Twelfth studio album for REM, the second as a trio: and the first thing to note is that it's impossible to avoid turning any release of theirs into an excuse to take stock of their twenty-year career, dotted with fine albums and at least a couple of masterpieces. So we won't shy away from doing just that.
Well, the most obvious thing that emerges from listening to the new album is that REM are probably no longer a band capable of surprising us. Even though they manage to churn out impressively consistent, perfect pop songs like "Imitation Of Life". It's as if, having reached the high point of their artistic journey years ago (shall we say with "Automatic For The People"?), they've needed ever since to justify each subsequent work with some practical/artistic impulse: the punk album, the rock one, the experimental one. Nothing wrong with that, to be clear: maintaining such artistic consistency and such critical and commercial credit twenty-one years after their debut doesn't come without costs, and you certainly can't expect Stipe and co. to keep endlessly evolving (toward what, anyway?) a sound that's by now well established yet still capable of capturing hearts and ears. For this new work, the band, having by now grown comfortable with the three-piece line-up, rallies around McCarthy's production and enlists Joey Waronker (drummer for Beck, already having worked on "Up") on drums and former Posies member Ken Stringfellow on guitar.
"Reveal" is the sunny counterpart to "Up": it restores the rhythm section, submerged on its predecessor in homage to Berry's absence, and cultivates the electronic detours already present on that album, treating them in a far from reverent way, a series of effects that sprout in the shadows, not at all organic to the songs' classic ballad structure. Like "Up", "Reveal" contains some priceless gems, but it fails to fully dispel its shadows. Shadows of the past, above all, because what has always been seen as an essential strength, the REM trademark, the unshakeable stylistic element that identifies their sound, is starting to become a burden.
Despite the vaguely dub treatment given to the strings coiled around the melody in the opening "The Lifting", one of the best things on the album. Despite "I've Been High" tangling repeated electronic textures around Stipe's oblique vocal delivery. There are elements of evolution in "Reveal", but it's an evolution so quiet as to be almost invisible, especially since the sonic quality of the work seems tired and listless, unable to fully develop the new themes it introduces (the driving electricity of "She Just Wants To Be", the nervous intro of "Disappear") and all too quick to settle back into well-worn sounds and melodies.
Better, then, to appreciate the more frivolous side (isn't this a summer album, after all?) explored by the delightful single "Imitation Of Life", with Buck supplying his trademark jingle-jangle and Stipe cultivating a killer refrain, the sixties fragrance of "Beat A Drum", in the vein of the band's lighter material, and the successful Beach Boys impression of "Summer Turns To High". Or admire the REM-esque classicism of a track like "All The Way To Reno". And enjoy the sunshine.
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25/10/2006
This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Rudie, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
Tracklist
- 1. The Lifting
- 2. I've Been High
- 3. All The Way To Reno (You're Gonna Be A Star)
- 4. She Just Wants To Be
- 5. Disappear
- 6. Saturn Return
- 7. Beat A Drum
- 8. Imitation Of Life
- 9. Summer Turns To High
- 10. Chorus And The Ring
- 11. I'll Take The Rain
- 12. Beachball
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