Metal Sludge Gossip Board

Fellow rockers, I just got tickets to see Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy's R.E.M. tribute band and I am pumped. I never got to see the real thing but I'm a huge fan of Shannon as an actor and person so this should be a blast.

Absent fellow rocker S. Buttnoid disliked R.E.M. considerably so in his honor I will make the first "bi anal" joke.

I'm a fan, mostly of the 1987-1997 era. Automatic for the People remains a top 10 album for me.

Interestingly, other than that one, I don't dive too often back into their catalogue? Wonder why.

With the minor exception of disproving my idiot friends contention that REM sang "don't go back to Knoxville" when I told him I was driving down to the smoky mountains via Knoxville.

veritas wrote: ↑Fri Sep 19, 2025 1:21 pmWith the minor exception of disproving my idiot friends contention that REM sang "don't go back to Knoxville" when I told him I was driving down to the smoky mountains via Knoxville.

DON'T GO BACK TO KNOXVILLE
and waste another beer

Chip Z'Hoy wrote: ↑Fri Sep 19, 2025 1:31 pm

veritas wrote: ↑Fri Sep 19, 2025 1:21 pmWith the minor exception of disproving my idiot friends contention that REM sang "don't go back to Knoxville" when I told him I was driving down to the smoky mountains via Knoxville.

DON'T GO BACK TO KNOXVILLE
and waste another beer

Sheesh, the company I keep is .... unsophisticated...

I'm not the world's biggest fan of theirs, but I do enjoy a lot of their classic stuff from '82/'83 up until '97. "Radio Free Europe", "Orange Crush", "Losing My Religion", "Shiny Happy People", and "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight" are probably in my top five.

Not a "fan", but they have had some great songs over the years, but also some total shit (Stand), and I find "It's the End of the World", "nails on chalkboard" annoying.

I'll always love their brand of "jangle rock" before Automatic For the People and a few tunes from each album afterward.

No, and why would there be?

Everything up to and including Automatic - great.
Everything afterwards - navel-gazing muso jerk-off so they could piss off the "pop fans" who only knew them for Shiny Happy People, and that song and album gave them (at the time) the near-FU-money to do so.

Their cover of Richard + Linda Thompson's Wall Of Death on the b-side of E-Bow The Letter is one of their best songs though. And the Bad Day single, which usd one of their archived 80s riffs, is excellent too.

The songs from them that I like, I like a lot.

The ones that I don’t, I despise, but their numbers are less.

I sure as shit don't like R.E.M. enough to watch an actor perform their songs.

Great band. Finally got to see them on the Monster tour and they were excellent.