R.E.M. - Perfect Circle

REVEAL (2001)

THE LIFTING

One hundred and ninety thousand people. An oceanic crowd. The largest gathering ever seen at a show by the band from Georgia. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Rem touch the sky. By now they're superstars fully absorbed into the system, coddled by the music industry, liked by (almost) everyone. And yet they still want to desperately proclaim their otherness. A kind of "duplicity" that former Q editor Paul Du Noyer would call out in a scathing invective against "celebrity progressivism": "On one hand they happily reap the benefits of belonging to an American capitalist multinational, Time-Warner Aol; on the other, they reserve the right to play the rebels against the system and bite the hand that feeds them: it's an extremely comfortable position for them... I have more respect for Bono, because he shows an ever-growing awareness of the absurdity of what he does and what he is. I think Bono sees himself as a comic figure. Whereas I never get the impression that Rem realize how absurd they are. If anything, they seem downright self-important."

A stance that's emblematic of the difficulties Stipe and co. face in coming to terms with their new status as millionaire celebrities, which inevitably attracts not only mass approval but also widespread envy and dislike. Peter Buck, for his part, will sidestep the issue in his own way: "I shop at small, independent stores, and yet, as everyone knows, I work for the biggest label in the world. I see the contradictions, but I don't see why doing business with a huge multinational should rule out any kind of political activity, or anything else for that matter, given that practically everyone on Earth works for some big corporation. The music journalist slamming us probably works for a huge company owned by someone who also makes cigarettes and napalm." Hard to argue with that.

The real problem for Rem at this stage is a musical vein that's progressively losing its freshness. But while "Up" was a brave, if only partially successful, attempt to break free from their own roots by chasing turn-of-the-millennium sounds, "Reveal" tries to take refuge in safer, already well-trodden territory, ending up fueling the impression of mannerism, if not outright self-imitation. Paradoxical, then, right from the title, is the story of "Imitation Of Life", one of the standout tracks on the new record. "A few years ago we made a firm decision never to write another 'Rem-sounding' song again", Mills explains on the matter. "We threw away a ton of songs because they sounded too much like us... We felt Imitation Of Life belonged to that category. But everyone kept telling us we were crazy to want to drop it, so we kept it." With all due respect to Mills, though, one can't help but notice that plenty more imitations of Rem would follow on later albums.

For "Reveal", the now-trio from Athens relies on three sessionmen who had long since become permanent fixtures of the line-up: drummer Joey Waronker and multi-instrumentalists Ken Stringfellow and Scott McCaughey. The sound goes back to smoothing out the edges, becoming rounder, but also fuller and more orchestral. Better not to use the word so many will attach to it: "commercial". It's a visionary, melodic album meant as the band's tribute to the Sixties, but also to the vast American landscapes. "All twelve songs are set in big, wide-open, wild spaces", they explain, "and carry within them the feeling of air, of breath, of high-altitude flight".

This sense of brightness and airiness comes through best on the opening "The Lifting", propelled by piano breaks and reverb. The obsession with losing one's sense of gravity returns, in a story suspended between the urge to take flight and the inescapable weight of earthly troubles.

Grounded, 5 a.m.

The nightlite is comforting

But gravity is holding you

Once settled into sleep

You have watched, on repeat

The story of your life

Across the ceiling

And in review

Here returns the nightmare, described in the old "Feeling Gravitys Pulls", of being nailed to the ground, inexorably drawn down by the force of gravity. But by closing your eyes you can rise up, freeing yourself from life's uncertainties. There's a voice calling, inviting you to fly far away.

Now close your eyes

And start to breathe

Allow the noise to recede…

…Allow yourself to drift and fly away”

But you just stay

As if on a path of physical and spiritual healing, the protagonist of The Lifting tries to break through the narrow confines of his own existence, chasing a sense of relief and liberation.

The whole song plays on the sense of flight and contact with the elements of nature, so the intro also adds underwater sounds, which pair well with the mention of "oceans and sunken cities" found in the lyrics.

Once you had a dream

Of oceans and sunken cities

Memories of things you’ve never known

And you have never known

But in the end, the thrill of having visited mythical, boundless places feels like just a dream, vanished in the first light of morning. All that remains is a faded memory.

I’VE BEEN HIGH

Rising, transforming, overcoming adversity. A concept that recurs obsessively in Stipe's songs and that gains even greater force from here on. Stringfellow explains: "From 'Reveal' onward, it seems to me there's a lot of talk about personal transformation and overcoming, not just adversity, but also one's own limits and boundaries, those small traps and weak spots that hold a person back".

A concept that resurfaces in "I've Been High" too, whose incipit encapsulates the album's title.

Have you seen?

Have not, will travel

Have I missed the big reveal?

Do my eyes

Do my eyes seem empty?

I’ve forgotten how this feels

What is the “great revelation”? A new riddle added to the puzzle Stipe has been building for years, yet the rest of the song once again conveys a sense of searching, of overcoming one's own weaknesses, through a metaphysical journey (and certainly not a narcotic one, as some will claim).

I’ve been high

I've climbed so high

But life sometimes

It washes over me

So

I dive into a pool so cool and deep that if I sink I sink

And when I swim I fly so high

What I want

What I really want is

Just to live my life on high

The desire for a life at high altitude. An awareness reached by defeating every fear, like that of sinking into freezing waters or scaling peaks too steep to climb. A solemn, hazy meditation, woven with almost dance-like beats and driven by an aching organ, much like Stipe's vocals. According to Stringfellow, “I’ve Been High” “is the masterpiece of the record, it's like pushing forward the boundaries of the genre that musically defines R.E.M.” Credit goes to its stately, majestic pace, which ends up capturing you emotionally.

ALL THE WAY TO RENO (YOU’RE GONNA BE A STAR)

But the record's high point is, once again, a house specialty. A classic old-style ballad, one of those airy, enchanted numbers that Stipe can still paint with unmatched grace. “All The Way To Reno (You’re Gonna Be A Star).” The road to fame runs, inevitably, through Reno, Nevada.

Humming

All the way to Reno

You’ve dusted the non-believers

And challenged the laws of chance

Now, sweet

You were so sugar sweet

You may as well have had “kick me”

Fastened on your sleeve

You know what you are

You’re gonna be a star

A young, alluring prospect. A budding starlet making her way down the path to fame, brushing aside the skepticism of her detractors. But it's a road strewn with pitfalls. Especially if you let yourself be lulled too much by dreams. And that's when the suspicion can creep in that you've gone too far, that you've taken a reckless step.

Is written on your feet

Your Achilles heel

Is a tendency

To dream

But you’ve known that from the beginning

You didn’t have to go so far

You didn’t have to go

A simple, plain-spoken lyric, embellished however by a sumptuous musical frame: dreamy acoustic guitar arpeggios, delicate electronic textures woven by the keyboards, horns and strings – skilfully synthesized by Johnny Tate – that suggest a sense of romantic surrender. It will be the second single taken from the album.

SHE JUST WANTS TO BE

Unlike the starlet of “Reno”, the protagonist of “Just Want To Be” (whether male or female) really exists. “I think it's someone we've already met,” is all Buck will say. But once again the individual perspective widens, coming to encompass existential, universal doubts. To be or not to be, one might say. She just wants “to be”, perhaps after having called her own existence into question. Because in Stipe's songs, the search for one's own identity, for a new life, fuller and more fulfilling, always passes through a painful process of self-awareness.

It’s not that she walked away

Her world got smaller

All the usual places

The same destinations

Only something’s changed

It’s not that she wasn’t rewarded

With pomegranate afternoons

And Mingus, Chet Baker and chess

It’s not the stampeding fortune

Of prim affectations

She’s off on her own

But she knows

Now is greater than the whole of the past

Is greater, and now she knows

She just wants to be somewhere

She just wants to be

The reference to Mingus and Baker, two of Buck's favorites, led some to read it as a nod to the guitarist himself, while others saw in the idea of a new, "smaller" but also "better than before" life an allusion to Berry's departure. None of these interpretations has ever been confirmed; what is certain, though, is the quality of the music, with a lovely melody in the chorus, enhanced by Buck's riffs and exquisite arpeggios, as well as by the band's usual orchestral sweep.

SATURN RETURN

Among Michael Stipe's unsuspected passions is also one for astronomy. That's how this odd dissertation on the planet Saturn was born — the guardian of the solar system, which "subjugates" mankind.

Saturn is orbiting nothing

Is off on its own

Is breaking from home

Harder to look yourself square in the eye

Easy to take off […]

Cover the mirror, look to the sky

You climbed into your rocketship triumph

Lift up and hold out your hands

In myth, Saturn is the most terrifying of the planets, feared by mankind because it rules over grief and misfortune. The planet takes about 29 years and nine months to complete its full journey around the ecliptic, thus marking two crucial moments in a person's life: ages 29-30 and 58-59. These are, precisely, the Saturn Returns, two periods often associated with delicate phases of personal psychological change, especially the first, which precedes the definitive entry into adult life. But "Saturn Return" — also the theme of the eponymous 1998 musical — could mean arriving at a condition of peace and serenity: which is why the song's protagonist, symbolically, boards a spaceship to reach the planet. "A new gravity", another form of gravity, reached once again through elevation and transcendence, the dominant concepts of the whole of "Reveal". Among the various characters mentioned in the lyrics is also Galileo ("to wake Galileo"), namely the very man who discovered Saturn's ring.

A singular, eccentric track in R.E.M.'s catalogue, and not only because of its lyrics: the music was in fact composed on keyboard by Buck and built as a kind of imaginative collage of loops and parts played live by Stringfellow.

IMITATION OF LIFE

After lulling themselves in these disorienting lullabies, R.E.M. rediscover the decisive swagger of their rock anthems on the album's lead single, that "Imitation Of Life" which - nomen omen - raises doubts about just how original their output really was in those years. Because there's no denying that the hooks and harmonic devices Stipe and co. keep skilfully orchestrating are by now the fruit of a certain self-referentiality. Like that very "Talk About The Passion"-esque wall of guitars the song rests on. The lyrics, too, go back to drawing on the nonsense and crypticism of Stipe's earliest work. A jumble of words, phrases and concepts that, strung together, manage to conjure a certain musicality. "It's pure linguistic suggestion," the singer himself would later explain.

Charades, pop skill

Water hyacinth, named by a poet

Imitation of life

Like a koi in a frozen pond

Like a goldfish in a bowl

I don’t want to hear you cry

That’s sugarcane that tasted good

That’s cinnamon that’s hollywood

C’mon c’mon no one can see you cry

The references to koi – a tropical fish often used as an ornamental pond fish – and to the goldfish trapped in its glass bowl, combined with the title, hint at a deeper meaning beneath the song: what we live is often just an imitation of life, a simulacrum, an appearance, caged within routine and the artificiality of our behavior. Like that of the shivering girl, forced to hide her true feelings at a fashion event.

Like a Friday fashion show teenager

Freezing in the corner

Trying to look like you don’t try

The relationship between real life and simulation has, after all, always been an obsession of Stipe's, who has often been forced to experience its contradictions firsthand. But there's also a touch of artifice in the music itself, brimming with a euphoria that at times sounds deliberately overstated.

I’LL TAKE THE RAIN

But even when dusting off the usual tricks of the trade, the Georgians can still stir real emotion – especially when the melodic magic of their golden years comes to their aid. Such is the case with this semi-acoustic ballad, steeped in a melancholic, fatalistic spleen. A long (by their standards) excursion through suspended memories and emotions, enriched by a striking instrumental interlude.

The rain came down

The rain came down

The rain came down on me

The wind blew strong

And summer’s song

It fades to memory

Almost a passive acceptance of an ineluctable fate, symbolized by the changing of the seasons, with rain washing away the faded memory of summer. Perhaps a necessary stage in that process of maturation/transformation the album constantly alludes to. It seems Stipe is suggesting that to fully live out a love story, you have to be willing to descend into its darkest corners as well.

I used to think, as birds take wing

They sing through life, so why can’t we?

We cling to this, and claim the best

If this is what you’re offering

I’ll take the rain, I’ll take the rain, I’ll take the rain

And yet, even amid the folds of its most crepuscular ballads, a thread of light always seeps through. Because “Reveal” is the sunny, springtime side of “Up”. With the rhythm section restored—buried in its predecessor out of respect for departed friend Berry—the album refines those same electronic instincts, grafting a series of effects onto the classic scaffolding of quintessentially R.E.M. ballads. But above all, it's a record that basks in the past, in that melodic vein that has always been the fortune of the Athens outfit, recovering with class and mannerism what was inevitably lost in freshness and originality. And in the end, it stays afloat. So much so that much of the critical establishment will end up preferring it to its predecessor, while the band itself will describe it in almost overly enthusiastic terms: “I like to think that when our career is over and people go back to listen to our records, Reveal will be one of the three or four they single out among them all, and say: ah yes, that's what R.E.M. were like,” claims Buck, also convinced that it contained “a good deal of the dance music that Michael and I used to listen to, without it actually being a dance record.”

The American public will be somewhat less enthusiastic, greeting it with lower-than-expected sales (700,000 copies). But Warner itself won't exactly go all out on the promotion. “Just look at what's in the charts right now… we're not particularly in vogue in the United States,” the guitarist will conclude. Europe, by now the band's second home in every sense, will instead pay it far warmer tribute, propelling “Reveal” to the top of the British, German and French charts. It's no coincidence that the crucial moment of the promotional campaign will be a free concert in Cologne, Germany, in front of 100,000 people. In the end, outside its homeland, the album will sell five million copies, confirming the unchanged commercial power of the Athens band—even in its “three-legged dog” incarnation.

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11/05/2026