Think back to those heady years of 1981-1996, when declaring yourself an R.E.M. fan was a sign of true musical taste, and not an open invitation to ridicule, mockery, and verbal humiliation. In those days, the band delivered great album after great album, some of which are still timeless kick-ass classics. They seemed to tour constantly; great bootlegs confirm that the band live was truly something extraordinary. Hip music critics and the fledgling college radio movement loved them. Michael Stipe wasn’t bald and didn’t present himself as some sort of pixie space alien. Mike Mills wasn’t donning sequin jackets. Peter Buck wasn’t getting into drunken altercations with flight attendants on airplanes. And Bill Berry was in the band. Even when the band signed to Warner Bros. and senior citizens were humming the melody to “Losing My Religion,” Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe had managed to achieve mainstream success (and a major label payout) without losing much of their indie credibility or initial fan base.
However, at some unknown point in 1997, the space-time continuum veered horribly off course and the mighty beast known as R.E.M. was replaced by a vacuum-of-suck imposter. After the awesome New Adventures In Hi-Fi, what followed over the next decade was a series of the patient-isn’t-breathing albums like Up, Reveal, and Around The Sun. The albums were long on pseudo Brian Wilson melodies, bleeps, blops, zips, zeeps, and other little noises; it sounded like the band had listened to OK Computer constantly and could only produce pale imitations of the Radiohead masterpiece. Mysterious and textured lyrics were replaced by overly-direct lyrics that were either painfully mundane (“Why not smile/you’ve been sad for a while” from, you guessed it, “Why Not Smile”) or complete nonsense (“It’s easier to leave than to be left behind/leaving was never my proud” from “Leaving New York”). What exactly is a “proud?”
All of this contributes to make the creatively titled Live album a truly puzzling and ultimately another non-essential entry in the R.E.M. catalog. After a decade in the desert, fans searching for signs of life from the band must still keep wandering. Consisting of two audio discs and one DVD of a 2005 show in Dublin, the release is long on vacuum-of-suck R.E.M. songs and short on the good stuff.
Article comments
1 - Dr.Jimmy
Strange how you praise the early R.E.M. albums but then deride the newer ones for having lyrics that are "complete nonsense".
2 - lori
"I am by no means suggesting that R.E.M. should turn into a nostalgia act and only serve up a platter of the older songs.."
You contradict yourself so many times in this review...
"This release also suffers from the song selection; many Around the Sun stink bombs are included, but no tunes from classic albums Murmur or Fables of the Reconstruction make an appearance. In addition, Reckoning is represented only by the by-rote “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville,” and only a reworked “Cuyahoga” from Lifes Rich Pageant is performed.."
3 - Tom Johnson
That's not a contradiction - he's just saying that they focus on an album that nearly everyone dislikes, even die-hard REM fans, then play only the songs everyone has heard a million times, including the band (so many times that they have to rework "Cuyahoga.") I think everyone would have been happier with an archives release that spotlighted the better days.
I will say one thing, however, and that's that I actually like Reveal a lot. I know I'm one of a small contingent of fans, but there are some.
4 - Jefferson Holt
They got lousy because they fired me.
5 - Eric Whelchel
Doc Jimmy, you caught me in a poor choice of words. Meant to merely say that the later albums' lyrics are sappy, mundane garbage. Good point that a lot of the early lyrics could be considered nonsense.
6 - Dr.Jimmy
I thought that's what you were trying to get at. I think Stipe, like Bono, is a mundane lyricist that sometimes comes up with a real gem every now and then. It's in the delivery they make their impact. By the way, this new R.E.M. album blows.
7 - lori
"That's not a contradiction - he's just saying that they focus on an album that nearly everyone dislikes, even die-hard REM fans, then play only the songs everyone has heard a million times, including the band (so many times that they have to rework "Cuyahoga.") I think everyone would have been happier with an archives release that spotlighted the better days."
I believe they did that already on the dvd "When The Light is Mine."