R.E.M. - Perfect Circle

ACCELERATE (2008)

LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REVENGE

One last burst of acceleration before the final stretch. The resounding flop of “Around The Sun” (a mere 240,000 copies sold in the US) left its mark. Perhaps also because the dialogue within the band had broken down, that relentless engine that had fuelled their creativity, even at the cost of furious backstage rows. Disaffection grows among fans, but above all in the music press, which by now doesn't hold back from openly suggesting the band hang up their instruments for good. Yet the band's fervour for civic engagement never wanes. On 21 June 2007, Amnesty International released a covers compilation of John Lennon songs, “Make Some Noise: The Amnesty International Campaign To Save Darfur”, aimed at drawing attention to the genocide that had ravaged the Sudanese region for years, and R.E.M. took part in the project with a moving rendition of “#9 Dream”, joined in the studio by Bill Berry for the first time in over ten years.

The Georgians, in short, aren't giving up: they hit the accelerator, crank up the volume and polish up their guitars again, just like in the days of “Monster”, unleashing their most driving album of the past decade. “Accelerate”, fittingly enough. Nomen omen for a record of honest, no-frills rock, lean and concise (35 minutes in total), featuring the freshest, most spirited songs Stipe had written since the band became a “three-legged dog”.

Having tossed violins and mandolins into the nettles, the Georgians return to essentials and a “first-take” approach: the new songs were born live in Dublin and began circulating through various bootlegs. New producer Jacknife Lee, who had already worked with U2 and the decade's new sensations like Editors, Bloc Party and Snow Patrol, works by subtraction, stripping everything down and focusing on drive and immediacy. The result is a revitalised sound, though still dangerously perched on the edge of déjà vu. The opening of “Living Well Is The Best Revenge”, for instance, recalls the breathless gallop of “These Days”, with its guitars let off the leash and blasted at full volume, the drums pounding fiercely, while Stipe's hoarse voice rattles off words in a rapid-fire stream. But even when imitating themselves, R.E.M. remain nonchalant enough never to seem shameless: here, they're helped by a fuller, more modern rock sound, at times perhaps even too heavy for Buck's (guitar) strings.

The album's central theme is a hyperkinetic, alienating future which, under the alibi of technological progress, diverts attention from the planet's wounds. “I was inspired by the current state of our country - when the empire is going down the toilet, it's easy to write great angry songs”, Stipe would pithily remark. Hence “the only revenge is living well”, as the title of the opening track has it, borrowed from a line by the metaphysical poet George Herbert.

It’s only when your poison spins into the life you’d hoped to live

That suddenly you wake up in a shaking panic – wow!

You set me up like a lamb to slaughter

Garbo as a farmer's daughter

Unbelievable, the gospel according to who?

I lay right down

All your sad and lost apostles hum my name and flare their nostrils

Choking on the bones you toss to them

Well I’m not one to sit and spin

‘Cause living well’s the best revenge

Baby, I am calling you on that

These are the recriminations of someone who feels treated like “a lamb to slaughter” and refuses to passively accept his fate, sitting around and spinning aimlessly (“sit and spin”), opting instead for a life lived fully as the best antidote to bitterness. Almost a proud assertion of independence, reinforced by the lines that follow.

Don’t turn your talking points on me, history will set me free

The future’s ours and you don’t even read the footnote now!

A two-faced invective that can be read both on a personal level (a comeback against the criticism heaped upon him?) and on a public one: Stipe again draws on his imagery steeped in religious symbolism (the gospel, the apostles, the sacrificial lamb) for an all-out denunciation of the hypocrisy of the ruling right wing, which uses religion for anything but ethical ends: “I come from a religious family, my father and my father's father were preachers,” the singer would recall. “I wanted to talk about how faith had been hypocritically exploited by the government, which realized just how useful a pool of votes the faithful could be.”

SUPERNATURAL SUPERSERIOUS

Synthesis is the new watchword. And the album's lead single rediscovers its lost freshness with just the bare essentials: Buck's incandescent riffs, a rhythm that's more driving than it's been in ages, and Mills's spot-on, ever-impeccable backing vocals. Recorded, like many other tracks on the record, at Dublin's Olympia Theatre in 2007 and originally titled "Disguised", the song got its new name thanks to an unlikely tip from Chris Martin: "We were in a studio in Soho," Stipe told the BBC, "and in the room next to ours were Coldplay, who are good friends of ours. He heard our track and told us: 'Great song, but the title's terrible.' So he suggested 'Supernatural Superserious' and we were all immediately thrilled with it."

Preceded in the liner notes by a quote from Harry Houdini (“My brain is the key that sets me free”), it's an anthem to the clumsiest, most embarrassing side of adolescence, with all its painful experiences to face and exorcise: “It's like one of those awful middle-school class photos, where you're standing there with the stupidest glasses on. And the worst part is that now anyone can see you on the internet. We've all had embarrassing moments in our teenage years that maybe ended up shaping our lives. I'm talking about a disastrous séance at a summer camp, which later manifested itself in life as a completely amusing kind of sexual deviance" (Milena Ferrante, R.E.M. 1979-2009).

Everybody here

Comes from somewhere

But they would just as soon forget

And disguise

At the summer camp where you volunteered

No one saw your face, no one saw your fear

If that apparition had just appeared

Took you up and away from this place and sheer humiliation

Of your teenage station

Nobody cares no one remembers and nobody cares

Yeah you cried and you cried

He’s alive he’s alive/a lie

Ah, you cried and you cried and you cried and you cried

All those present

In the end, a veil of irony covers, discreetly, the embarrassing memories of that tragicomic séance (“the séance where you first betrayed”). It was just “a zen experience”, a sweet delirium of teenage naivety.

Zen experience sweet delirious

Supernatural superserious

Inexperience sweet delirious

Supernatural superserious

Wow!

Zen Experience Sweet Delirious

Supernatural Superserious

Inexperience Sweet Delirious

Supernatural Superserious

Wow!

It's largely thanks to this single that R.E.M. climb back up the charts, winning over a new generation of fans as well.

HOLLOW MAN

But even when they veer into midtempo territory, Stipe and co. show real signs of a comeback. “Hollow Man” sways between languid beds of piano and sudden guitar surges, with Stipe's voice just slightly clouded by a veil of smoke. The theme is once again speed, the frantic pace of life that overwhelms and confuses individuals, emptying them of their identity.

I’ve been lost inside my head

Echoes fall on me

I took the priceless night for complicated mess

Persuading things I didn’t mean and don’t believe

Believe in me

Believe in nothing

Corner me

And make me something

I’ve become the hollow man, I

I’ve become the hollow man I see

A sense of confusion and disorientation looms, against which the protagonist wages a titanic struggle, in the hope of proving that the trust someone had placed in him was not misplaced.

I'm overwhelmed

I’m on repeat

I’m emptied out

I’m incomplete

You trusted me

I want to show you

I don’t want to be the hollow man

Frenzy, in short, as a woodworm gnawing away at our lives, wearing down even the sturdiest relationships. The acoustic instruments blend perfectly with Buck's feedback, capturing that very sense of jarring contrast between calm and chaos.

HOUSTON

But even amid the chaos, there's always time to reflect and question. Because the civic fever of those Athens kids who called themselves "concerned" (on the These Days poster) hasn't faded, not even after the avalanches of dollars that buried them. Stipe rediscovers all his polemical vis, railing against the devastation of New Orleans wrought by the American government, incapable of protecting the "French pearl" of the Deep South from the devastating fury of Hurricane Katrina.

A two-minute folk'n'roll miniature, chanted over a sinister organ and smeared with obsessive electric distortion.

If the storm doesn’t kill me the government will

I’ve got to get that out of my head

It’s a new day today and the coffee is strong

I’ve finally got some rest

So a man’s put to task and challenges

I was taught to hold my head high

Collect what is mine

Make the best of what today has

Hurricane Katrina caused at least 1,836 deaths, resulted in $81.2 billion in damages, and became the costliest natural disaster in US history. The catastrophic failure of the flood protection system in New Orleans led to a shake-up within the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency solely mandated by Congress with designing and building the levee system. But the reaction of the federal, state and local governments also sparked fierce controversy: following a Congressional investigation, Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael D. Brown was forced to resign. This is what Stipe is alluding to when he speaks of a “second murder” committed by the government, after the hurricane. But what seems to have really enraged him was an ill-judged remark by former first lady Barbara Bush, who, visiting the homeless in Houston, Texas, remarked that the transfer from New Orleans to the Astrodome was going remarkably well, given that these were "underprivileged" people anyway (Milena Ferrante, R.E.M. 1979-2009). Faced with such insensitivity and incompetence, there's no point placing any faith in the government and its empty promises.

Houston is filled with promise

Laredo is a beautiful place

Galveston sings like that song that I loved

Its meaning has not been erased

Laredo and Galveston are two other Texan cities; the latter was also struck in 1900 by a devastating hurricane. The song referenced in the lyrics thus symbolizes the memory of that tragic experience, a lesson that, over a century later, has gone unlearned.

UNTIL THE DAY IS DONE

The obligatory ballad slips languidly in even among the grooves of this record of acceleration and frenzy. This time, though, with results far better than its immediate predecessors. "Until The Day Is Done", which Buck describes as "one of my fake Irish folk songs in 6/4", actually feels like a kind of sequel to the old "Swan Swan H", renewing its languid, mysterious charm through the warmth of the acoustic instruments and Stipe's velvety, pained vocal. But all that sweetness is offset by a scathing lyric, preceded in the liner notes by two quotations. The first is a line from Sinclair Lewis: “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carry the cross”; the second is a bitter reflection from William S. Burroughs on the American dream: “Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams. Thanks for the American dream to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through”. The first quote alludes to the religious bent of George W. Bush's politics, while the second broadens the view to the fate of the great American dream, buried under layers of lies and deceit. Like those of an administration growing ever more corrupt and complicit with the powers that be.

The battle’s been lost, the war is not won

An addled republic, a bitter refund

The business first flat earthers licking their wounds

The verdict is dire, the country’s in ruins

Providence blinked, facing the sun

Where are we left to carry on

Until the day is done

Until the day is done

Stipe once again points the finger at the greed of power and big capital, ceaselessly propped up by media propaganda.

As we've written our stories to entertain

These notions of glory and bull market gain

The teleprompt flutters, the power surge brings

Then the allusion becomes more direct, and Bush senior and junior end up squarely in the crosshairs, with their “intrusions” into foreign soil: “Forgive us our trespasses, father and son”. Almost a prayer spoken in America's name, for all the grief and devastation brought by the military campaigns in Iraq.

SING FOR THE SUBMARINE

But as always happens on R.E.M. records, reality ends up giving way to imagination. So, almost at the tail end of the album, there's room for a dreamlike vision, suspended in an underwater dimension that seems to evoke the myth of Atlantis, the sunken continent. To accompany this sort of rebirth, this spiritual catharsis in the depths, nothing works better than that psychedelic shading that had already made songs like “Oddfellows Local 151” and “I Remember California” so successful, here further enriched by an intense melodic sweep, making it one of the album's finest moments.

It was Stipe himself who revealed the backstory of “Sing For The Submarine”, in an interview with Pitchfork: “A guy got so far into this almost neurotic state that he imagined fleeing the city with his girlfriend in case some catastrophic event occurred. And his escape route is a submarine powered by melody”.

It feels in dreams

That everything is there for you

The city breathes and pulses

It’s for you electron blue

I knew that you could see right through it

So this is where I give in to the machine

Lift up your voice feel gravity’s pull

Drown out the siren’s ring (or silent dream)

Oh…

It’s all here where I keep it

It’s all in the submarine

It’s all a lot less frightening

Than you would have had it be

But that’s the good news my darling

It is what it’s going to be

So sing, sing for the submarine

A fearsome escape route from the apocalypse, which turns into something far less frightening than expected. All that's left, then, is to sing an ode to the submarine that made this metaphysical journey, carrying us into a new dimension.

Once again, the secret is to let go, letting yourself be inexorably drawn in by gravitational pull — a genuine obsession for Stipe ever since "Feeling Gravitys Pull". But it's not the only self-quotation: the song, in fact, plays almost like a collage of references to other tracks from the R.E.M. catalogue, from "Electron Blue" to "High Speed Train" all the way to "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)".

It would have made the ideal final testament for the band, and some will read it that way.

But "Accelerate", as mentioned, was only the second-to-last step before the finish line. A step that would nonetheless let R.E.M. achieve their biggest commercial success since "New Adventures In Hi-Fi" (1996), debuting straight at number 2 on the Billboard charts and selling nearly half a million copies in the United States. This time critics loved it too, marking a considerable vindication for the band. Proof that living well truly is the best revenge.

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13/05/2026