I have to confess I wasn’t franticly excited when I found out R.E.M. had a new album out. It’s not that I’ve gone off R.E.M., it’s just that they have seemed to go off themselves. I couldn’t gel with their albums as I had done with the old material back in the 90s. It seemed like listening to a different band. Their previous album ‘Around the Sun’ didn’t do a damn thing for me in fact. I found it all very worrying, and when I saw the news of Accelerate I got that awful ‘oh no not, again’ feeling.
As many aficionados of this Athens, GA band will attest, the rot started back in 1994 when, following a serious brain aneurysm on the stage on the Monster Tour, drummer Bill Buck was forced to leave the band. This was one of 3 major blows the band took that year. Lead singer Michael Stipe also lost 2 good friends in River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain. It was at this point they decided to try something different, which ultimately, at least IMHO, was a mistake. They set off down a road that time and again lead to doubt of their own ability to carry on, and a decidedly mixed repertoire of albums like New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Up, Reveal, and Around the Sun. The latter was an unadulterated flop, it sold only 240,000 copies in the US, and I’ll bet most of those were to hardcore R.E.M. fans. Of the rest I only ever really could say I actually really liked Reveal a lot, the rest really don’t do a lot for me, save for odd songs here and there where the R.E.M. genius shines through the mist.
It was the abject failure, even by the band’s own admission, of Around the Sun that prompted a rethink. And so late on last year they started work on something new. Stipe admits he works best under pressure, and as such the album was conceived in just a few months and recorded in London in just 10 days in studio. I often say to people that when you trying to do something the worst thing you can do it think about it too much. Follow your nose and go with the flow. I guesss it’s not aas daft as it sounds. Accelerate, produced by Jacknife Lee (who apparently was recommended by U2 Guitarist The Edge) was born.
The results? Pure gold R.E.M. Gone are the new age keyboard riffs and weird percussion-less oddity. Out has gone the departure from what made the band so big in the first instance. What has been given back is what we all went nuts for in the late 80s and early 90s. Real R.E.M. Guitar-filled, drum smashing edgy rock music, soulful and profound social political rhetoric, and madcap trips into semi-surrealism. The album’s halls echo to the sounds of great albums of R.E.M.’s distant past, like Life’s Rich Pageant, Murmur and Fables of the Reconstruction. The guitar and bass work is genial, the lyrics are hard edged and catchy. R.E.M. had a point to make with Accelerate. The point was that they found what they had lost, and wanted to put out the good word to fans and the music world that R.E.M. were back on the map.
If all the R.E.M. you ever heard was released after 1992 then you either won’t get it or you might like it. I dunno, who am I to say. If that’s the case and you do like it then you will like R.E.M.’s old stuff.
If, like me, you have been a hardcore fan for decades, and have every album and know every song then you’ll love this album, if not from the point of view of absolute quality and depth, but from the view that it at least proves R.E.M. as we knew and adored them are back, baby.
Lets hope the positive vibe from this album makes it sell big and they get the message and make more of this pure magic.
