R.E.M.: Finding Their Religion

By Josh Tyrangiel

In your leisure time, you most likely enjoy fun, which is why you most likely did not enjoy any of R.E.M.'s past three albums. If memory serves--and the thick layer of dust coating 1998's Up, 2001's Reveal and 2004's Around the Sun is a stern warning to let it--these records paled in comparison with R.E.M.'s earlier, essential material but were right on a par with Woody Allen's recent output. Which is to say, there were vestigial hints of artistry but a disturbing lack of purpose and energy. Facing the age-old choice of burning out or fading away, R.E.M. appeared to have settled on a third option: loitering.

The reasons for any great band's decline--and from 1983 to 1992 R.E.M. was one of the greatest, not only cranking out an unmatched series of jangly, literate records but also tracing a heroic arc from arty Athens, Ga., bar band to arena filler without any of the usual soul-selling--are not particularly surprising. Imagine if your livelihood depended on constantly being with, and agreeing with, your three best friends from college. It's enough to make a rock star want to become a farmer, which is exactly what drummer Bill Berry did when he retired from the band in 1997. Singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills continued, but they put more weight behind their vow to rock on into middle age than into any actual rocking, and it soon became clear that Berry's departure had done quite a number on the group's psychology.

Bands are built on an agreement, signed in the exuberance of youth, that what they do together matters more than what they do separately; if one person punctures the bubble, the whole enterprise can deflate--and in R.E.M.'s case, it did. As three consecutive sonic duds got filed under R, Stipe started producing movies, Buck moonlighted with other bands (and slagged his own in Robyn Hitchcock: Sex, Food, Death ... and Insects, a documentary about the singer), while Mills claims he contemplated quitting a few hundred times.

If their current trajectory puts expectations for R.E.M.'s 14th album, Accelerate, out April 1, at sneaker level, it's worth noting the band faced up to a few hard truths before getting into the studio last year. Given their ages (all three are nearing 50), the steep decline in their album sales and the fact that they don't particularly enjoy tarnishing their legacy with inferior records, they all agreed it was time to kill or cure: make a good album or call it a career.

Accelerate is awfully good--if not quite great--but what's indisputable is that it goes by fast. Producer Garret (Jacknife) Lee, who worked on U2's "still-got-it!" record, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, thereby earning a Ph.D. in jarring legends from complacency, grasped that making an album that didn't stop to think would solve R.E.M.'s two biggest problems: Stipe's tendency toward romantic drift and Buck's stunted, decadelong desire to plug in his guitar and blow people away. Dispensing with dirge-y ballads and long musical bridges to nowhere, Accelerate clocks in at a frenzied 35 min., with five of the 11 tracks zooming by in under-3-min., leave-the-room-and-you-missed-it blurs. It sounds less like a recent R.E.M. album than three men fleeing the scene of a recent R.E.M. album.

It's Buck's resurgence that hits you first. The album opens with a yawping power riff that establishes a melody line, tells you who's in charge and hits the verse in a joyous explosion of fuzz. Egged on by the whomping of former Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin, Buck blows off 10 years of rust in 10 seconds on Living Well Is the Best Revenge and keeps right on flying through the first ecstatic third of the album.

But the defining moment of Accelerate, and perhaps the defining moment of whatever R.E.M. goes on to become from here, takes place a few seconds into the fourth song, Hollow Man. At the band's peak, Stipe's lyrics conveyed emotions with an abstraction summed up in a line from Losing My Religion: "Oh no I've said too much." He chose his words carefully, out of a sense of privacy and poetic economy, and trusted that the tremors in his voice would convey the feelings. But the success of 1992's Everybody Hurts led to some bad habits; soon after, his every wounded thought became explicit and Stipe became kind of a drag. So when Hollow Man's melancholy keyboard and opening lyric--"I've been lost inside my head/echoes fall off me"--drip into the air, there's an understandable temptation to scream. But before Stipe can indulge his mopey impulses, Buck's guitar rises out of the mix with a propulsive riff that picks up song and singer and delivers them safely to R.E.M.'s most anthemic chorus in an age.

Not all of Accelerate is that optimistic, but the best bits are. On Houston, about people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, there's venom for the government but hope too ("Houston is filled with promise/Laredo's a beautiful place"), while Supernatural Superserious zooms from summer camp to a Harry Houdini reference to a classic pop climax ("inexperience, sweet, delirious/supernatural, superserious") with giddy confidence.

If there's anything to quibble with, it's that R.E.M.'s 14th album never quite generates the moody atmospherics of their first 10; it's a little hard to lose yourself in something that doesn't pause long enough for you to get lost. But then, judging R.E.M. by the acoustics of their back catalog may no longer be fair. The band is finally headed in a new direction, and getting there fast.