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By Andrew William Smith, Editor
2008.2
Michael Stipe is no stranger to singing about the end of the world, but for the last few years, these testaments tended towards contemplative elegies rather than shake, rattle, and rolling with energy. With the release of the band’s fourteenth studio album Accelerate, R.E.M has finally silenced the naysayers who had prematurely predicted the end of his band’s career. Taking tips from The Edge, the band hired producer Garret “Jacknife” Lee (U2, The Editors, Snow Patrol) to return to the ferocious familiarity of guitar-driven, fist-waving power pop.
To break out of the experimental moodiness of the band’s last three discs, the latest features axeman Peter Buck tightly owning each track. For an album whose title references high-speed songs and the high-stakes mood of the millennium, the alternative music elders from Athens, Georgia adopted their hardest-rocking, most political pose since the Green and Document days. While songs like “Final Straw” (from Around the Sun) tried to fuel dissent around the time of Bush’s second disputed seizing of power, the hymns of protest and participation that overpopulate the new disc hardly need introduction or annotation; they simply rip through the guts with post-punk grit and apocalyptic poetry.
So far, the critical consensus confirms that the resuscitation succeeded, and the eleven tracks of ecstatic clamor and torrential prophecy come and go so quickly that many fans simply cue it up again, giving it repeated listens in a single sitting—or in a singular morning of mad, Stipe-like dervish dancing around the apartment while the album blares, disturbing the neighbors without a care.
Lyrically ominous and biblically sonorous, Stipe’s vocals visit burning cities where we cannot cash in on bitter refunds or sad apostles choke on bones tossed from the rich man’s table. At track one, “Living Well Is The Best Revenge” ignites the sizzling musical tenor and challenging topical tone that carries the entire record’s indictment of our Machiavellian masters and their manipulators in the mass media. It takes a particular poet like Stipe to take a line like “Nature abhors a vacuum but what’s between your ears?” and make it rock. But that’s just what he manages in “Man-Sized Wreath.”
The sweetly seductive hooks, the catchy chorus, and the puckish title of the single “Supernatural Superserious” all hide the layers of narrative inside the “humiliation” and “celebration” of “your teenage station.” R.E.M. songs frequently boast a bundle of multiple meanings that tend to border on the mysterious, but with all its references to fears and tears, fantasies and travesties, disguises and darkness, the storyline in “Supernatural Superserious” hints at the struggles of growing up gay in America.
While “Hollow Man” peddles some of the purest pop-rock on the record, it’s nothing close to a throwaway track; in fact, when Michael intones “Believe in me/Believe in nothing,” the tune folds in on itself like a chant, contemplating an emptiness that could signal liberation or desperation, solitary wisdom or lonely wandering—or all of the above or nothing at all.
Continuing the record’s relentless message-driven mission, “If the storm doesn’t kill me the government will” opens the bittersweet post-Katrina ballad “Houston.” Just as the song’s narrator is “put to the test,” Stipe’s lyrical stance once again tests our short-term memory and reminds listeners not to forget the calculated miscalculations that abandoned too many of our fellow citizens in the time of their greatest need.
On the roof-raising title track, we find an obvious nod to the seriously wired and fired-up pace of the project. But the band hardly puts the pedal to the metal of an SUV in any kind of Sammy Hagar “I Just Can’t Drive 55” fashion. In this period of exponential change and existential churning, we’re all passengers on the Titanic or an out-of-control train without a driver and without brakes. Stipe’s sense of foreboding futureshock overflows with mixed messages, but the velocity of this vision doesn’t demand more speed; indeed, it’s “accelerate to make it slow.” To hear Michael and Mike share vocals on this tune while Buck kicks our butts with his melodic buzz approaches a joy as palpable as the “pounding pulse” of the song’s terrifying theme.
Inspired by The Edge, the band prominently features Peter Buck’s ferocious guitars on the new record. Photo by Jonathan Marx
Even as the public Stipe sports his Obama support proudly, these are not Pollyannaish paeans to democratic hope; these are lethal lullabies serenading the sunset of democracy. In a haunting eulogy to American empire called “Until the Day Is Done,” Stipe implores, “So hold tight your babies and your guns/Forgive us our trespasses, father and son”; this hardly sounds like the spineless liberalism some critics have chirped at him for peddling. At this point in the record, R.E.M. has fully reclaimed its musical and cultural clout. Like Ben Harper’s “Black Rain” and Arcade Fire’s “Windowsill” (both scathing indictments of the Bush-Katrina chapter in our history), this potent piece portends a frightening face for our fate. Unless the listener hits the pause button, there’s no time to ponder the powerful, mournful tone of a tune that sits on top of a powderkeg of ideas and emotions.
Instead, the band gathers the children of the choir to dish out some serious payback on “Mr. Richards.” This tough track theorizes that while living well may work fine some of the time, other forms of revenge involve sending corporate crooks to the joint to do hard time.
By the time the disc concludes with the self-referential “Song for the Submarine,” the straight-shooting “Horse to Water,” and the goofy greatness of “I’m Gonna DJ,” the fan might feel a bit light-headed, like after sprinting 400 meters or bouncing around the boxing ring with the bantamweight Stipe alludes to in “Horse to Water.” Like most good records, this one won’t necessarily sink in until: it’s spun around your mind for a few days; you see Michael, Mike, and Peter in your dreams; and you wake up humming random lines.
For seasoned R.E.M. fans, the April Fool’s Day release created a kind of feast day—but it also forced us to reckon with the force of nostalgia. This sure seems like the good old-days of the cool and blistering Buck, the mysterious and stupefying Stipe, the nerdy and musical Mills. (Just for the record, the “Bill Berry’s departure ruined R.E.M.” myth is about as annoyingly simple-minded as the “Yoko Ono ruined The Beatles” myth.)
But some things have changed. When we were in our teens and twenties, nothing seemed easier than railing against the hypocritical excesses of aging rock stars. But today, the very guys that told us about fanzines and college radio on a late night MTV program called The Cutting Edge are themselves—like their four peers from Dublin, Ireland—the middle-aged super-celebrities that once seemed to our younger selves like sickly, wrinkled artifacts.
At first glance, the critical feeding frenzy at the resurrection party appears slickly engineered as rock’s pundits line up to pile praise. Has the hype been coldly calculated and carefully engineered? We’re too “Zen experience sweet delirious” to get all superserious about it.
Sure, you can never remake Life’s Rich Pageant, Green, or Automatic for the People—or any of the first ten studio albums—and who would want to try? Any cynicism might as well be the “pageantry of empty gestures” Stipe speaks of in “Man-Sized Wreath.” No matter, nothing can quiet the return of this angry jangling jubilee—perfectly-timed, timely, and timeless. Accelerate is great on its own 2008 terms.
R.E.M. released Accelerate on April 1, 2008. For more information, visit REMHQ.com
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Published on
04-05-2008 at 07:49 PM |
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04-05-2008 08:05 PM -
