One of the ironies of R.E.M.'s long career has been their fairly impressive inability to structure their own albums into both coherent and interesting masses, the irony rooted in three remarkable exceptions: the jangling and often menacing I.R.S.-period "Life's Rich Pageant", the nigh-perfect expression of the American plains in "Automatic for the People", and the fuzzy, brave, quasi future-rock "Monster". As an R.E.M. fan you accept that for every hit, there are the near-hits, and the awful experiments, as the band reel somewhat pretentiously from what their last album really cost in spirit, rebuilding their own character through our generous donations to the cause of their emotional stock, so far removed from their college rock origins. With "Accelerate", the first sense of pay-off is present, but comes muddled, and, most disturbingly, in a self-parodying vehicle that has garnered a degree of critical praise.
The patch between 1996's still-underrated,
but never great, "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" (incidentally lead-singer Stipe's favourite R.E.M. album), and 2008's "Accelerate", is a fraught one, perforated by the poor and drummerless "Up" (Bill Berry's aneurysm necessitating an early retirement), the awkward, summery wafts of "Reveal", before the rudderless, "Leaving New York"-led "Around the Sun" almost completely destroyed the band's modern credibility and commercial viability (especially in the U.S.). Indeed, the only saving grace of R.E.M. since 1996 has been through compilations, and the release of the fairly-strong "Bad Day" (from "In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003"), which recaptured R.E.M.'s energy from the "Life's Rich Pageant" version of it ("PSA"), and modified it without nosing it through parody, a telling sign of how comfortable R.E.M. were with their original manifestation as late-night, atmospheric, often rocky, student radio fodder.
With 2008's "Accelerate", the idea of a retrospective look feels ill-conceived in that the revisits are done without the blunt honesty that great stop-gap, the album of Greatest Hits, provides: the time needed for thinking. Yet it is a sad state when one has to comment positively on "Accelerate" being precisely that, for as a fan, one can only consider it as for their own good, even if the album title feels, in common with much of their recent titular output, misapplied. Going quickly apparently only makes you go somewhere part of the time, and often the improvements in the album come on the back of a sense of drudging labour (multiple live shows of putting these songs together, the nine weeks in the studio taken to collate the album). If you listen closely, the most interesting aspect of the album comes therefore in the opening three tracks, "Living Well is the Best Revenge", "Man-Sized Wreath", "Supernatural Superserious", where the band are there to contend with the dismal failure of the last ten years, and to stall the criticism, rather than necessarily bypass the causes of it, which the tempo almost wills.
The above sequence would be worth congratulating if with the effort came self-knowledge and self-criticism, but sadly, this sense of trying to work an acceptable angle dissipates fairly quickly, and instead moves into several instances of awful choices ("I'm Gonna D.J." competing with Darren Hayes' "Bombs Up in My Face" for most ill-advised album song choice in the last few years, the latter threatening a genuinely adventurous album). In its best, but isolated parts the album sounds like a prologue to something better, which would a positive experience were it not that it is built on something akin to b-sides or outtakes from earlier albums of greater merit ("Until the Day is Done" and "Houston" being the most outwardly back-to-glory failures, dragging in straight politics, rather than the pop-culture and political mix of "Automatic for the People"). Songs like the aforementioned, "Supernatural Superserious", together with the energetic "Horse to Water", the rather apt "Hollow Man", and the album's fuzzy, expansive, best track, "Mr. Richards", do tip the record towards a re-expression that permits novelty and nostalgia, but much of the rest feels disingenuous, and in fact is one of the most peculiar, unintentional, self-parodies I have heard in several years.
Ciao Rating 2/5.
Tracklist follows:
1. "Living Well's The Best Revenge" 2. "Man-Sized Wreath" 3. "Supernatural Superserious" 4. "Hollow Man" 5. "Houston" 6. "Accelerate" 7. "Until The Day Is Done" 8. "Mr Richards" 9. "Sing For The Submarine" 10. "Horse To Water" 11. "I'm Gonna D.J."
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Apr 19th, 2008
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