"Dig a hole, dig it deeper, deeper"

Among the dozens of unwritten rules of composing pop songs are

1. You don't have different songs with similar names;

2. The name of the song = the chorus (the bit you hum when you're waiting for the 'bus), not the 'bridge'; and

3. Between 'verse' and 'chorus' you have something called a 'bridge', which builds the tension a bit between the two.

For sure, rules are there to be broken, but REM manage to break all three to ill effect with "Mine Smell Like Honey" from their new long player. For a start, you'll be disappointed that it's nowhere near as good as Me in honey. The intro and verse are cool enough, you assume they are building up to the usual REM 'uplifting chorus' bit, but then the song sort of stops and there's a really clunky bit where they sing "Mine smell like honey" which is completely out of context and drags the whole thing back to the ground.

Because that's the name of the song, you initially assume that it's the chorus - which ruins the whole song - and that the bit after that (where they sing "Dig a hole, dig it deeper, deeper") is some throwaway filler bit. It's not - that is the actual chorus!

Once you grasp that the official song name ("Mine smell like honey") is the result of an administrative cock-up at the pressing plant and work on the assumption that the chorus is actually the bit where they sing "Dig a hole, dig it deeper, deeper..." and hence that the song is really called something like "Dig a hole", it's actually a brilliant song: