[New Music] REM - Accelerate

I haven't listened to the new album as yet in whole, but the track "Houston" is pretty good. I like the slower songs like "Until the Day is Done" as well.



I listened to this ten minute preview of all the tracks.

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R.E.M. has been one of my favorite bands in the past, however, they are weirdly inconsistent. Most of their albums I love or really like but some I can't stand. For example, I felt Reveal was great but Around the Sun was just OK and I could never get into Monster. Usually if I like an artist I can listen to an album several times until I get it but the R.E.M. albums I don't like just never do it for me.

 

Well, they did start their career with 8 straight solid albums (well, I'd say 6 of them can be classified as classics, and the other two are just good). How many bands have done that?

Agreed though, they have been inconsistent since Monster. I think New Adventures in Hi-Fi has been there only real memorable album since Automatic for the People.

Oh, and this albums sounds awesome based on that preview.

 

I have to admit, I haven't listened to REM since Document. The whole Losing My Religion phenomenon spelled the end of my REM fandom. I didn't like all these other people jumping on the bandwagon after me and my friends had been listening to them for a decade already.

Yes, I'm a musical snob.

I'm hearing good things about this album, so I guess I'll give it a shot. But I've gotten my hopes up before about a long-time favorite band of mine being "back" only to be let down (see RHCP's Californication), so I'm going to try not to get my hopes up.

 

I'm really hoping REM can make a "comeback." Around the Sun was the first album of theirs that I didn't buy, which is saying a lot since REM was a huge part of my high school years!

Leaked videos of them performing the new songs sounds awesome, though! Agree with Oski that bringing the touring drummer makes a big difference.

It's almost like they felt like they'd be "cheating" on Bill Berry if they brought a drummer into the studio full-time, but they've "moved on" with this record.

Check out this 4-star review in the new Rolling Stone. Sounds very, very promising.

When their original drummer, Bill Berry, quit in 1997, R.E.M. became more than "a three-legged dog," as singer Michael Stipe famously put it at the time. Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills actually turned into a pair of trios, two very different bands, for the next ten years. One was the studio R.E.M. of Up, Reveal and Around the Sun: wounded but determined, making a stately, reflective pop rich in psychedelic luster and heavy with ballads about faith and doubt. Then there was the concert R.E.M. Armed with longtime second guitarist Scott McCaughey and, in recent years, ex-Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin, Stipe, Buck and Mills charged the musical exploration and internal debate on those records with the dirty-silver jangle and get-in-the-van surge of R.E.M.'s quartet-era classics, such as 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant and 1987's Document.

Accelerate is the first studio album by that post-Berry stage band, and it is one of the best records R.E.M. have ever made. Much of Accelerate was cut in live-band takes and even tested onstage during a run in Dublin last summer, and it shows. Guitars are front and center, in slashing-chord and rusted-arpeggio crossfires, as if you've got R.E.M.'s 1982 EP Chronic Town and the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks spinning in your CD tray at the same time. "Man-Sized Wreath," "Supernatural Superserious" and "Horse to Water" rattle and zoom like buried treasures from an old club-tour set list. And there is nothing soft or shy about the slower darkness either. In "Houston," a stark snapshot of post-Katrina exile ("If the storm doesn't kill me/The government will"), crude fuzz drones and ham-fisted organ chords roll over Buck's acoustic guitar and the fighter's will in Stipe's voice ("I was taught to hold my head high. . . . Make the best of what today has") like oily floodwater.

But the R.E.M. on Accelerate is also the one I saw at New York's Madison Square Garden right after 2004's Vote for Change Tour — and two nights after Bush's re-election. Bummed but unbowed, they opened the show with loud, fast defiance — "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" — and they do the same thing here, with "Living Well Is the Best Revenge." "Don't turn your talking points on me/History will set me free/The future is ours, and you don't even rate a footnote," Stipe sings in a rapid, ecstatic near-shout over flying fists of guitar and racing bass and drums. And that's just the start of the blowback. "Nature abhors a vacuum/But what's between your ears?" he snaps in "Man-Sized Wreath," a bitter laugh at empty pomp and sound-bite patriotism, aimed at sheep and herders alike. And whoever "Mr. Richards" is, he gets his just desserts — "Mr. Richards, your conviction/Had us cheering in the kitchen" — served with Buck and McCaughey's bristling-glam guitars.

Stipe has not sounded this viscerally engaged in his singing and poetically lethal in his writing since the twilight of the Reagan administration. But he is not merely protesting the mess of the nation. Accelerate is total-victory rock, Stipe making promises he knows he can keep — "You weakened shill . . . Savor your dying breath" ("Living Well") — because he's not alone. The apocalypse is obvious in "Sing for the Submarine," an urban-holocaust update of Crosby, Stills and Nash's hippie-escape plan "Wooden Ships." So is the strength in numbers. "It's all a lot less frightening/Than we would've had it be," Stipe insists, as Mills swoops way behind him in guardian-angel harmony. (Mills' vocals, too often taken for granted, are frequent literal high points on the album, the reassuring sunlight on Stipe's gritty delivery.) And in "Hollow Man," Stipe concedes his own needs and ****-ups, then calls for help — "Corner me and make me something" — in a stunning mix of tender-piano ballad and big-guitar chorus that sums up the commitment that makes true loves, democracies and great rock bands possible.

Ultimately, the best thing about Accelerate is that R.E.M. sound whole again, no longer three-legged but complete in their bond and purpose. "Music will provide the light you cannot resist," Stipe crows at the end of the record, in the atomic frivolity of "I'm Gonna DJ." And you can believe him — because he and his band believe in themselves again.

 

I wouldn't give it a shot if I were you. Too many other people already said they liked it.

No offense, but what a r****ded reason to stop listening to a band.

 

5 songs into the new CD, and every song is awesome!

Sounds like some of the Document/Green/Monster era stuff. Even some Chronic Town thrown in on the first track.

Tickets go on sale tomorrow AM for the Philly show, and I'm down. These tracks will rock live!

 

Don't get me wrong, most all of their early to mid stuff was great. Plus I think that Reveal is up there with Automatic. I just think that it's weird that a band I like so much can come out with an albums that I just don't like (i.e. Monster). Usually I can listen to something enough times to "get" it but not in that case!

 

They looked pretty good on the Today show this morning.

 

That is snobbish ima_. A decade, huh? You were listening to them for an entire year BEFORE they had a record out. Did you live in Athens ? In Stipe's apartment? Why didn't you split immediatley after they signed w/ Warner Brothers?



anywhat, good album, maybe not classic, but good.

 

Digging it very much.

 

I heard a sample of the Houston song this morning on the radio.