R.E.M. begin in a mythological state, in a state of deliberate distance. Stipe’s vocalizations would change immensely over time but initially, his tongue-tied shudder spat half-phrases like hieroglyphics, non sequitur constructed like AI replicating some inference of human sentiment. A linger towards pretension if reserved to the point of uncompromised solipsism, yet whatever Stipe may have truly said, whatever he may have truly meant, there is a universality borne of sincere feeling that render his piecemeal verbiage into mantra. Met with the propulsive Bill Berry and the earthy Byrdisan-from-the-get-go picking of Peter Buck, even the thick-tongued and half-uttered verses feel like some sense of purpose is dripping from them, though the purpose I would posit is up to the individual. Murmur era R.E.M. aren’t universal via agreeable sentiment, but by potent and boundless emotionality. The connective tissue bonding each personal conclusion on the sensations therein lies not in how we interpret, but that we all seem so riveted to do so. No real mysteries lie in this murky canopy, yet few things urge me to analyze closer, again and again. Of course as a writer, to be able to swell with sensation and be unable to script said sensation feels like cheating, but Murmur is more like filmic language in its way.
I feel it overwhelmingly, “Radio Free Europe” erupts with urgency, with anthemic absolution, with some mythic and earthly love, with an unstoppable drive towards something! It stops mattering the specificities, what matters is the truth embedded within the way it releases. The band is in perfect lock step, Buck subtly builds his jangling riffs from little punctuations to huge exclamation marks shouting out (in transit?) in the bridge before settling into a lite-punk drive in the hook. Berry does the same, never letting up the locomotion but offering hi-hat and snare variations at the right points to tremble at the terra firma a bit, as Mills thumps away to give it proper fuel but leaves his easter eggs in the bridge’s lovely bass melodies. Buck and Mills play with such balanced synchronicity and independence in the halcyon days of R.E.M. that they seem to turn every song into multiple songs, you can focus on the bass and ride a different train track entirely, but the propulsion will remain. Deceptively direct, yet no wonder my intrigue towards the mystery refuses to dissipate. Most things that declare themselves mysterious aren’t actually interesting when you find the answer, but R.E.M. aren’t hiding themselves inside of Murmur, they are erupting with themselves and hiding within that something deeper. I can’t, ten plus years on, describe that something. I hope I never can.
Reckoning is a half step out of the rural dusk, though the rooted connection to Earth remains firm. Stipe described the album’s cover imagery as defining earthly elements such as the rocks, sky and sun, and the vinyl of the record contained the alternative title File Under Water. That last tidbit may best express the album’s distinctions, compared to the more folksy and overcast sound of Murmur, here R.E.M. display a relative leap in clarity, in vibrancy, with brighter cerulean guitar tones swirling across the soundscape with a fullness Murmur evaded in its mythic reserve. Not that they’ve stopped hiding things, if the knack for building a full enough song to hide other song’s worth of melodicism and mantra within was a strength of Murmur, on “Harborcoat'' the band seems to push this to its limit as it basically serpentines two entirely distinct vocal performances, two different series of verses and two different choruses. At times they work together for conventional harmony, the “woah oh oh''s that humbly cheer on the pleas of the chorus, yet at many they border between harmony and cacophony, and they’re certainly not mixed like backing vocals. Mills is set in more of a mutter but his ruminations wash over Stipe’s on many occasions. This is not a negative, “Harborcoat'' melts its two vocals together in an intricate zig zag that plays toward the band’s unique blend of the instantaneous and the mysterious, and occasionally lines its metronomes up for the right payoffs. They echo each other sentimentally with different sets of words.
Underneath, Buck locks down perhaps his strongest main riff ever in the verses, with a driven confidence and crackle that punches a hole in the sky, he would ultimately write few figures so intricately considered, shimmering and dancing on pace, hitting a powerful, defiant chord progression to underline Stipe’s desperation to find whatever a harborcoat is! Indeed, Stipe remains cryptic as before, though he’s stopped tucking his syllables in his cheek and adds in his articulations to the sense of clarity. If Murmur claims its beauty in something inexplicable, I think Reckoning finds it in a vague but affirmative sense of where the arrow is pointing. I don’t know what a harborcoat is if anything, but I know Stipe is directly asking for something, directly hoping and worrying. The song gives just enough of their hand to reveal their affability, the Americana that was always there but perhaps hard to read in the murk, a certain commitment to the anthemic, to the urgency beyond calling out in transit. Still, plenty still remains of their curiosity, of splinters in your eyes that read “react”, of handshakes that are worthy if they’re all you’ve got. They’re playing both sides at once here, “Harborcoat” specifically can be encrypted spiritual poetry or crystalline jangle pop perfection depending on yr vantage point, both if you like! It seems to demand less though it still has its own cinematic language, key to this album is the directness afforded by their clarity does not yet soil their penchant for evocative spaces. Not yet at least.
If anything links R.E.M.’s first two albums, it’s a sense of seclusion. Murmur was hushed and secluded, Reckoning was loud and secluded. Words over a couple years became more declarative but no more definitely spoken directly to you or I, the resonating universality rippled not because Stipe sought other’s pulses but because he knew how to translate his own. The liminal woodlands and river sides, the main characters are R.E.M. and their environment. With Fables of the Reconstruction, the band would take their next large step away from their mysticism, though for one occasion to illustrate another. Through faces and their accompanied environments, passenger train engineers and migrant workers, strange men and their strange jobs, the artist and photographers, the Southern culture as it lives and breathes, lived and breathed, R.E.M. step out of the woods into the full countryside and assemble of it a loving and curious travelogue.If their Americana was but an inference of their spiritual energy and musical influences prior, with Fables it seemed they became the ones interested with mysteries rather than subconsciously creating them.
It radiates with a marigold hue of plentiful wheat fields and rolling hills, yet in its Southern Gothicism maintains a characteristic surreality and shade of darkness. R.E.M. may have well started this album as challengingly as possible, the frayed burnt orange skies and weary wailing tone of “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” object as strongly to the expectation of jangle as possible, shuffling its bones like a body with a boulder on its back, Stipe’s parched moan giving way to the apocalyptic shamble of its chorus. It feels densely painted in the melancholy of its space, as the guitars seem to begin melting in the sweltering heat. R.E.M. aren’t the ones hiding anything, they’re showing directly something that itself hides much of itself elsewhere, in the tapestry of the past, in the non-fictions and fictions elsewhere derived and the blurred lines between. “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” is not as clear in the regard of narrative but in conceptualization it resonates, their knack for an aural language proven to work in larger scenery as the evasion of usual tricks serves the work, painters who trust the colors to end up in the right place rather than designate a strict path. They’re still working with feeling, but an impression of a deeper feeling, outside of themselves, and in it there is something overwhelming and powerful, a history of glory, with a touch of the sinister.
I really have to emphasize how rare it is for a rock band to have such talent for the elemental, for the environmental, to paint such thorough landscapes while never losing the core attributes that make for a great rock band that doesn’t live and die by their aestheticizing. But the self-made and perhaps always accidental mythology of one exceedingly talented rock band from Athens was progressively wearing away, they’d already stopped wearing the mystery personally, and by 1986 maybe the mystery was getting boring anyway. Or maybe other things grew more important. We leap from the rural abstract to modern day, and to modern causes. R.E.M. had mastered the anthemic of the heart, but while one can sing with some subconscious desire to the opaque beauty of their first three, consciousness suddenly becomes a must, the arrow isn’t just suggested, its rattling violently in the compass. Stipe writes his first true call to action with “Begin the Begin”, and like all Gen X calls to actions, it’s all unrest and no answers, but we won’t hold that against him. He isn’t just louder and more confident, he’s specific. Name drops in the past are evocative gestures, but here to evoke MLK is for absolute purpose, for what we seem to have forgotten, and when he names Myles Standish for the any-means-necessary brutality of the gears as they turn, words aren’t suggestions at all, they’re direct urges. Stipe cracks capitalism as having a talent for engineering the comfort that leaves insurrection with a rain check, the sheer power of security and thus the vagueness is perhaps forgivable when just telling people to think about thinking may have been a task at the time, and for Stipe it’s an emboldening statement, in that it’s a statement at all.
He’s no longer painting in impressionistic strokes, these are stark sketches, every detail isn’t etched but nothing is unclear. From this, the setting is decidedly modern though it may vary, the studio, the stage, the podium if you prefer. So what does this leave the band to do? In tandem with the urgency, R.E.M. trade some of their more ethereal tendencies for a relative hard rock attack, still imbued with groove but navigating with a more steely gaze, and prove that indeed, they had those core attributes all along. Berry especially was born for supplying this kind of muscle and gives “Begin the Begin” the insistent march towards hope it needs, weighty but never oppressive. Shedding the old self is always risky, especially when one may worry if there’s indeed nothing under the mystery, but while Lifes Rich Pageant certainly isn’t as exciting as the past, the poetry is there but its literalism leaves little room for interpretation, and its aesthetic alongside it with no time to interpret images over scrawling them clearly if jaggedly, R.E.M. prove to not need the mystery to survive, and in fact, as the times would show, the rise of college rock met with the band’s first wisp of commercial impact would set them on the course that would make it seem utterly impossible that they ever withheld much of anything.
On Lifes Rich Pageant, R.E.M. made its first direct call, but who could know if the transmission would be received? Yet by “Finest Worksong”, even if just by the convenience of hindsight, it feels like their signal is bouncing from station to station, across every tower in the nation. College rock was booming after all, and no band quite so perfectly locked the balance of artistry and accessibility like R.E.M., the door was wide open if they so desired to keep the pace of their previous record. Enter Scott Litt. Upon the final hours of their indie days, R.E.M. begin charting the course for their major label days with their longest-running producer, and in doing explore many previously unconsidered possibilities for their future. Their curiosities seem more open than ever, whereas they briefly painted more evocatively than any standard four piece with rare flourish beyond the core, here they display explicit playfulness with music for music’s sake, spirited saxophone solos, chiming 60s acoustics and marching drums, fierce feedback manipulation, experimenting on their own terms.
Together with a few ironclad singles, R.E.M. signal a clear desire for the world stage without betraying their integrity nor their creativity. The first impression doesn’t lie though. “Finest Worksong” plays against the usual R.E.M. opener lockstep, the riotous tight drive of their jangle days as well as the crunch of “Begin the Begin”, but urgency and bombast have only been accentuated. Buck is beginning to borrow from himself and will continue to run his guitar well dry from here but at least here he lays down a firm and sharply jolting line that whirrs tentatively like it’s floating along the air waves. Berry follows suit with one of his most thunderous beats, cavernous kicks that perpetually defibrillate the heart and some excellent ride accents. It feels a similar mission statement as the last, some sense of necessity to act against inaction, and Stipe has stopped half stepping towards going from enigmatic murmur to true blue frontman, absolutely howling here like never before, reaching beyond range for purpose. As R.E.M. say a clear goodbye to one era, they seem to permit themselves to imagine the stadium. There’s no real “what if” here, this call seems to know its being heard, and the band and Litt give it the weight and tunefulness to make it stick. No turning back now.
R.E.M. became U2, in a way at least. Both their moments of excessive pleading schmaltz and unkillable dorkiness are images the I.R.S. band would likely recoil at with a bit of horror. Stipe would go from understating literally everything from words to phrasing to understating absolutely nothing, and the band’s once perfect core sound, in appreciation of but never need of assistance, had quickly become a foundation nearly always begging for a twist, too familiar otherwise. The formula got more predictable at the same time that it got wayyyy fucking louder about itself. Luckily, R.E.M.’s major label days, the middle stretch and its many identity crises, were usually redeemed by the band’s sincerity, that fountain of otherwise meaningful creativity and curiosity. Like Document, the curiosity is self-centric, of the possibility of their position. The mandolin has its first trial runs for the group, the three numbers here are as equally good as they are all too similarly airy and hung on motifs, beautiful but blatantly unincorporated into their overall talents yet (“Hairshirt” is the best with its accentuating triangle and balance giving bass). They dabble in weighty britpopish rock on “Turn You Inside Out” and lean more directly country than ever prior on “World Leader Pretend”‘s pedal steel.
Every move is the search to actually not be the sleek dulled down version of the band they were before. The story this time hardly lies in “Pop Song 89”, but the drive to write simpler major key songs was part and parcel with this endeavor, alongside an increasingly evident sense of, irony? Sardonicism? Spite? Whatever it may be, R.E.M. when they played dumb played the role like they’d been training for the big bout, and revealed a dopiness that would pop up now and again through their career. Stipe has gone from words that could mean anything to words that blatantly mean not a goddamn thing, rambled with a certain either cluelessness or contempt for the thing itself. Gen X, could be either, could be both. The vocal melodies, main lick and Berry’s barreling toms do indeed make for a sturdy pop song, but Green is one of those albums that feels largely successful at being catchy or efforted, yet still assuredly stands as a failure towards evolving the band. The intent will get them where they need to go soon, but this is not a roadmap, it’s a series of experiments as interesting as the idea and bolstering little underneath. R.E.M. have and will write many, many better pop songs, and with less sense that it’s an obligation, which is much of what this album becomes in its desperation to be someone else.
God, speaking of openers that tell not the real story. Out of Time would stand as the true transition to R.E.M.’s middle-career second opus, a testament to their strengths in actually cracking their reinvention on only try number two. The tricks aren’t so different, a more eclectic instrument selection and the band members trading them off as before, but what they have found is a sense of grandiosity. R.E.M. have found cinema in the eclectic, in the spacious bass and organ wander of “Low”, or the venomous outlaw country amble of “Country Feedback”, one of their best ever while we’re keeping score, Stipe’s momentary gift to the lovers of his purposeful reserve, and to the lovers of his shuddering belt (I’m both). More importantly than better experiments and soundscapes however are that R.E.M. aren’t sacrificing themselves for their sake, the “R.E.M. type songs” exist in multitudes that Green feared, while simultaneously filling them with those experimental touches. Buck’s mandolin fares far better the second go-round, I need not elaborate on “Losing My Religion”s harmonious marriage surely, but the swaying country drama of “Half a World Away” is better than all three minimal drumless mandolin affairs on Green. Even the pop songs have more thematic rustic magic, the sheer wind-in-the-hair power of “Me In Honey” (even if Buck clearly took five seconds to piece that guitar together) or bubbly effervescence of “Near Wild Heaven”, and only “Shiny Happy People” fares like the last album’s goofier pisstakes and even its better than all of those.
Sorry these aren’t supposed to be album reviews but this one is underrated goddammit, and R.E.M. acclimated to more expansive arrangements like a pro after only a little bumbling. Anyway, “Radio Song”. Ok so there were two goofy pisstakes. The kind of opener that may have unfavorably shaded its record for years to come. I’m a 90s dumb shit junkie so the ironic organ funk bumble of this track fascinates me too much for any room for ire, but I do spite to a degree these songs that R.E.M. seem to have allowed to make them look like joke artists, I don’t know if their sense of humor was ever their strength. Also KRS-One on this sounds like he literally never rapped in his life, I can only assume the band wrote it for him cuz it emits massive “white people in the 90s found out about hip hop and are putting it in everything” vibes. It’s all so fantastically 90s really, I can imagine everything from the set design to the clothes to the hypothetical All That performance of this silly, silly song. Like I said, when R.E.M. went dumb, they went caveman dumb. Eh, one confounding dud does not a bad album make, and this hardly accounts for the story at play anyway. Anomalies are what they are, they just usually aren’t openers.
Automatic For the People is a masterpiece. We don’t have to debate this one right? R.E.M nail both their cinematic and mindfully textured major label era’s side and their thematic power all in one with rich and sincere numbers one after the other. Also “Everybody Hurts”. A few of the rockers don’t blow my mind but the highs are among my favorites by the band. “Sweetness Follows”, “Star Me Kitten”, “Find the River” “Try Not to Breathe”, and I could go on, the more sweeping and astral in its existential dread and magic alike, the better, and in those high moments quite possibly unrivaled. “Drive” sets that scene perfectly, more gradual and ruminative than they’d ever previously been, near a full minute before the drums come in and even then know when to pull back, its cyclical motif leaving plenty of pauses to feel the space. In their early days R.E.M. mastered painting with immediacy, here they master the art of expanse and patience, and “Drive” isn’t even its greatest success, but it shows a grand maturity that lets the album take the flight it does. Stipe’s words remain a bit cryptic but distinctly acting against some force of inaction, urging the kids that “nobody tells you what to do” etc, and Buck pointed to it being “subtly political”, it’s easy to put two and two together for that general sentiment of unity, but within this tone its spirit is one of both confidence and the ominous that such confidence would be necessary for, and in an album that deals in a lot of heavier spaces it’s a nice hushed but powerful version of Stipe’s anthems to the youth. Sonically it still brims with the same existential sensation of riding a vessel into the cosmos that much of the sparser numbers do, its weeping strings and lingering low end hum, so when I don’t feel like shaking a leg I can just bask in it and stare into the album’s moonlit waters.
Per Mike Mills, “On past albums we had been exploring acoustic instruments, trying to use the piano and mandolin, and we did it about all we wanted to do it. And you come back to the fact that playing loud electric-guitar music is about as fun as music can be.” Clearly. Monster was R.E.M.’s most rock-centric album since gosh, Lifes Rich Pageant? To its benefit, in no way similarly, as Buck adapts a burnt sienna blear to his guitars that melds 70s glam rock heroics and 90s Smashing Pumpkins and shoegaze waviness and noise. Alongside tucking Stipe a bit deeper in the mix the rawness and bleed of the tone is felt in every crevice its poured, and the band uses this to venture from distinctly 90s-y pastiches to steadier simple rockers, they’d never previously tried things like the blowtorch sear of the fuzz on “Circus Envy” or the oblong jitter and vocal filters on “King of Comedy”, immediacy was back on the menu but R.E.M. were holding few if any obligations towards returning to form. The cruel bargain bins of the world falsely write a narrative of throwaway for this record, which even if dated or sloppy to your tastes is clearly more than a cheeky toss off. Stipe writes in various seedy characters to accentuate the raw energy but he also has some great emotive moments blending the last two album’s experimentation with the weightier numbers like “Tongue” and “Strange Currencies”.
Even the naysayers tend to stand by “Kenneth” though, which makes sense, a safer bet that evokes vaguely the R.E.M. spirit without really sounding like any other exact song by them. Buck’s throttled toy-like tone is not my favorite but the plasmatic tremolo fissures the tracks with a “How Soon Is Now” style shudder. It almost registers as parody with its comical mass and disheveled tones yet the band write a sturdy enough tune to keep it afloat. The “critic first, fan second” intention fails me here as I prefer the more adventurous and textural sides of the album, but “Kenneth” stands celebratory nonetheless. The band wanted to rock again, play it and release it, no bullshit, all the while keeping it true to self, a bit cryptic, a bit wiggly and weird, a lot excited by brazenly different approaches to the comfortable formula. Buck’s deafening whirr is after all more glorious statement than golden guitar craft, left as the main weapon again he re-reveals this much, the mandolins and organs not here to make one forget his well running progressively drier, but what can I say, when Mills say it reminded them how fun guitar is, I believe them, that tone does indeed say it all. Clearly it was so fun they had to do it again.
Monster is almost obstinately encased in its mass, an encircling tower of amps sure to blot out the pesky sun. Their Americana and earthy self took a vacation, but once they found themselves on the road again, in bursts between shows that essence of the road itself snuck into the next sessions. The result is considered a much better execution of the raucous mud-caked buzz of Monster, for reasons that elude me. I actually think this album is one of their worst, for its aimless noxious rockers, for its bizarre experiments, for its bloated runtime and certainly for its redundancy in the face of the last one. At least there the ornery tone had a purpose, here the clogged squonk of Buck’s guitar clashes horribly with the more diverse styles and earthier vibes, suffocating much of the tracklist, when there’s a discernible life to snuff in the first place anyway, over stillbirths like “Wake Up Bomb” and “Departure”. Fortunately, “How The West” evades this and evokes the album cover imagery better than most here; a parched stumble through desert mirages, depth of view vast and flat land replete. Berry pares his kit down to some hushed brushing and Mills lays down an insistent piano that feels like something lurking in the distance, it feels like staring out of the window at the ever moving and ever stagnating scenery, a bit of majesty but also an isolated madness, and mercifully Buck keeps his stupid lead quiet, opting for some deliciously hallucinatory blues licks which make way more sense illustratively.
It’s a good hazy travelogue and R.E.M.’s learned knack for the cinematic applied in a much more understated way is refreshing, they’ve cracked using their larger-than-life self to recapture their naturalism, for a brief and bright moment. Struggle though I do with this album to say the least (and were it the proper venue, believe me I’d give this thing a good lashing), I have to have a little heart for what became a sort of celebratory sayonara. Bill Berry suffered a nigh-fatal brain aneurysm after a show, and this would be his final outing with the band. Even in their least appealing form this foursome is magic dichotomy, lightning striking infinitely across four Tesla coils, to lose any of that is unavoidable and permanent destabilizing of what R.E.M. were in full. This doesn’t mean doom, but its change that comes with nothing short of massive reassessment. So for all of its flaws, I have a heart for this beautiful band’s final celebration together as the original four, the greatest and most fluid democracy in rock music’s history. When Stipe says “I’m outta here” on “Electrolite”, feel free to call that your personal series finale. But not for me. A better one lies ahead.
R.E.M.’s fifteen album career can be split neatly into three eras: the IRS era, the major label era, and the post-Berry era. Of course they retained their major label status, but there were clear differences, and it was clear the world wasn’t watching on quite the same level anymore. The band insist the album isn’t the way it is due to Berry’s absence as rehearsals had begun to shape it prior to his departure, but “post-Berry” still suits a fascinating series of five albums trying to figure out what R.E.M. are anymore, what have they left to do? I have no reason to disbelieve the band, but it’s a great convenience that losing Berry made them use Up as a challenge for what can be done without the firm backbeat, with more ambient and electronic textures, percussion is there but rarely as vital propulsion, floating just as the rest does. More than Berry’s exit it can be presumed this is more due to the inevitable rise of electronic rock again after the impact of OK Computer, and if that seems convenient too well, they got Nigel Godrich himself to engineer this record, and Stipe’s lyrical themes were set around the relationship between spiritualism and the modern age. Digitalism to illustrate the digital takeover, per the anxieties of the time, but R.E.M. don’t contort it with such panic, opting for lush minimalism more often. They pull a few Beach Boys pastiches like “At My Most Beautiful” and “Parakeet”, splash in their own brand of moodier wall-of-sound on tracks like “The Apologist” and “Suspicion”, and hit with a few pure sparse ambient numbers like “Falls to Climb”. The acoustic strummers suit the album’s delicate glide nicely as well, for when you need a break in the organic. R.E.M.’s ability to shake the formula without losing what makes it work is pretty much second nature, and ultimately despite likewise CD era bloat to the last, I find Up very likable, but I also find it a bold risk.
On those most sparse ambient numbers, “Airportman” puts the most jarring possibility of Berry’s absence right in the foreground, and it could easily sound neutered and monotonous if handled wrong, reveal the negative space where a drum machine sits futily, but they adapt to the sound immediately, inducing a balming daydream state with a sweetly drift, Stipe providing a humming lullaby over the cascading tones, it sounds like its title, Music for Airports and all. It’s actually wildly rare when you think about the times, where electronic dabbling was maximalist and often set in the industrial, house or downtempo realms, really dark or really loud, retro drum machines this fluttery and slight were a relic of the past, so to dredge up their charm only adds to how realized R.E.M.’s particularly warm and welcoming shape of electronic would arrive, and they assemble the tones and textures knowingly, tastefully. I wish there were more of it honestly, it remains a gorgeous idiosyncrasy even if the record follows suit in its own ways. I love Bill Berry, he was an absolute force and also he fuckin’ wrote “Perfect Circle” so he gets into Heaven, but here R.E.M. fight for their survival. The band who once lived and breathed by storming through the doorway on every opener, and then slowly toyed with letting the tempo rest or even holding the drums back for a spell, are now without the one who gave them that momentum, and yet here they are, proving their longevity even beyond the risk of losing a vital component. The band states they nearly broke up during this album, what I hear is the triumph over that. Post-Berry wasn’t a death sentence, it was just a call to new realms.
Up, much like Monster, is a rare evasion of the outside world for the band, outside of high altitudes anyway. Naturally it was time again to return to land with what they’d gained in the ether, though their gazes remained locked onto the skies. Furthering their electronic tinkering into a partly overcast sunshine pop version of their more songy selves, R.E.M. craft a quasi-sequel that retains much of the wall-of-sound and Beach Boys worship of Up‘s more lush moments and attempts to integrate it into more straightforward numbers, textures abundantly bubble and coat the songs rather than exist as the songs themselves or drift in the vastness. Make no mistake these aren’t mere touches, the honey gold sheen is glopped on viscously thick and will not appeal to everyone, in the field of comparing R.E.M. to U2 this is probably as loud and insistent as their aesthetics have ever been and some could find it sickening, though songs like “Imitation of Life” don’t seem deniable. For me, R.E.M.’s take on maximalist ear candy plays perfectly to their prior album’s aesthetics to give it legs, and hell they proved they had subtlety down, let’s get a little copious. “The Lifting” does just that, in an instance plunged into its transitory swirls, the entire mix is bathed in hypnagogic goo, but gazes fondly at distant mountains from the Tarmac. The amberized leads almost become synths and horns at the same time, its sunshine isn’t as much abject effervescence as it is bottled optimism, the bubble swells with everything it’s got. Yes indeed, it is both maximal and absolutely claustrophobic with itself, pushing at the walls with none of the arrangement space that the middle albums accustomed them to, but I think that’s the point, to hit you like a gamma ray burst. Plus it helps R.E.M. soften but not weaken, if it’s shape is dull it’s because it’s a pillow. You want a sharp pillow? The entire album is a float along a stream, and “The Lifting” is well, a pretty perfect title. Berry-less R.E.M. found a niche and crammed it every space they can fill. Hard to fault them for that. Also it’s Stipe’s favorite so y’know, go ahead and call him a liar?
In the thick of it, I’d think one would always wanna see R.E.M. succeed, endeavor to follow them on each avenue change and root for their survival. They never seemed to stop deserving it, they always meant well and had the right blueprints. Doesn’t mean you can’t fail though. Even R.E.M. themselves have written off Around the Sun, there’s a trend in the sentiments of boredom with the material and loss of focus as a band. Sometimes you get told something so many times you feel foolish for debating it, so along with the consensus I went to disparage the album. Over time I started to like it, yet even still I couldn’t deny one feeling, which is that said boredom that characterizes these sessions resonates in one truth: it took thirteen albums, but R.E.M. made Just Another R.E.M. Album. It isn’t exactly any of them, but nor is it distinctly itself. They remain a softer self, they aim for grand anthemic scope more than not, but they still tinker, invite weird guests, dabble with electronic textures, its alot more slight but its not totally dry and gray. Still though it’s undeniably more languid, though maybe the maudlin graduality of it is why I do enjoy it, albeit with a certain pleasant passivity. None of their best songs are here. Perhaps unsurprisingly it shows whats been missing so very long, Berry’s rocket fueled pistons gone, Buck having not shaped a genuinely brilliant-on-its-own guitar lick in more chapters than I’d like to flip back, increasing lack of the backing vocal depth, increasing rudimentaries in the rhythms in general.
You’d almost forget any of R.E.M. are there besides Stipe, and maybe that’s actually the fascinating bit. This album seems absolutely lonely to me, the creative democracy sounds drained and Stipe is the only voice literally or otherwise, and it wasn’t enough. Interestingly a lot of this still has glimmers of R.E.M.’s more sophisticated sides if you squint, but “Leaving New York” surely does not. Or well that’s not totally fair, the verses have a sparsity that is aiming for something Up-esque, but the chorus slams the gavel on that shit having a chance. Stipe has absolutely never written a more romcom ready, pleadingly overwrought chorus in his life, and the backing vocals all being himself just seals the sensation that he’s the only one in the damn studio, and it feels a bit blasphemous truthfully. It is so cloyingly mushy and renders Stipe into avaricious frontman more than ever, if you want one more U2 analogy this is surely a peak Bono moment of indulgence without much invention, It has all the ingredients that should guarantee I hate it. So why don’t I?
For one, the post-9/11 sensation is all too palpable so maybe I can give a bit of schmaltz a pass when its clear Stipe is speaking of a place he loves that did its share of suffering. But I don’t know man, I wish there was a reason so convenient, but somewhere along the line this song’s blatant Hallmarkery started working on me. Maybe if you just write one of these, a total anomaly, rather than being some insincere creep stockpiling pick up lines disguised as ballads and crummy film soundtrack fodder, the effect changes. Maybe growing a suspicion to such things makes one’s heart grow more desperate to feel what people who can just enjoy a mediocre romcom feel instead of being a friggin’ know it all every day of yr life. A tradeoff truly. Whatever the reason, Stipe hasn’t lied to me much to make me think this is a sales pitch for a hit single and nothing more, not that 2004 R.E.M. had a chance. It’s ok to just smile with it for a bit. Plus it’s still better than “Everybody Hurts”. The only issue is while it represents its album well, its album is a non-starter of a lore bomb, a total standstill. The band feel like they’re decaying here and that’s about all one can say, but luckily they have a better sendoff coming.
The truth was it was borrowed time, but there’s no shame in revving the pacemaker if the spirit is willing, and rev they did. For the first time since Berry’s leave a decade ago, the boys embrace tempo, embrace stark energy, bring R.E.M. back to the four piece guitar-bass-drums-fundamentals and do so with spirit, perhaps mere nostalgia inside and out but why besmirch good memories? Accelerate is probably the most no-frills record they made, and considering their recent tendencies to become more frills than man it was a welcome change. 90s-esque in its DIY energy but never as their actual 90s material, which had so much more of the times gimmicks and ambitions to every corner, here they just seem to celebrate being a band at all. You can feel the urge to unwrite Around the Sun completely. As said before, survival. How are the songs though? Well I hear Mike’s backing vocals again so it’s a 10 folks! “Supernatural Serious” is the prime not-done-yet-folks spirited anthem, where the band remind you how special they were in simpler terms, but the album’s immediacy doesn’t mean it’s all basking in rose tint. “Hollow Man” sports a bouncy 90s power pop hook sticky enough to keep one returning, “Sing for the Submarine” waltzes with menace to one of their most sinister sounding hard rockers ever, and the volcanic organs and low end on “Houston” make for a gnarled dirge that plays with noise as the band rarely have. It’s still relatively safe to the band’s most eclectic days but it’s the right call, rejuvenation without monotony. As for pure energy, it pays to not withhold the sales pitch, and so rides in “Living Well is the Best Revenge”.
Well first of all, call it confirmation bias, but in this rawer mix Stipe for the first time in ages sounds in sync with his band and equal to their force rather than a dominant. Nothing wrong with the latter either, but well after Around the Sun I think I’d be pretty sick of my own voice. Indulgence serves some roles but not brisk rock, and the band seems back at a balance with each other in Jackknife Lee’s production, they sound like themselves with no asterisks and that’s a nice feeling in the twilight years The quick turnaround does show at times, “Revenge” has its spots of barreling atonality and sometimes feels like spitfire first and song second (and isn’t entirely alone on the album for feeling a bit slight), worth the head bang and exciting for the refusal of going gently into the good night, but Stipe’s hoary wails don’t show the strength they once had, inevitably, and Buck is certainly pulling more weight than in a while but his lines do tend to melt into the mix as it propels. Still, the song sticks, largely off of Mill’s great bass lead-ins and half time harmonies on the hook, but ultimately because it’s an opener that makes a statement sonically that the album builds on rather than tossing off ten more of equal blind stead. It is fully contextual, a first of two victory laps well earned by a career well spent, and a punch in the face of the decay they feared an album prior. There wasn’t much left to be said nevertheless, but it would be on their own terms.
You really have to hand it to R.E.M., they’re one of the few bands who said “this is where we call it quits” and a decade on have stuck to that story and seem intended to remain that way, comments as recent as 2021 affirm this much and frankly, good and God bless. We all get suckered into the promises of tickles to the nostalgia gland these days, try though every individual might to resist, and over time it makes all “endings” barring actual death of the artist feel flimsy and momentary. R.E.M. provided a genuine final chapter, and it feels special through thick and thin because of this. A sense of fond retrospect and finality pervades Collapse Into Now, if you can remember it from them they probably remembered it too and incorporated it here. You get the bombastic rockers like “All The Best”, wistful acoustics like “Walk It Back”, Reveal-esque opulence on “Every Day is Yours To Win”, peppy power pop on “Mine Smell Like Honey” with a little of that fondly recalled Buck jangle for ol’ times sake, and more than anything, the “Country Feedback” evoking “Blue”, where Stipe shares the stage a final time with Patti Smith, a finale so perfectly suited its almost autobiographical fanfiction, the goosebumps border on cryogenic. The band made no illusions, Stipe’s muffled but evocative poetry is hushed but definitive. “I want Whitman proud. Patti Smith proud. My brothers proud. My sisters proud.” Consider it done. Last though on “Blue” comes a reprise of the opener, and that’s not for nothing.
R.E.M. have been many things with wild abandon, but some things were constant. Stipe could be variants of abstract and direct, but rarely if ever was clearly speaking personally. So many albums are formed around new versions of characters that Stipe found to illustrate them, the man was a poet before he was a songwriter, and I won’t pretend to possess the discipline for dissecting prose, but what I know is the face Stipe showed and the face he didn’t, all the way down to the literal, fourteen albums with no distinct image of the band themselves. Then at the end, the streak breaks, Stipe waves his first hello and last goodbye, still draped in harsh silhouette but present, discernible. This was no coincidence, Stipe has made that wave goodbye clear, has made the rarity of their faces on the cover clear, and alongside doing so, divulged that the opener “Discoverer” is one of his only autobiographical songs. As the title suggests, a story of discovery, for Stipe specifically of New York City and all its opportunities. It’s interesting to look back, how far Stipe has grown, a confident poet even in his most supposedly direct songs. He spent alot of time after a bout of fixated crypticism on songs that spoke to the universal and thus intently to all willing to listen, but those glory days and that real estate of radio waves, long ago by now. Doesn’t stop him but also creates a sense of comfort in what has already been done, a chance to engage the personal before dropping the curtain. “With the slightest bit of finesse, I might have made less mess, but it was what it was”.
The band offers a seemingly endless crescendo, a song that acts as a single massive chorus, a chant unto the realities peeled open for Stipe by the city, the possibilities. “I have never felt so called”. Stipe and his friends took a chance on art and art paid off, it feels like a thank you to art, and art should thank them back. That “Blue” reprise doesn’t cut me quite like the song itself, but I get it, Stipe sends out personal sentiment and makes of it a mantra, as he always did, more simple and direct than ever. R.E.M. took a shot and climbed to the top, and they never stopped exploring and trying, until it was them made the decision, nobody else. What they always did best, through highs and lows, sought possibilities and captured them, used their opportunity to say as much as they could, didn’t take the privilege of artistry for granted. They were and are and will always be one of the great American rock bands, and theirs is the rarest of things, a complete story, with a final chapter with just a generous glimmer of the hearts responsible, a touch of a visage and a few words directed for once to no extravagant fiction, to no disenfranchised youth, to no urgent cause, but directed at the self, in a satisfaction in a completed journey and all it afforded. It was an honor to take part in that journey, from the first murmur to the final shout.
go back