The first time I listened to the new R.E.M. album, I thought to myself, “I think Curtis will like this.” Curtis was my roommate through most of college, and he had a much greater tolerance for some of R.E.M. than I did. He liked New Adventures in Hi-Fi, an album that I still don’t own. He even had a soft spot for Monster, R.E.M.’s last attempt to rock; I bought Monster in a cut-out bin for 39¢. But Curtis won’t like Accelerate because it’s weird or unusual. He’ll like Accelerate because it’s the first album in fifteen years in which R.E.M. actually allow themselves to sound like R.E.M.
Those who are familiar with R.E.M. know that, while there are some signature songs in the band’s catalog (“Don’t Go Back To Rockville,” “Everybody Hurts,” “It’s the End of the World . . .” and the like), the beauty of Messrs. Stipe, Mills, Berry, and Buck was that they could angle their jangle toward just about any type of music. Many people forget, for example, that the album that contained their biggest hit, “Losing My Religion,” also contained some of the weirdest songs they had ever recorded (see KRS-One’s inexplicable contributions to “Radio Song”). Although Peter Buck always kept his Rickenbacker within easy reach, the band that wrote “Shiny Happy People” also wrote “Orange Crush.” So there.
Drummer Bill Berry left the group in October of 1997, and things seemed to change for the worse. Their 1997 album Up contained some solid tracks but it meandered too much to work well. I didn’t even buy 2001’s Reveal and 2004’s Around the Sun; they just didn’t interest me. By the time I saw R.E.M. live for the first time, at the turn of the decade, they seemed to be a band without a direction. They played their old songs and everyone sang along, but the response to the new material was lukewarm because the material itself simply wasn’t that good.
So it was with trepidation that I approached the tracks on Accelerate, and it is with relief that I can say that the songs are just fine. (The “hot” mastering, on the other hand, renders the album almost unlistenable, but that’s Warner Brothers’s fault, not R.E.M.’s.) There are ballads like “Hollow Man” that contain some of Stipe’s usual self-deprecating lyrics (“I took the prize last night for complicatedness / For saying things I didn’t mean and don’t believe”). For the most part, though, this album rocks, balls out. “Man-Sized Wreath” brings together my favorite aspects of R.E.M.: Peter Buck’s crashing guitars and Mike Mills’s soaring backing vocals. Michael Stipe has never sounded better, either. His voice is a bit scratchy and hoarse, but there’s nary an Auto-Tune plug-in in sight. (But goddamn that mastering!) The obvious single, “Supernatural Superserious,” is just fine. To my ears, it sounds a bit like R.E.M. trying to sound like R.E.M. circa 1990, but that’s better, I suppose, than R.E.M. trying to sound like Radiohead or Li’l Wayne circa 2008.
I have recently read some criticism of this album that goes like this: although R.E.M. is trying to rock, these songs sound a bit too overplanned, a bit too paint-by-numbers. I would agree, but I would also posit that, for the past twenty years, R.E.M. has been a band that has approached their music in exactly this way. A few months ago, I watched a documentary about British singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. In that documentary, Peter Buck, who has also played guitar with Hitchcock since the late 1980s, said that he enjoyed his time recording with Robyn much more than he enjoyed his time recording as R.E.M. He said that Robyn’s songs were more creative and off-the-cuff and that R.E.M.’s songs were planned down to the last detail before the band ever entered the studio. On some of their recent albums, like Up, this approach yielded uninteresting songs and uninspiring arrangements. Even though Accelerate does seem a bit forced (“Dammit, we WILL write a rock record!”), it has moments of joy and weirdness that we haven’t heard from R.E.M. since the early 1990s. The last track, “I’m Gonna DJ,” is my absolute favorite R.E.M. song in years. Over crashing guitars, Michael Stipe sings, “Because death is pretty final / I’m collecting vinyl / I’m gonna DJ at the end of the world!” It’s a delightful and delicious proclamation. No matter how much you thought they were down and out, R.E.M. has come back. And it’s about time. |