Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, Spectrum Culture followed a shorter publishing week. While I’ve got a couple fairly significant things looming for the week ahead, my only contribution to the site last week was a couple essays for our PLAYLIST feature on R.E.M. The premise is fairly simple: the various music writers go through all of a band’s albums and select the best single track from each release, duking it out electronically until we come to a reasonable consensus.

Logically, the songs I was assigned to write about were among those those for which my first pick represented the song we eventually settled on. Here are the initial choices I made for all of the albums:

Chronic Town — “Gardening at Night”
Murmur — “Perfect Circle”
Reckoning — “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville”
Fables of the Reconstruction — “Life and How To Live It”
Lifes Rich Pageant — “Cuyahoga”
Document — “King of Birds”
Green — “World Leader Pretend”
Out of Time — “Losing My Religion”
Automatic For the People — “Man on the Moon”
Monster — “Crush with Eyeliner”
New Adventures in Hi Fi — “So Fast, So Numb”
Up — “At My Most Beautiful”
Reveal — “I’ll Take the Rain”
Around the Sun — “Leaving New York”
Accelerate — “Supernatural Superserious”
Collapse Into Now — “Oh My Heart”

Also, for the record, my low opinion of Reveal and Around the Sun didn’t change with fresh listens tinged with nostalgia inspired by the break-up of one of my favorite bands. Accelerate really is a good record, though.