-- Michael Stipe in the Sunday NY Times, 3/30/2008
Anyone who's been following ye olde blog this month has probably found my routine of reviewing R.E.M. albums on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which leaves me something else to write about during the other four days of the week. Now I have two more albums, and only one more day in the month. Forgot to account for Dead Letter Office! I guess that's not one of the "official" albums, even though I treated it as one. Mea Culpa.
The two R.E.M. albums left in alphabetical order are Reveal and Up, which are two thirds of their weak post-Berry triumvirate. I'm the biggest R.E.M. fan I know (6'2" and 220lbs if you're wondering), and even I can't rally behind these three albums. Listening to Reveal after Reckoning (as I did during my morning and evening commutes yesterday) makes someone wonder how these two albums, twenty years apart, are by the same band. But they really aren't.
When I listened to Reveal, I liked "Imitation Of Live","All The Way From Reno", "She Just Wants To Be", and... that's it. Three songs out of twelve. The Reveal album would have made a good maxi-single. In food analogies, it's like a really bland dish that you try to rescue with spices, but after you've added coriander and mustard seed and paprika, it tastes even worse than it did originally. The songs are under-written and over-produced.
Here's a quote by Peter Buck from the same NY Times article, on R.E.M.'s new album Accelerate. "Of the 14 records we’ve made, I think 12 of them are pretty close to this one". I think Reveal is one of Peter's two runts of the R.E.M. litter, along with Around The Sun. These are the only two of their albums that I've had to work to get all the way through.
3 comments:
I'm looking forward to your comments on Up, if only because as an experiment in moving in a different direction after Berry's departure, it seems to me pretty much like a success. The problems with the following two albums were following some of its ideas too closely, as well as poor sequencing and a lack of ye olde rocke. Oh, and lame-ass songwriting for the most part. But ye olde rocke can make up for that: say something stupid or hackneyed loudly and enthusiastically, and (in the rock context) it can still work, because the enthusiasm and noise overpower the cliche.
I still like Reveal quite a bit. I like the sound of it--a kind of strange, almost psychedelic mess of keyboards, gurgly electronics and orchestral pop elements. I think there are a lot of really good, interesting songs (The Lifting, Beachball, Summer Turns To High, Chorus & The Ring, I've Been High) that aren't like much else and still work for me. They all have really fantastic lyrics, too--some of Stipe's finest in the post-mumble era! The melodies are better developed here than any other post-Automatic album. The more straightforward songs are probably the least successful for me (All The Way To Reno, I'll Take The Rain), but overall I think it's a great album that has aged well.
I think "I'll Take The Rain" may have the worst lyrics of any R.E.M. song ever. The first three lines are
The rain came down
The rain came down
The rain came down on me.
If you start your song like that, there's nowhere to go but Up!
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