Say what you like about Up, but at least it tried to shake things...uh...in a non-downward direction after drummer Bill Berry left a Bill Berry-shaped hole in the band's lineup. Reveal is an attempt to get back to business as if nothing happened, but Berry's absence affected them more than they cared to admit; it threw them off balance at a time when things weren't guaranteed to come naturally to begin with, and this passionless album is the best they could muster as a result.
Around the Sun distinguishes itself from Reveal by virtue of the fact that it sounds as if a modicum of effort was put into it, but even the band ended up bored with the result and retired most of the songs from the their live sets after Accelerate.
R.E.M. could have ended things on a relatively high note with Accelerate, but they just had to push it. Collapse into Now is a return to the creative wilderness of Reveal and Around the Sun. It's just...nothing.
It'll always be known as the panic-induced album they made after Berry left (prompting the band to hire multiple drummers, use drum machines for the first time since their debut and even get in on the act themselves rather than find a permanent replacement), but I think Up is better than most people give it credit for. Scattered among what is admittedly one of the band's least cohesive albums are some excellent discrete efforts; the keyboards and effects on "Lotus" and "Parakeet" give them a neat twist on the R.E.M. rock and ballad templates respectively, whereas "At My Most Beautiful" forsakes all musical artifice and shows Stipe at his most direct and vulnerable - something that once would have been impossible. On the other hand, there are at least four undeniable duds. Up is a long album - trim the fat and you still have a ten song album that sits in the middle if you arrange the band's catalogue by length. An OK album becomes a decent one that way, but nothing can make it great.
The band's first decent album in over a decade, Accelerate worked because the band didn't overthink it and just made something they'd enjoy playing live. It's their most straight up rock album since Monster, or in fact ever. Michael Stipe sounds as into it as ever, Mike Mills' backing vocals make a welcome return and Bill Reiflin (Ministry), Bill Berry's long overdue replacement, earns his keep. Unfortunately, Accelerate proved to be, as Sick Boy would say, "a blip on an otherwise uninterrupted downward trajectory".
Out of Time brought the mandolin that debuted on Green to the ears of millions via "Losing My Religion", the band's biggest hit and one of its best songs, but that song is an outlier in what is otherwise a spectacularly poorly chosen set of singles: "Shiny Happy People", which the band famously disowned, the ill-advised funk experiment "Radio Song" (featuring KRS-One!) and the forgettable "Near Wild Heaven" with Mike Mills on lead vocals. Besides "Losing My Religion", it's the deep cuts that make Out of Time worthwhile; "Low" breaks new ground for the band, with its sparse hand percussion, palm-muted guitar and simple, stark organ; "Half a World Away" has the band indulge its folky side and makes me wish they'd done it more often and spared us a couple of those singles; "Country Feedback" is the anti-"Shiny Happy People", a dirge that brings to mind Neil Young, who played lead guitar on it seven years later at a Bridge School concert.
Monster was the first R.E.M. album to gain a bad reputation, and it doesn't usually come in ahead of any albums that came before it in lists such as these. Undeniably there's some filler - heaven forbid an R.E.M. album should have any of that - but it also kicks off with two of its best and most brazen rockers "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" and "Crush with Eyeliner", and contains one of its best ballads in "Strange Currencies" and two of its most underrated and adventurous numbers, the falsetto "Tongue" and the distortion-seared farewell letter to Kurt Cobain "Let Me In". Monster received favourable if not fawning reviews initially, but only a fraction of Automatic for the People's audience bought it, and perusing bargain bins in the 90s was a reminder of just how many people soured on it. The obstreperous denunciation was no doubt due in part to its opacity, especially relative to Automatic. How many R.E.M. songs hit you on an emotional level even though you don't know what they're about? With some exceptions ("Let Me In" in particular"), Monster's songs don't generally work on that level. It delivers the obliqueness fans had come to expect without the emotional gut punch that had always been implicitly bundled with it. It's also because it not only came along after an improbable string of winners, but also was the first R.E.M. album to pay no deference whatsoever to its immediate predecessor.
R.E.M.'s first LP has paradoxically aged well while sounding very much like a product of its time. "Talk About the Passion" and other tracks written in the style that would come to be known as "jangle pop" spawned a thousand indie bands, while "Perfect Circle" set a high bar for the band's ballads and the brilliantly elliptical "9-9" and "West of the Fields" showed their post punk influences. The only real flaw is its timid, non-committal production and the early Stipe mumble robbing it of some of its impact, as was the case with the preceding Chronic Town EP.
Automatic for the People has been so irrevocably hammered into the public consciousness that it's easy not to notice that it's one of the weirder albums to have sold 8 million copies in its first year. It probably wouldn't have sold that many if "Star Me Kitten" had retained its original title "Fuck Me Kitten", although the lyric remains intact and is by far the most easily parse-able phrase in a cryptic song even by Stipe standards. Even the singles are weird. After Green and Out of Time led with "Pop Song 89" and "Radio Song" respectively, Peter Buck's D minor arpeggio in "Drive" (lead single as well as opening track) is a cold welcome, sort of like if they'd opened Out of Time with "Country Feedback", but the song is one of R.E.M.'s best. "Man on the Moon" joins "Don't Fear the Reaper" in the canon of catchy songs about the inevitability of death. The best known deep cut "Nightswimming" is deceptively inviting; while it's one of the band's prettiest tunes and the lyrics are some of Stipe's most straightforward, it has no chorus, only a baroque, circular piano figure that is gradually joined by strings and horns.
Out of Time is a disjointed album that is caught between R.E.M.'s proclivity at the time to write upbeat pop songs that didn't quite become them and their talent for darker fare, and Green is the same to a lesser extent. There's only so many times you can listen to "Pop Song 89", and while I'll always be an apologist for "Stand" (I think it's just stupid enough to work), I can understand how it can grate, too. But damn, when Green on, it's on - the rockers "Orange Crush", "Turn You Inside Out" and "I Remember California" make it worthwhile on their own. Then there are the first mandolin tracks in the R.E.M. canon - "You Are the Everything" and "The Wrong Child" are excellent, but "Hairshirt" proves that the rule of three isn't always paramount.
Fables has the weakest reputation of the IRS-era albums, but to my mind it also has the best run of three opening tracks of any R.E.M. album, the harmonic fever dream "Feeling Gravitys Pull" (sic) battling it out with "Drive" for the title of R.E.M.'s best opening track. It's easily their darkest album besides Automatic, but it works for me, and it's only when the band steers away from that that it goes awry - "Cant Get There from Here" (what is it with R.E.M. and apostrophes?) is an oh-so-jaunty pop number the band only included because it seemed to go down well when they tried it live, and "Wendell Gee", though slower, similarly applies a false patina of country.
The band's last album for IRS, Document is an appropriately transitional album that is bigger and bolder than their earlier albums, but too singular to pass for a Warner Bros release. From the band's first minor hits, the oft-misunderstood "The One I Love" and the rapid-fire "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", to the band's first and only flirtation with saxophone, "Fireplace", everything here sounds as though it should only work in isolation, yet somehow it all comes together. Also deserving of a mention is the band's cover of Wire's "Strange", of which it can be truly said that they made it their own. Whereas the original was a glacial, dirge-y outlier on the over-before-you-know-it punk exercise that was the English band's debut, R.E.M.'s version is an upbeat number that sounds like something they could have written. Stipe even went as far as to put a personal spin on a line he'd misheard to begin with, assuming Colin Newman was singing "Colin's nervous and the lights are bright" and substituting his own name (the name in the original was in fact Joey).
If Murmur was a TV spot advertising what R.E.M. was capable of, Reckoning was the full widescreen presentation. It is what Peter Buck or Bill Berry (I don't remember which) called a "very human record", not least so in its production, which is both cleaner and more natural at the same time. Reckoning builds and improves upon Murmur's idiosyncratic pop template, except when it moves beyond it - I refer to "Camera", a stunning slow-burn beyond the scope of anything R.E.M. had attempted before.
Lifes Rich Pageant aka We Dont Need No Stinkin Apostrophes is the first R.E.M. album to be rid of the Stipe mumble, and what a way to announce it - "Begin the Begin" opens with a brief guitar riff that gives way to overdriven chords, Peter Buck allowing his guitar to feed back. Over this, Stipe begins his call to arms, no longer hiding behind the rest of the band. The lyrics are typically impenetrable in their specifics, but the general message is clear. The political focus doesn't abate from there. "Fall On Me", with its brilliant counter-melody from Mike Mills, rounds out another opening run of three - hell, make that four with "Cuyahoga" - and "The Flowers of Guatemala" is one of the prettiest songs ever written about genocide.
In 1996, Warner Bros re-signed R.E.M. for another five album contract for 80 million dollars, the biggest such contract at the time (there was a bit more to it than "here's 80 million dollars", but it was still beyond most people's wildest dreams). What seems overconfident in hindsight was predicated on the notion that the commercial failure of Monster was an aberration. The band signed just before the release of New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which they recorded quickly on tour (some of the recordings are live, others from soundchecks) in order to complete their previous contract. It was well-received critically, but just how good it is is one of R.E.M.'s best kept secrets because so few people bought it. It starts like no other R.E.M. album with "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us", its spaghetti western harmonica looking ahead to Gorillaz' "Clint Eastwood" five years later. One of the best sequential song pairings on an R.E.M. album comes with "E-Bow the Letter" and "Leave". On the former, the titular implement on Peter Buck's guitar gives the song the quality of a slowly rolling wave, over which long overdue guest Patti Smith expertly coasts. At seven minutes, "Leave" is R.E.M.'s longest long and would still be even without its acoustic intro, which gives the false impression that it's of a piece with "E Bow" before a siren-like synth ushers in the most spirited, anguished rock song the band ever recorded. The rough (by R.E.M. standards) sound owing to atypical recording environments elevates some of the songs, giving "Undertow" and "Binky the Doormat" a welcome coating of sleaze, while potentially rescuing "Bittersweet Me" from overcooked mediocrity. Putting New Adventures in Hi-Fi at #1 is probably a less popular move than being a Monster apologist, but most people will agree with me on one thing: R.E.M. never sounded this good again.
No comments:
Post a Comment