R.E.M. - Perfect Circle

AROUND THE SUN (2004)

LEAVING NEW YORK

Increasingly television celebrities and less and less stage animals (as Milena Ferrante recalls, “after the end of the Monster Tour the band appeared live in front of fans for a total of just three months in six years”), R.E.M. nevertheless don't abandon their social and political commitment, taking part in various initiatives, from the benefit concert organized in Seattle for the Groundwork Foundation to the Carnegie Hall benefit in New York for Gay Men's Health Crisis, celebrating twenty years of the fight against AIDS, all the way to the Love Rocks Concert in Los Angeles, where Stipe joins Bono, by now pop's humanitarian star, for his campaign in favor of debt cancellation for African countries.

But the band's public dimension had by now become so intertwined with showbiz that their appearance in an episode of The Simpsons, or a question about one of their songs on a TV quiz show like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, could hardly come as a surprise, nor could it be surprising that the trio had finally given in to the commercial law of the greatest hits, with “In Time – The Best Of R.E.M. 1988-2003”.

So, perhaps to carve out a corner of independence for himself, Stipe devotes himself to photography and to his film projects with C-Hundred and Single Cell, while Buck, by now permanently settled in Seattle, picks up his guitar in service of a swarm of side bands, perhaps also to forget the London misadventure of April 21, 2001, when at Heathrow airport he was stopped by police on charges of having assaulted some crew members during the flight while visibly drunk (it would be Bono himself who testified in his favor in court, swearing he had never seen him drunk).

Older, perhaps less motivated, perhaps satisfied by the mega-deal with Warner – those 80 million dollars pocketed to produce about ten albums on a two-year cycle – the former Oconee Street squatters seem, however gracefully, to be heading down the home stretch, no longer able to keep pace with their old friends/rivals U2, who keep selling out stadiums and shifting stacks of records (not always deservedly). “Music for me is a religious experience,” and again: “Life is too short to do what you don't like,” Stipe kept telling the press, desperately in search of new stimuli. It would be Bono himself, as Ferrante again recalls, who reassured him, with a mix of wisdom and cynicism, reminding him that “you can write songs that aren't exceptional too, you just have to do it.” And Michael would do just that.

“Around The Sun” (2004), recorded by the trio together with bassist Scott McCaughey and guitarist Ken Stringfellow, is perhaps the weakest chapter in R.E.M.'s entire discography. Playing the anti-Bush election-controversy card isn't enough for Stipe and co. to restore freshness to a musical proposition now light years away from the agit-pop of the golden IRS years, from “Cuyahoga,” from “Orange Crush” and the other eco-pacifist anthems of the Eighties. What's missing, instead, are the truly great songs, the tracks worthy of joining that ideal R.E.M. anthology which the Athens band had punctually managed to enrich with every new release. Even the three key concepts of the album announced by Stipe – “ascent, speed and movement” – hardly represented an extraordinary novelty in the Georgians' poetics.

The single “Leaving New York” drags wearily through the usual chiming guitars and Stipe's modulated murmuring, until that melodic flash of the chorus arrives to give us back, for a moment, the lost magic. The lyrics are an act of love for the city still wounded by the tragic events of September 11th, colored by new reflections on loneliness and detachment.

You might have laughed if I told you

You might have hidden a frown

You might have succeeded in changing me

I might have been turned around

It's easier to leave

Than to be left behind

Leaving was never my proud

Leaving New York, never easy

I saw the light fading out

So, setting aside his old reticence, the man who once rejected sentimentality pulls out of his pocket the long-feared word "love." And he does it twice.

I told you, forever

I love you forever

I told you I love you

I love you forever

You never, you never

You told me forever

It's hard to imagine the Stipe of the Eighties even flirting with such levels of mawkishness. But the main problem with a ballad like “Leaving New York” is that, however impeccably crafted, it's unclear what it actually adds to its countless predecessors (from “Everybody Hurts” to “Daysleeper”).

ELECTRON BLUE

If there's one novelty to be found on “Around The Sun”, it's the choice to scale back the role of electric guitars, shining the spotlight instead on Stipe's vocals and on the gradual layering of strings, piano, Hammond organ and keyboards. The idea might have been intriguing, but the result doesn't fully convince in the late-period U2-style synth-pop of “Electron Blue”, an almost dance-like novelty (after all, McCarthy had worked with Madonna) that never quite takes off despite the drum machine pulses and piano chimes.

Scarred by a persistent electronic drone, Stipe unspools a new string of abstract, enigmatic images, musing on adventures at the edges of oceans and new ascents toward unfathomable dimensions.

The light has started to fade

Your high is timed

You found the climb

It’s hard to focus on more than what’s

In front of you, electron blue

Adventure rings with a page

And when

It dawns on you, it singes blue

Your buzz beginning to wane

Adventure has laid its claim on you

It’s all you want to do

You, you know where to run

You run electron blue

Further on, there's a hint of the storm (“electric storm”), hence the reference in the title, namely the electrical discharges formed by electrons of blue colour.

THE FINAL STRAW

As the United States slides inexorably towards military intervention in Iraq, Rem sound the alarm. An appeal broadcast as a preview on the REMhq.com website, meant to strike straight at the conscience of every American: "This is the strongest message we could send - the band announce on the web page - We had to send an immediate message. We pray for the lives of all the people involved, the military, the Iraqi civilians, the refugees, the prisoners of war, the families of soldiers, the innocent; we pray that they are well and out of harm's way. All safe at home."

The music, in truth, already existed, crafted by Buck back in the Monster days, but had probably been deemed too soft to make it onto the album of the rock comeback. Because "The Final Straw" is an invective delivered in a hushed voice, a litany brimming with restrained anger, composed and almost elegant in its measured pace, punctuated by electronic effects and a sinister acoustic guitar with a western flavour. It's hardly a masterpiece, but it manages to capture the lump in the throat that weighs on post-9/11 America.

If hatred makes a play on me tomorrow

And forgiveness takes a back seat to revenge

There’s a hurt down deep that has not been corrected

There’s a voice in me that says you will not win

And if I ignore the voice inside

Raise a half glass to my home

But it’s there that I am most afraid

And forgetting doesn’t hold. It doesn’t hold

Now I don’t believe and I never did

That two wrongs make a right

If the world were filled with the likes of you

Then I'm putting up a fight. I'm putting up a fight

Putting up a fight. Make it right. Make it right

Two wrongs, then, don't make a right, and so it can't be another war that brings back peace and democracy, Stipe suggests, condemning the logic of humanitarian intervention on which the George W. Bush administration would build its fortunes (but also, in the end, its downfall). At a time of growing disaffection toward the president among an ever-wider slice of American society, Stipe let loose with fiery statements in an interview with Darren David for Launch News: "America, damn it, what are we doing? I can't believe we've come to this point... I still can't believe we're a democracy and that the president was elected in a non-democratic way by the Supreme Court, which in turn was created by his father... So isn't that a little too convenient?"

THE WORST JOKE EVER

It's on the front of melancholy ballads, in any case, that the Georgians still manage to stay afloat, even while recycling solutions already widely tried out in the past. In any case, if there's one track on this record to add to an ideal "best of" for the band, it can only be "The Worst Joke Ever," a dark, aching slow number, embellished with soft acoustic flourishes and delivered by Stipe in a most poignant register. All to tell "the worst joke of all time," a self-mocking existential meditation on the need for change and the obstacles standing in its way.

Give me a minute and I’ll tell you the setup for

The worst joke ever, I never

I’ll tell you my version of the greatest life story

Don't bore me

Now I am floating

I feel released

The moorings have been dropped

The weights unleashed

Everything is crystalline, simple and free

The crime of good men who can’t wrestle with change

Or are too afraid to face this life’s misjudged unknowns

You're not hurting anybody else's chances

But you're disfiguring your own

An invitation not to ruin one's own life by refusing change and letting fear take over. With the ever-present desire to "cast off the moorings" and rise up, floating free in the air, with no more weights or ties holding you down.

AROUND THE SUN

Muted and radiant, plucked on guitar strings and whispered with an almost soul-inflected tone, the title track recaptures the sinuous stride of the old days, though without a chorus to match. With that touch of self-assurance and self-regard that had been missing from Stipe's lyrics for quite some time now.

I want the sun to shine on me

I want the truth to set me free

I wish the followers would lead

With a voice so strong it could knock me to my knees

Hold on world 'cause you don't know what's coming

Hold on world 'cause I'm not jumping off

Hold onto this boy a little longer

Take another trip around the sun

The swagger of someone who refuses to throw in the towel and still wants to call the shots, against all odds. But with Around The Sun, it's impossible not to utter the word flop. Sales were disappointing, and much of the critical reception was negative. These aren't bad songs, nor poorly arranged ones, but they seem propped up by an orchestra of replicants endlessly running through the same score. Not even the addition of new drummer Bill Rieflin, formerly of Ministry, behind the kit is enough to recover any real spark. It's tepid music, lacking backbone, drifting past like a gust of morning breeze.

But for R.E.M., perhaps, the only thing that mattered was staying alive. And finding the chance to finally get back to playing live, in front of their audience. The Around The World Tour would indeed circle the globe through 2005. And the first dates (from October 1st to 10th) would triumphantly coincide with Vote for Change, a tour across the US devised by Bruce Springsteen to push Americans to vote for Democrat John Kerry and against the Bush administration in the November 2004 election.

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12/05/2026