38. R.E.M., Lifes Rich Pageant (1986)

When it was time to record their third album, R.E.M. were worried about meeting expectations. That doesn’t mean there was record company pressure to generate chart-topping hits or a sense that they might not be about to live up to fan and critic expectations about how good the record would be. Instead, the college radio titans from Athens, Georgia were determined to skew away from the sound everyone was anticipating. Although the band had never come close to the upper reaches of the Billboard chart and even MTV hadn’t really warmed to them yet, R.E.M. were still solidly established in certain circles. Their first three LPs certainly adhered to a distinctive aesthetic — jangly guitar, subtle and sharp rhythms, emotional singing of cryptic lyrics — and most who dropped the needle on a new R.E.M. platter could make a strong educated guess as to what they were getting.

R.E.M. first buffeted their model with the choice of personnel behind the mixing board. They looked to Don Gehman, regular producer for John Mellencamp who’d helped the Indiana rocker become a rock radio mainstay, most recently presiding over the hit album Scarecrow. The matchmaking didn’t immediately take. The members of R.E.M. will still skeptical of anyone who seemed too chummy with bigger record companies, and Gehman’s excursion to watch the band in concert left him feeling underwhelmed. They keep talking, though, and eventually grew intrigued enough about the prospect of working together to give it a go. In the spring of 1986, R.E.M. traveled to the Indiana studio Gehman and Mellencamp built and started laying down the tracks that became Lifes Rich Pageant.

“We certain weren’t looking for any ‘hit record’ kind of feeling,” guitarist Peter Buck told a reporter not long after the album’s release. “We just wanted the record to be fun for us. The last couple of years, we’ve been working real hard and under pressure, having very little time to do things. This time, we decided we’ll take our time and not worry too much about it. We did want to make more of a rock ‘n’ roll record. We made it a little bit tougher, a little bit more direct.”

Some of the directness Buck mentions was in the music itself. Bill Berry’s drums punch a little harder than before, and the guitar parts have an ornery leanness to them. There was also a newfound clarity to the lyrics. Partially that came from the lead singer Michael Stipe’s extended evolution from determined murmurer to proud belter at the center microphone, but there was also an eagerness to get political points across. Somewhere in the midst of touring, Stipe and company decided they wanted to be more clear with their growing audience. Lifes Rich Pageant includes a mournful elegy to Indigenous people in Guatemala who were still enduring genocidal attacks by the government on “The Flowers of Guatemala” and songs that put forth calls for better environmental stewardship, such as “Cuyahoga” (“This is where we walked/ This is where we swam/ Take a picture here/ Take a souvenir”) and the lovely, evocative ballad “Fall on Me” (“Buy the sky and sell the sky/ And bleed the sky and tell the sky”). Even as there was plenty of room for interpretation, the words hit with the weight of unmistakable intention.

Stipe partially attributed the shedding of a layer of obscurity in the lyrics to the direct influence of Gehman, saying the producer was the first collaborator to confront him about the words (Stipe specifically said Gehman would ask, “What the fuck is this about?”). It was more of a slight shuffle towards openness, though. Stipe still chafed when music journalists asked him to define his message.

“I know I’m going to be asked a lot of questions about our new album,” Stipe told Spin. “I’ve put a lot into those songs, and I think I’ve spoken my piece. Now I’m leaving it up to everybody else to take what I’ve given and expand on it.”

In the same interview, Stipe opined that Lifes Rich Pageant was the band’s best album to that point. Then and now, most wouldn’t elevate over most of its predecessor in the R.E.M. discography. Still, the frontman’s enthusiasm for the album is justifiable. There’s a striking set of songs here that really do demonstrate an impressive expansion of the group’s range. “Begin the Begin” has an agreeable touch of twang to go with its garage grind, and “These Days” and “Just a Touch” are tight rockers. When the earlier R.E.M. records are called to mind by a cut — as with “Swan Swan H” — they come across a welcome contrast to the surrounding material rather than the band running in place. The album closes with an endearingly scruffy cover of “Superman,” a then little-known pop nugget originally recorded by Texas band the Clique in the nineteen-sixties. The tune was in the band’s repertoire because it was on the set lists of the oddball R.E.M. side project Corn Cob Webs, a cover band that played a few raucous shows in their hometown. Adding to the sense of playfulness in positioning the song as the closing cut is the fact that it provides bassist Mike Mills with a rare turn on lead vocals duties.

Like the three albums before it, Lifes Rich Pageant was generally lauded by critics and celebrated with equal fervor by fans. Even those mildly disgruntled followers disappointed by band’s preceding album, Fables of the Reconstruction, were favorably inclined towards the the new material’s bracing force. If R.E.M. were paying attention to these reactions, they didn’t let on that was the case.

“We don’t worry about anyone else’s perception of the band,” Buck insisted at the time. “It’s nice to get that, and it ups the ante a little bit. But we hav a different view of the band, one that’s higher and more rigid than most of the critics. We work twice as hard as we really need to, just to keep ourselves happy.”

37. X, More Fun in the New World (1983)

“I think it just reflects what we’ve been going through,” insisted John Doe, bassist and vocalist for the band X, upon the release of the album More Fun in the New World. “I never just sat down and did anything in my life.”

Doe felt the next to explain the dearth of calculation in the X trajectory because More Fun in the New World represented another robust booster rocket blast away from the Los Angeles punk scene where the band has its beginnings. To varying degrees, those rattle-the-girders-of-the-club origins were at play through the band’s first three albums, including their major label debut, Under the Big Black Sun. As a follow-up to that outing, More Fun in the New World doesn’t stray so dramatically that it sounds like it was made by a different band altogether. X still come across as an act that can test the limitations of their amps. The sensibility that could once be described as maturing has reached its proper ripeness. Any complaint that they’d gone soft were met with a rejoinder that cast aspersions on any attempt to categorize alongside their proud punk contemporaries.

“We started during the punk scene, but it could have been any scene,” X guitarist Billy Zoom said. “We just wanted to play.”

More Fun in the Real World is definitely the product of a band that still wants to play. Produced by Ray Manzarek, like every X album to that point, More Fun in the Real World romps through its songs with a vigor that suggests someone overjoyed to learn they’ve unexpectedly mastered a new shade of rock music, whether it’s the Bo Diddley drive or “Poor Girl” or the Talking Heads-esque sideways funk of “True Love Pt. #2.” The latter’s companion piece, “True Love,” is like X’s version of bubblegum pop, with some gnarly guitar flourishes to remind listeners that they’re not exactly the Archies. When they truly rip it up, as on the cut “Devil Doll,” it’s less an example of seasoned punk and more reinforcement of how ragged and rough pure rock ‘n’ roll can be.

Arguably, the most punk they get is when they bash Ronald Reagan on the “The New World” (“It was better before, before they voted for What’s-His-Name”), but musically the track comes across closer to Mott the Hoople than Black Flag. And when Black Flag and a bunch of similarly bulldozering bands get name-checked in “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” (“‘I hear the radio is finally gonna play new music!/You know, the British invasion’/ But what about the Minutemen/ Flesh Eaters, D.O.A/ Big Boys and the Black Flag?”), X sounds like the spiritual link between the Kinks and Yo La Tengo. There’s a little of the old muscle to “I See Red,” which zings like a race car at top speed, capping off the contained mayhem with sound effect chaos at end.

Maybe the one place X can be justifiably accused of bowing to the demands of commerce in opposition to their natural instincts is in the inclusion of “Breathless,” a rave-up cover of the Otis Blackwell composition that Jerry Lee Lewis made into a hit in the dawning hours of rock ‘n’ roll. As they conceded at the time, they weren’t driven to take a pass at the song because of abiding affection for it. Instead, they were hired hands, covering the classic number for the soundtrack to a Hollywood remake of a Jean-Luc Godard classic of French New Wave cinema. It seemed a sound enough compromise at the time, but the movie tanked at the box office. The profile of X wasn’t raised one iota, which was a fate they were more or less resigned to at this stage of their career.

“We’ve been on the verge of big success for like four years,” observed Exene Cervenka, X’s invaluable vocalist. “It hasn’t happened.”

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.