Great album to kick off the album club!
I have not listened to this album in a very long time, I listened to it several times this week and enjoyed it every time.
I was never a deep R.E.M. fan. I came to them with Out of Time, and album that I love to this day, and because that was my first R.E.M. album all others are kind of secondary to it. (I also love the subversive nature of oot)
So, for aftp, Drive is my favorite track. Such mood and atmosphere to this song. It always draws me in and makes me feel melancholy in a good way. It’s like the capstone to the entire mood and atmosphere of the album.
This album as a whole just sucks me back to the 90s, hanging out with my first girlfriend and her friend listening to cds and just being dumb teenagers.
Honestly, I’m having kind of a hard time with Consider Phlebas. It has elements I really enjoy, but these elements keep getting bogged down in (imo) clumsy writing and kind of awful dialog.
There have been really stellar scenes. Like the opening scene that introduces Horza, and a later scene with Horza on an island. But largely I’m just finding it okay.
I’m powering through because I’ve heard really good things about the Culture series, and I hope the subsequent books get better for me, but it may just be that Iain M. Banks is not for me.
As for The Space Between Worlds, I’m really enjoying it. It’s a portal fantasy, which I generally enjoy anyway, but this one has a sense of melancholy desperation that is working really well for me. It’s also dystopian, which is pretty topical considering, y’know, everything.
The premise is also pretty cool, in that you can’t travel to another dimension/earth where your alternate self is still alive, and you can’t travel to dimensions/earths that are too divergent from the “prime” earth that the story takes place in.