Music: REM * * * *
Accelerate (Warner Bros)
REM - Accelerate
Many long-term fans of the Athens, Georgia band have noted that REM were never quite the same after founding member, drummer Bill Berry, quit in the middle of 1997. Perhaps the finest American band of the 1980s, and unlikely contenders for world’s biggest group in the early 1990s, REM had simply run out of steam, content to release the odd good single, but failing to come close to the consistent excellence that had been their stock in trade for a freakishly long time.
Accelerate is a resurrection album – 11 urgent tracks that weigh in at 34 minutes. It’s the band’s shortest album ever, a good 20 minutes leaner than 1996’s New Adventures In Hi-Fi.
An alternative name could have been ‘New Adventures In Lo-Fi’ such is the album’s raw power – Buck’s guitar is gloriously to the fore, Mills’ bass has never been punchier, and touring drummer Bill Rieflin is no longer just a stand-in. Clearly a change of producer — Garret “Jacknife” Lee replacing fellow Dubliner Pat McCarthy — has played its part too.
REM haven’t felt as revitalised as this in a very long time, and many of the songs recall the urgency and directness of mid-1980s albums such as Life’s Rich Pageant and Document.
There are even name-checks to old songs (Feeling Gravitys Pull) and newer ones (Electron Blue) on Sing To The Submarine — one of the album’s standouts.
Accelerate lives up to its name on the opening salvo. Living Well Is The Best Revenge tears out of the traps, sounding every bit as incendiary as it did when played live at the band’s ‘working rehearsal’ shows at Dublin’s Olympia last summer.
The pulse-quickening Man--Sized Wreath has been trimmed of excess fat – it makes its point in two-and-a-half minutes.
And Supernatural Superserious – the lead single and bearing a title apparently suggested by Coldplay’s Chris Martin – gets better on each listen. It’s got those key REM constituents: a vintage Stipe vocal; Buck magic on Rickenbacker and Mills back to his harmonising best.
It’s an angry album too. Houston – no doubt inspired by a post-Katrina New Orleans – finds Stipe especially worked up: “If the storm doesn’t kill me the government will.”
And Living Well Is The Best Revenge reportedly offers an attack on the US president. “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.”
The album is not without its weak points – the title track is flimsy and Until The Day Is Done lacks the potency of its stable-mates.
But it ends on a high with the goofy garage punk belter I’m Gonna DJ – essentially an updated version of It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine), and nowadays REM’s concert closer.
It also boasts one of the loveliest lines Michael Stipe has yet penned: “Music will provide the light you cannot resist.”
Burn it: Supernatural Superserious; Living Well Is The Best Revenge; Horse To Water
