Music Review: R.E.M. - Accelerate
Published April 08, 2008
Here's how it might work:
A band shows up at a certain point in your life and you happen to be grabbed by the music. The group and its songs become a part of your life just as surely as the memories of the apartment you lived in, your girlfriend at the time, and anything else that was 'important.'
R.E.M. was like that for me. The darlings of college radio at the time, their Murmur record embossed a permanent logo on the music department of my brain. A lot of things are attached to that mind space — my best friend Gene's cozy living room (where Murmur was given at least two spins per session), the greater Bangor area, and my girlfriend, who went on to become my first wife.
Here's how we'd like it to work:
We do get older, but our relationships stretch to take up the space. Love and friendships don't decay. All along, the music glues everything together. The bands making the music take paths parallel to our own.
What really happens:
Most things don't (and can't) remain the same. We know this. People get hurt. Relationships fall apart. Friends fade from view. We "grow up" (not always a good thing). The inevitability of these changes is something that's accepted, however begrudgingly.
Remember those musicians? The ones we hoped would enjoy lives as blissful as our own? They're not the same either. So why is it that we expect them to be able to avoid time's gravity any better then we can? Why are bands cut no slack in their artistic lives? I'm not heading toward a gift wrapped rationalization of a group's lesser efforts (Hello, Around The Sun). It's just that sometimes it seems that a fan's preconceptions (and wishes) can cloud their listening judgment.
Accelerate is not Monster. It's also not Murmur or Automatic For The People either. It's not trying to be any of those things. What it seems to be is R.E.M. finally artfully negotiating the post-Bill Berry world. It's full of many of the elements that attracted me way back when.
Mark Saleski is a writer and music obsessive based out of the Monadnock region of New Hampshire. On his best day, he hopes to channel the ghosts of Lester Bangs and Jack Kerouac. He spends the hours of 9:32PM to 1:37AM carving out music reviews and essays for Jazz.com, Blogcritics.org and other publications.
- Music Review: R.E.M. - Accelerate
- Published: April 08, 2008
- Type: Review
- Section: Music
- Filed Under: Music: Alternative Rock
- Writer: Mark Saleski
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This is the first R.E.M. album I've listened to all the way through, and I quite enjoy it.
Good review, Mark. I think there is a place for "listening" history and "personal" history in the conversation, but too much of either can cause people to miss something. I contend there are similarities to Monster but they're not the same record; they are both good records, so there is another similarity.
Mandolin pops up a couple times and I quite like it.
I've always been neutral to R.E.M, and certainly haven't had the same experiences with the band as you have. With that said, I'm starting to really like this album. Hopefully, we'll see an R.E.M. resurgence for years to come.
It's a good album, for sure. I like it a lot - and a lot more than expected post Around the Sun. It sounds like the band is really trying again after years of coasting, and this is coming from someone who really liked Hi-Fi, parts of Up, and Reveal.
I think I'm in the same boat as Kevin - neutral. I don't live by REM at all. I like them a lot, love a lot of their songs, but they aren't a band I live through, as many other things I listen to are. I don't have so much invested in their music. So I don't know what kind of longevity Accelerate will have with me. I am not feeling that pull (gravity's pull?) that makes me want to hear it over and over. I picked up Reckoning over the weekend - believe it or not, I have never owned this (I know, shame on me) - and I get that pull from that album. (It's not nostalgia - I didn't give a dump about REM until Out of Time came along.)
Speaking of fan reactions, one I'm real tired of seeing is the one about how if Bill Berry was back in the band everything would be different and better and back to the old ways. No, plain and simple. I've even seen some suggest that Bill Reiflin's drumming is inferior. Sorry, wrong again - Reiflin is a great drummer (he's worked with Robert Fripp and Fripp does not work with slouch-drummers - he has difficult relationships with drummers, so why put up with inferior ones?) REM's musical issues are not sourced from the drum throne. It's simply a matter of a band aging and fans wanting more of whatever album they joined in at.
Congrats! This article has been forwarded to the Advance.net websites and Boston.com.
It seems like with every new R.E.M. release, their PR machine hypes it as their "comeback," their "return to form," and their "return to rock." As a longtime fan, I must admit that I became disenchanted with them from "Monster" onward. My first exposure to them was in high school, when a friend taped "Life's Rich Pageant" for me. Subsequently I bought all their earlier albums and later loved "Green," "Out of Time" and "Automatic for the People." Since I feel like the group was a part of my formative years, it's hard for me to divorce their earlier material from their recent stuff. Logically I know that I need to listen to their latest album without this bias, but somehow I've found it difficult. The PR machine's continual insistence that each new release will propel R.E.M. to their former glory doesn't help, either. Great piece; it gave me a lot to consider!
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Good write-up, especially about "fan's preconceptions." I have read way too many reviews of this album by long-time fans and they all seem to run a similar track. I am hoping to see what someone new to the band or someone who didn't have R.E.M. at a key time in their life thinks of it, which gets harder to do the longer a band has been around.