Pop Songs 08

My “premature evaluation” of the new album Accelerate is up on Stereogum. Please go check it out, but I suppose I should give you fair warning: There are some spoilers, so if you want to go into the record without knowing its twists and turns, you may want to skip the second half.

It’s a terrific album, and I’m really glad that the guys at Stereogum were kind enough to not only hook me up with the record, but to provide me with such a great forum for my early impressions. That said, it’s very unlikely that I’ll be writing about the new songs here in the foreseeable future — I feel that one of the strengths of this project comes from the fact that I’ve lived with all of these songs for a long time, and though I’m very enthusiastic about the new material right now, I don’t think it’s fair to rush into writing about them here. Give it a year, maybe. In the meantime, I’ll be entering the home stretch with the original plan in mind.

It might only be up on the WFMU site for one week, so please do check out the archive of my appearance on Trent Wolbe’s Safe and Sound show while you can. We talk a bit about this site, and play about three hours worth of R.E.M. songs. We managed to play at least one song from every album, but that wouldn’t have been possible if I didn’t bring in a couple burned cds and the new live record because the last four studio albums have been purged from the WFMU library.

Not to be all Jarvis Cocker about this, but I suggest that you refrain from looking at the playlist whilst listening to the show!

Edit: If you want to hear it as an mp3 instead of a real audio thing, please click here.

Drive XV, Stereogum’s tribute to Automatic For The People, launched today, and you really ought to check it out. In addition to free mp3s of covers of every track on the record by a range of indie rock acts, the mini-site includes an essay about the album written by myself, along with comments from Mike Mills on each of the songs. I conducted the interview with Mike last week, and a longer Q&A about the new live dvd/cd set and the forthcoming album will appear on Stereogum in a couple weeks.

A big thank you is due to the guys at Stereogum for making this happen, and to David Bell, Bertis Downs, and Mike Mills for being so great about getting that interview together.

Also, if for some reason you can only hear one of those covers, you should make sure that it’s Dr. Dog’s version of “Find The River,” because it’s lovely.