A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Beggar Weeds’ Tragedy in U.S. History LP. It’s funny how, sometimes, there’s a collision between music and time which ends up leaving people to feel like they showed up late to the party, or walked in by accident without knowing there was anything happening at all. It’s not one of those occasions that anyone enjoys, but the reward which comes with the music still leaves those who came upon it glad that...
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...