A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Arthur Buck’s self-titled debut album. Full honesty and disclosure: I’ve been a really big fan of R.E.M. for a really long time and approached Arthur Buck’s self-titled debut album with no small amount of trepidation. I didn’t want to risk sullying my memory of Peter Buck – but it turns out I needn’t have worried. In fact, by crossing Buck’s instantly recognizable guitar tone (which, let’s be honest, helped inspire almost an...
R.E.M. Monster (Warner Bros., 1994) To this day (now) twenty-two years after it was originally released, R.E.M.’s ninth album, Monster, still feels like it should have been a risky record for the band to make. By then, the band had long since broken through the glass ceiling between the underground and the mainstream; they had become patron saints of the thinking man’s end of college rock (which later got annexed by alt- and is currently a province of the indie...