had history with Reznor: David Lynch. “Copy of a,” followed soon after, a glitchy synthesizer-and-shakers jam periodically infected by Mr. Buckingham’s distorted guitar. I was totally on board so far. But the full album might be the most underwhelming and same-y LP in my collected works of Reznor. The weirdo-disco bass of “All Time Low” and Green Day shredding on the widely-derided “Everything” hit the wrong notes, but at least they’re attention-grabbing, unlike the zoning-out I tend to do during the amorphous middle stretch of “Various Methods of Escape,” “Running,” and “I Would For You.”

A trance-like state at least seems to be the goal with the climax suite of “While I’m Still Here” and “Black Noise.” And I get some delight at hearing Trent’s long-rumored sax skills make an appearance in the grooved-out transition point between the two final tracks. That last was something I got to witness in the flesh at my long-awaited and cruelly withheld live Nine Inch Nails experience (Reznor had earlier announced that the band was “disappear[ing] for a while” at the exact point my fandom took hold). With gorgeously composed, layered video imagery, a killer setlist, and cues smartly taken from Stop Making Sense (a pair of female background singers, and the band’s giant shadows cast on the wall during one song), it was a brain-meltingly great concert. No matter my shrugging reaction to the material on HM, that alone was enough to justify the reemergence.

Since then, we’ve received more dreamlike film and television scores from Reznor & Ross, a vault-opening wealth of instrumentals and unheard deleted material from The Fragile and With Teeth, and 2 of 3 announced EPs that I found far more satisfying than the 2013 album that kicked this all off. The band was even officially inducted into Twin Peaks canon, performing a new, horror dirge piece written for the revival. They were credited as “The Nine Inch Nails.” That sounds about right. There is no other.

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Art is Resistance. 149. “With Teeth” (Halo 19), 150. “Year Zero” (Halo 24), 151. “Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D” (Halo 25), 152. “Ghosts I-IV” (Halo 26), 153. “The Slip” (Halo 27) by Nine Inch Nails

The 6-year gap between Nine Inch Nails studio albums saw the Internet become truly ascendant in popular culture, for better and worse.

Napster took a bite from the music industry and was put down like a mad dog. The Pirate Bay first unfurled its flag. Radio play and music videos were still the main avenue for displaying the wares of major label musicians to the general public, and success was still measured in units of CDs sold, but more and more people were becoming hip to the underground access provided by a DSL modem.

But the power of the Web to empower artists and connect them to their fans still evaded most of the recording industry; honchos and artists alike were largely clueless. Trent Reznor, the big ol’ nerd, was a notable exception. Posting on early message boards on Prodigy, embracing torrents, creating an online gateway for the band’s fans, leaking material from the archives, experimenting with an optional-pay release, even being an early adopter of Twitter— it was a white-hot fiber optic cable running through the life of the band. While this technological engagement didn’t always translate into sales (The Fragile was considered a financial disappointment), it was a 21st century incarnation of the connection between what the artist creates and how the audience consumes it, internalizes it, and hopefully finds some emotional release in it.

This uneasy alliance between organic emotion and technological chilliness is reflected in this era of Nine Inch Nails’ aesthetic, both musically and through the packaging. Where Downward Spiral and Fragile dealt in decaying earth tones, the releases starting with 2005’s reemergent With Teeth (#149) are shades of blue, black, ghost white, and slate gray, dirtied up by belching factory smoke, or distorted by broken pixels and lines of computer code. The songs are likewise colored by pulsating synth accents, digital distortion, hums and drones and beats. The instrumental stems for Reznor’s compositions were offered up to remixers both professional and amateur, so that even the boundary of artist and audience member became liminal. He had his carefully constructed versions of “The Hand That Feeds” and “Only,” but suggested that there were infinite alternate permutations to be created at the click of a button. For the once angry, brooding Prince of Industrial Rock, it was downright egalitarian.

“All The Love In The World,” a title that might suggest a big-hearted power ballad on a cornier band’s track list, is in Reznor’s hands an electronica-inflected paranoid dirge. Where crunchy guitars would have provided the backbone in the past, here woozy piano figures are the main melodic backup to the vocal, before shifting into driving major chords to signal minute 3’s complete tonal transformation. With its layers of harmonizing Trents, it’s completely unlike anything else in the band’s repertoire, but it was the perfect next course to stimulate my appetite. And then Dave Grohl’s superhuman drumming on “You Know What You Are?” kicked me through the door. The wailing chorus presented an aggressive musical release for me that I’d never had access to before.

“Right Where It Belongs,” the keyboard-driven closing track, is spooky and introspective, and one of the best songs in NiN’s catalogue. A stripped-down, electric piano and vocal version, originally exclusive to the Japanese release but eventually uploaded by Reznor to his website, captures that dark night of the soul uncertainty even better. This recording made its way into the end credits of my senior thesis film, at the point where it was obvious it wasn’t going to go anywhere and that I should at least put copyrighted stuff I liked into it. I also set a live version against grainy deleted footage from Pink Floyd - The Wall, a mashup I figure ol’ Trent would appreciate (the idea was to then do the reverse, matching “Hey You” to the visuals cut together for NiN’s stage show, but the result wasn’t as compelling).

I don’t have any supporting evidence, but Year Zero (#150) may well have been the first time I ever plunked down money for a physical copy of a NiN CD. Also lacking sufficient empirical backup: I’m convinced this speculative fiction about an increasingly plausible American dystopia represents some of Reznor’s strongest songwriting. Inhabiting characters like a brainwashed foot soldier, an underground Resistance fighter, a religiously-inflamed demagogue, even a judgmental alien intelligence, he moves away from the diary page introspection that could occasionally curdle into lyrics of questionable taste (Sorry, please don’t slip on all the tears I’ve made you cry).

The release of the album was notably attached to a labyrinthine “Alternate Reality Game” campaign, with in-character websites, USB drives hidden at concerts, and music videos with secret messages, adding plot strands and world building to the lyrics. (I missed the boat on all that, but the work that the same marketing company did for The Dark Knight was sure something to experience.) All of which would be near-impenetrable, if the actual music wasn’t so compelling. You don’t have to read the wiki pages to feel the apocalyptic beats and glitchy cacophony of “HYPERPOWER!,” “The Good Soldier,” and to pump your fist to the chorus of “Survivalism.” “I got my propaganda / I got revisionism” hits harder in a time, 10 years on from the album’s release, in which the most powerful voices in the U.S. government disregard reality on the reg, occasionally try to downplay the Holocaust. “Capital G,” a gleefully sociopathic near-rap by the forces of greed, could soundtrack one of Paul Ryan’s dead-eyed workout photoshoots.

“In This Twilight” and “Zero Sum” are the shattering two-part coda, in which the squabbling remnants of humanity face the end, whether by divine intervention or nuclear fire. The first juxtaposes crunchy, distorted percussion and fuzzed-out bass with perhaps the most perversely light and melodic vocal performance Reznor has ever delivered. He’s singing about encroaching extinction, but in a blissed-out religious reverie, optimistic for the afterlife. The character at the center of the closing track is not so sure: this is the End of this ridiculous human experiment, and we’ve brought oblivion on ourselves. “Shame on us / For all we have done / And all we ever were.” There’s the Nine Inch Nails nihilism we know and love!

Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D (#151) filters the previous album through Hip-Hop and EDM, to uneven effect. The collection of remixes never quite sustains the highs established by the first two tracks: Saul Williams’ fiery rap verses turn the instrumental “HYPERPOWER!” into a polemic against a legacy of American violence, “Gunshots by Computer,” while modwheelmood frees the vocals of “The Great Destroyer” from the squealing synth breakdown and creates a whole new paranoid anthem. While it’s also interesting to hear the Kronos Quartet reinterpret “Another Version of the Truth,” the rest is largely skippable. The physical set includes a DVD with the multitracks for the original Year Zero recordings, so you too can fuck with the raw materials! (I’ve been trying to remix things for years, and I’m awful at it, but it’s fun to hear the individual instrumentation.)

After freeing himself lyrically from his old methodology, the next release from Reznor eschewed words and melody completely. Ghosts I-IV (#152) is nearly 2 hours of ambient experimentation, a precursor to the Oscar-winning film scores with Atticus Ross (a few tracks were literally reworked for The Social Network, and several others continue to be licensed for film and documentaries). The buzzsaw distortions, dark piano chords, oddly organic synthesizers, and industrial beats identify it as a NiN record even in the absence of vocals. Though good luck recommending your favorite tracks, with titles like “26 Ghosts III” and “09 Ghosts I” not exactly sticking in the memory.

The Slip (#153), originally released free of charge, is more of a return-to-form. Arguably too familiar— it’s essentially With Teeth Part 2, but leaner and meaner. It’s not held in especially high regard, but it was there right at the outset of my fandom, and as such I continue to have a soft spot for it. I even bought the physical copy after years of listening to the decent quality MP3’s. “Discipline,” with its uncommonly funky bass line and high hat-favoring drum beat, is my number 1 “trying to sneak it onto a party playlist but not very successfully” NiN song. Along with the following track, “Echoplex,” the dark dance floor vibe is a preview of the sound Reznor and co would explore with How To Destroy Angels. “Lights in the Sky,” “Corona Radiata,” and “The Four of Us are Dying” create a kind of suite, insinuating and ethereal. I can understand if you bow out of that middle, 7-minute-and-33-second, ambient track before the library sample of fighting cats kicks in. But “LITS” is Reznor’s sparsest, prettiest piano lament, announcing the eminent “retirement” of Nine Inch Nails as a touring/recording entity.

Wave goodbye. They’ll be back.

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Nothing can stop me now. 143. “Pretty Hate Machine” (Halo 2), 144. “Broken” (Halo 5), 145. “The Downward Spiral” (Halo 8), 146. “Further Down The Spiral” (Halo 10), 147. “The Fragile” (Halo 14), 148. “And All That Could Have Been” / “Still” (Halo 17) by Nine Inch Nails

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

I was supposed to stay safely sequestered in the arena of pretty, pastoral pop-rock and art-folk music. A child of The Beatles, forging my identity through sleepy, sun-dappled study of R.E.M. and Bob Dylan and all their offspring. Maybe, in my darker, isolated moments, letting my classic rock cocoon be pierced by Roger Waters’ more strident Pink Floyd moments. I hated metal, in all its flavors, and wouldn’t be caught dead in punk or goth gear. Even David Bowie’s more shadowy impulses were out of my purview— “I like ‘Changes’ a whole bunch! Wait, what’s ‘I’m Deranged?’”

For the longest time, my knowledge of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails came chiefly from discussions on VH-1 about censored music videos, and polka parodies from Weird Al. “Closer” was so aggressively sexual that my teenage, shame-based puritanical attitude rejected the song, and by extension the man’s entire creative output, definitively. Then David Lynch, that wholesome pervert, started to creak open the door I had preemptively slammed shut.

After the unholy coronation of Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me upon my young adult psyche, it was time to put on a VHS tape of Lost Highway, literally dug out of a cardboard box shoved into the corner of a closet (thanks, Dad). Then, to buy the CD soundtrack, sequenced by Trent Reznor and featuring the since-disowned NiN single “The Perfect Drug.” This was more my speed. Songs about fucking? Frightening. Songs about doomed love, metaphorically represented by narcotics, or vice versa? Oh yeah, those bolster my smug sense of sophistication. And those pizzicato strings, crunchy beats, and ethereal outro? Just the right amount of aggressive, gothic, and tragically romantic. Still, I was well into my college years before I was ready to go further down that spiral.

Even now, with the collected works of Reznor filling up half a shelf in my room, all those suicidal synths, broken machine beats, and flesh-searing guitars represent a striking deviation from the rest of my musical diet. I have friends who are downright incredulous when I confess that I’m a devoted Nine Inch Nails cultist. And, true, “Tear a hole / Exquisite red / Fuck the rest and stab it dead,” is a bit of a heel turn from “Don’t let yourself go / ‘Cause everybody cries.” But to delve into the layered sound of Trent and Company’s sonic identity is to find more shared creative DNA with “Low”-era Bowie, Joy Division, Queen, and dark electronic pop than Ozzy or Norwegian death metal or Lost Highway album-mates Rammstein.

Especially in Pretty Hate Machine (#143), the band’s debut, which is as much about tin-drum machines, synthesizer chords, and esoteric sampling as it is blood-speckled diary lyrics and exultant references to sadomasochism. It’s all too weird to be Top 40, but the big choruses and pop-punk attitude on tracks like “Head Like A Hole” and “Kinda I Want To” give the record a downright accessible sheen, at least compared to the scorched-Earth abrasiveness of the band’s follow-up E.P., Broken (#144). When “Fist Fuck!” is given the same emphasis in the mix as, say, “Leonard Bernstein!,” you know the approach is less about scoring guest spots on primetime TV and more about melting your face. Reznor’s heavily processed riffs and the assault rifle drumming contributed by Martin Atkins and Chris Vrenna bear this approach out. The fact that the sequel to Woodstock was rocked by a live version of “Happiness in Slavery” is some kind of generational metaphor that I’m not quite savvy— or maybe cynical— enough to articulate.

The Downward Spiral (#145) is the unlikeliest of “breakthrough” albums; a viral infection helped spread, even in diluted form, by Mark Romanek’s oft-censored Dust Bowl snuff film video for “Closer.” Even when Reznor’s lyrics are knowingly and unsubtly transgressive (either a credit or a debit, depending on your point of view, that will always be an intrinsic part of the band’s identity), the incredible sonic layering continues to reveal new depths on each listen. Exacting production techniques (Reznor was an early adopter of the kind of PC-based recording and mixing software that has now become the only game in town), make this one of the ultimate Headphone Records (or Surround Sound, if you have the Dual-Disc 5.1 mix like I do). Though, unlike another blacklight-poster smoke sesh with Dark Side of the Moon, you will probably emerge from the homicide-by-laser cacophony of “I Do Not Want This” and the final dying buzz of “Hurt” finding you’ve never been less mellow. Further Down The Spiral (#146) can be crowned with the title of “All-Time Actually Essential Remix Album,” breaking apart the previous LP into a thousand shards that cut just as deeply.

Coming into my fandom during the temporary NiN “retirement” of 2009-2013, I wasn’t collecting the releases in linear “Halo” order (in fact, nearly in reverse). So to pop in The Fragile (#147) after the more alternative leaning sounds of The Slip and With Teeth, expecting energizing after-dinner dishwashing music, but instead hearing a gooseflesh-raising acoustic guitar riff transmogrify into buzzsaw distortion, chugging electric guitar, and a flagellating lead vocal from an angry Cenobite was… somewhat damaging. After I calmed down from that initial thrashing, I came to embrace the New Flesh through an hour-forty-minutes-plus, double-barreled personal apocalypse. There’s a sizable number of fans who consider Fragile Reznor’s magnum opus, ranking it even above Spiral. For sure, the songwriting on tracks like “The Day The World Went Away” (which ran on a queasy loop through my head all Inauguration Day 2017), “The Wretched,” and the exultant “We’re In This Together” represent some of his best shout-along choruses and memorable riffs. And the complex, nightmarish instrumentals “Just Like You Imagined” and “The Way Out is Through” are even stronger: they create whole movies in one’s head, and I’m struggling not to use that most abused and now meaningless term “epic,” but well, there we are.

And All That Could Have Been (#148), the first official live CD (and only one, barring some charitably leaked soundboard recordings of later tours) offers suitably amped-up, full band performances of material from the first four studio releases. More intriguing is the 2nd disc included in my edition, labeled “Still,” which offers stripped-down arrangements and otherwise unavailable songs. The intimate acoustic guitar and keyboard recordings of “Something I Can Never Have” and “The Becoming” actually do more for me than their iconic original configurations (“SICNH” still has some rather dopey lyrics, but removed from the dated PHM production and with some miles accumulated on Reznor’s voice in the preceding decade, it lands harder). The pretty, melancholy mood is continued by introspective, hypnotic instrumentals (my favorites: the raincloud grey “Adrift & At Peace” and elegiac “Leaving Hope”), which prefigure Trent Reznor’s excursions into film scoring.

  To think, I’m a little less than halfway through my NiN collection. Pretty impressive for a band I was never supposed to like, an aesthetic that was supposed to be too scary, too hardcore for a cardigan-wearing tea-sipper like myself. Come back next time for the comeback— the anticipated era that gained new fans like myself, while alienating some that were weaned on the stronger cocktails of Reznor’s pre-sobriety period.

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How strange it is to be anything at all. 142. “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel

Jeff Mangum and Co’s psychedelic, noisy, quasi-religious ode to Anne Frank and the ineffability of existence has become iconic to the point of parody.

It’s the Ür DIY-Experimental-Rock record, a template for every bohemian subway busker with a fuzz pedal who prefers early Wayne Coyne to Jerry Garcia. It so eclipses the group’s previous record in impact that it feels like Mangum’s Catcher in the Rye, a staggering freshman work before instant retirement (if Salinger had popped up 20 years later for an out-of-the-blue book tour), even if that’s not strictly true.

It also holds up like gangbusters. The album was released in the early part of 1998, but if you clicked that bizarre 19th century, vaguely Eastern European postcard cover art in the New Releases tab on Spotify today, you would think, “This is so great, I’ve instantly decided to stop listening to Twenty-One Pilots and move to Portland!” Even OK Computer sounds like a distinctly late-90’s achievement compared to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea's (#142) ageless aesthetic of campfire singalong meets surrealist circus show. String-busting acoustic strumming, buzzing feedback loops, and warm brass arrangements make the seams between all 11 tracks invisible; a cohesive sonic document.

The record continues to feel vital because, for all the off-kilter production touches and impressionistic lyrics, the songs are solid and the melodies stick in the brain. “Two-Headed Boy” and “Holland, 1945” can be broken out of the whole and stripped down— dependable chassis for endless covers, passing the essence to the next generation like folk standards (with slightly more references to semen). There’s room to dream, as David Lynch likes to say, within the all-too-brief span of 39 minutes, a chance for the songs to mean something different as you accrue life experience. Maybe at 20, driving around your hometown with the CD, you saw yourself as a romanticized “King of Carrot Flowers.” Then at the edge of 40, putting the needle in the groove of a new vinyl pressing, the details of domestic trauma came into greater relief, adding tragic dimension. The common denominator is you’ll be singing at the top of your lungs, struggling to make it to Mangum’s line breaks on a single breath.