Strange folk
R.E.M. get weird again
by Matt Ashare
The new R.E.M. album -- Up (Warner Bros., out this Tuesday), the band's
11th in 18 years, not counting EPs and compilations -- is almost certainly not
the sort of album R.E.M. fans were expecting or hoping for. It's also -- and in
this way alone it bears some resemblance to 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi
-- not the kind of album Warner Bros. must have told its accountants to
figure into long-term financial forecasts when the band were re-signed to a
rather enormous contract by the label a few years back. None of which is meant
to imply that I possess any special clairvoyant abilities when it comes to
divining the details of other people's expectations, or that the folks at
Gallup have been making their services available to the record industry.
No, it's just that four minutes and 12 seconds of nearly tuneless layered
keyboards and feedback drones accented by a cheap drum-machine beat and the
occasional burst of atonal electronic bass is very likely not what
anyone had in mind as an album opener for R.E.M. this time around, especially
when it's followed by 70 minutes of some of the more challenging music this
band have created in years -- heavy on the layered keyboards and strings, light
on guitar riffs and straightforward backbeats, chock full of cryptic lyrics
(which is nothing new, but, well, Michael Stipe really outdoes himself here)
and exotic percussion embellishments. There are accessible, vaguely familiar
moments: the galloping chorus of "Walk Unafraid" (with real drums), the
"Stand"-style guitar hook that powers "Lotus," Stipe's oddly soulful vocal (Al
Green comes to mind) on "Suspicion," the strange, skewed folk of "At My Most
Beautiful" and "Sad Professor" -- but these are few and far between. There are
no obviously close relatives to "Losing My Religion," "Everybody Hurts," or
"What's the Frequency Kenneth" on Up, just distant twisted cousins of
the hits that have put R.E.M. in a position where they actually have the clout
to persuade a major-label to release this sort of album.
And what sort of album is that? Well, bassist Mike Mills, one of only three
full-time R.E.M.-ers now that founding drummer Bill Berry's bought the farm
(no, he's not dead, just farming), suggests in the Anthony DeCurtis-penned
Warner Bros. "Media Information" for Up that it's a "headphones" album,
which is usually what artists say when they've really made a mess of things.
It's sort of like saying, "If you stand on your head and blink your eyes really
fast, that painting looks really cool." Or, "You have to get stoned to watch
that film." Mills goes on to offer a few more of the kind of choice words that
make major labels shudder and begin scouring their rosters for baby bands to
drop in the next fiscal year: "This could be a really good late-night,
by-yourself, in-the-dark kind of record to listen to." And guitarist Peter Buck
pounds a couple more verbal nails into the commercial coffin: "It's got a more
baroque, arranged sensibility."
Baroque? "By-yourself"? Yikes! Wonder whether Stipe, Mills, and Buck were
kicking themselves for letting Berry talk them into wasting the title
Monster back in 1994?
For a band who have enjoyed a remarkably controversy-free 18 years in the rock
business (no drug busts, rehabs, or excessive-speeding tickets, just a few
little medical mishaps, questions about the lyrics to "Radio Free Europe," and
those lingering doubts about the frontguy's sexual orientation), R.E.M. have
nonetheless spawned a decent number of disagreements. There are those who
believe, as legend has it, that four arty Athens college kids stumbled into
fame and fortune, and those who're convinced that, like U2, R.E.M. have had
some secret plan for world domination all along. There are those who argue that
R.E.M. were always a conventional rock band with an arty veneer drawing on
conventional sources like the Velvet Underground, Big Star, and the Byrds, and
others who insist that R.E.M. were always an arty band with a conventional
veneer drawing on unconventional sources like the Velvet Underground, Big Star,
and the Byrds. And there are those who believe that R.E.M. cashed in on and
ultimately corrupted the indie-rock underground of the '80s, and others who
argue that without R.E.M. the expression "indie-rock underground" wouldn't even
exist. What I think we can all agree on is that in some fundamental way R.E.M.
created the very notion of commercial alternative rock that we're all living
with today, and whether they did it by skewing the conventional or
conventionalizing the skewed has more to do with questions of personal taste
and politics than with those of musical form.
Up, I think, will have people raising once again these questions that
have remained mostly dormant in the '90s (we've had bigger things to deal with,
like, you know, who killed Kurt Cobain), because, unlike Out of Time,
Automatic for the People, and Monster, it's not an album that
goes down terribly easy. And unlike New Adventures in Hi-Fi, it can't be
written off as something the band threw together for the hell of it during
soundchecks on a tour. No, there's something intentionally unsettling, uneasy,
unconventional, and, yes, challenging about Up that brings to mind the
deliberate nonconformity of the band's first few releases -- the murky
production, soft snare, clean 'n' jangly guitar arpeggios, mumbled
vocals, and moody tone that set Chronic Town, Murmur, and
Reckoning apart, not only from the slick commercial mainstream of their
day, but also from the loud, fast rules of the post-punk underground and the
quirky synth-pop of new wave. Those albums were a lot stranger for their time
than most people seem to recall.
Stipe, who has stopped making sense again on Up, even refers to
Reckoning on the new "The Apologist," where he repeats the "sorry" as if
it were sort of mantra against a tension-ridden backdrop of dark guitar
feedback, droning organ, soft drumming, and piano. It's "So. Central Rain (I'm
Sorry)" revisited without Berry's steady backbeat or the country comfort of the
original. In a way, Up sounds like the left turn R.E.M. could have made
after Reckoning but didn't -- where 1985's Fables of the
Reconstruction might have headed if the sexy menace of "Feeling Gravity's
Pull" had been the rule rather than the exception. Of course, that might not
have left Berry with much to do. Up apparently employs two able drummers
-- Screaming Trees dude Barrett Martin, who also plays with Buck in an
instrumental side project named Tuatara, and Beck's pal Joey Waronker -- but
neither is prominently featured on most of the new tunes. As Anthony DeCurtis
aptly points out in the "Media Information": "A panoply of old-fashioned rhythm
machines and analog synthesizers from Buck's private collection amiably gurgle,
chug, blip, whoop, and clack through the entire album." Now that's a change.
And if at first, on the aforementioned opening "Airport Man" (a fragmented
character sketch, as best as I can tell, about a guy in an airport who "moves
efficiently" that draws its pathos from the idea that airports are some of the
saddest, loneliest places on earth), the synthetic rhythms are a little
distracting, eventually they become so woven into the fabric of the songs that
you hardly notice. "Hope," for example, begins with a drum-machine beat over
which organ and synths are piled until it barely makes any difference what's
moving things along, especially since, as the song gains momentum, so do
Stipe's lyrics, which appear to be addressed to a person dying of cancer, AIDS,
or some other terminal condition. "You want to trust the doctors/Their
procedure is the best/But the last try was a failure/And the intern was a
mess," he sings, reminding us that he's often at his funniest when the subject
matter is the saddest, and at his darkest when a song seems sweet on the
surface, as on "The One I Love." Or on the new "At My Most Beautiful," which is
ostensibly a love song with innocent Beach Boys background vocals, a Phil
Spector-style orchestral production, and downright spooky obsessional lyrics
like "At my most beautiful I count your eyelashes secretly." Or the new
"Diminished/I'm Not Over You," where the singer's selfless proclamations ("I
will give myself away") yield to a growing sense that he's on trial for the
murder of his lover, whom he then serenades in what sounds like a short,
home-recorded snippet of Stipe alone with a guitar (the "I'm Not Over You"
part).
Up features some of Stipe's most personal lyrics to date, which is
rock-critic code for "Good luck figuring out what the hell he's singing about."
As always, there are just enough clues to keep listeners interested -- lines
like "The bull and the bear are marking their territories" on the tuneful
ballad "Daysleeper" -- but not so many as to give the plot away. Perhaps the
most intriguing bits of verse are the ones that seem to suggest R.E.M. are
pulling into the homestretch. "I have to tell you dear readers/I'm not sure
where I'm headed," Stipe admits on "Sad Professor." And on "The Apologist" he
croons, "Thank you for being there for me/Thank you for listening goodbye."
R.E.M. used to joke that they were going to break up on New Year's Eve 1999 --
right before Y2K in the current lingo. But then, they also once promised that
if any member quit they wouldn't continue as a band. Up, however,
doesn't sound like a last gasp or any kind of betrayal. It sounds like the band
who invented the idea of commercial alternative have taken it upon themselves
to figure out what comes next. Fortunately that doesn't involve making the same
album over and over again. Up is a headphones album we can be grateful
for.