R.E.M. "Around The Sun" - the verdict

I thought that was a silly rumor.

And it's track FOUR that starts like Mariah.

The Q-Tip bit is basically him rapping over a slowish 80s soft rock thing - it took me completely by surprise as the song actually seems to end just before it, and then starts up again. Its not very good but not as awful as KRS-1 on Radio Song.

Electron Blue is nice though. And the first half is quite pretty in a way which may grow on me hugely. Second half mostly just plain clumsy and tedious.

it's all rather sad, and i was soooo hoping it wouldn't go this way.

news that they would be headlining next year's lancs. cricket ground gigs was front page news in manchester's local paper mindyou.

come back monster-era all is forgiven.

I never thought I'd agree with such a sentiment, but here I am.

But most posters here, for whatever reasons, are very un-optimistic about an album that they have not heard yet.

It's not so depressing. I mean, it's their thirteenth album. I like REM, but I can't say that I'm super excited about it either. I certainly don't want a "return to Monster days," though. To me, that was their worst period (though not all that bad). Up and Reveal are, I think, better than Monster and New Adventures.

This is the first R.E.M. album that I've ever not liked at all. Reveal, as boring as it is, had some decent songs on it. I could respect Reveal. They're just phoning it in now.

This record just doesn't work. "Electron Blue" is halfway interesting and is by far the best song on the record, but if it were on Up (much less one of the classic albums), it'd just sound like filler. "Leaving New York" and "The Boy In The Well" aren't terrible, but are just too sappy and overwrought. "Leaving New York" in particular sounds like something that they'd play in a 'dramatic episode' of Friends or something. "The Outsiders" at least sounds like they were trying, though it's not very successful - it's too drab and plodding. Q Tip isn't totally cringe-inducing, but the 'now we are playing a hip hop beat' that starts just before he comes in definitely is. Sorry, nice try. Respect to Q Tip for being brave enough to rap on an REM album, though. Jay-Z and Ludacris probably didn't return their calls.

(It does make me wish that they just went all the way and hired out Lil Jon to do some kind of perverse crunk song - "Skeet In The Place Where You Live!")

Most of the songs just plod along, daring the listener to care. They aren't catchy, but they aren't devoid of melody. They are theoretically pop songs, but it's just a lot of numbness.

I understand what you mean, though - the production is so cluttered that it almost blurs together. Their songs keep getting more droney and less dynamic. That's a big problem for them.

"'Leaving New York' in particular sounds like something that they'd play in a 'dramatic episode' of Friends or something."

Exactly! That's why it's so great! I mean, it is that, but it's that DONE WELL.

as a band, i think they've evolved too much over the course of their career to ever do the former (this isn't like some post-punk heroes emerging after a decade-long hiatus just to prove they can play the exact same songs just as well as ever)...however, i really love to see them do the latter, certainly not in the "Lil Jon remix" sense, cuz they would look like asses, but just the idea of Stipe singing over Prefuse 73 beats or something would at least be tenfold improvement on the noxious tastefulness of Around the Sun.

I really doubt that they're consciously calculating their style. I'm sure they just collect instruments and equipment that interests them and play around, trying to write songs.

And they're good at it and that's why I like 'em!

"Bang and Blame" sounded awfully like "Losing my Religion" (Em-Am).

Matthew, I hope what you say is not true. Their albums have been hugely successful in Europe. I'm sure they've brought in a lot of money.

i hear the same strum pattern then and a lot of the same inflections in stipe's voice in it.

I always remember Peter Buck saying that his band was capable of making an album as good as Astral Weeks. Each passing release proves him more and more wrong...

Wait. What?

I keep making my self by imagining "The Outsiders" with a spoken intro where someone says "Hey. I can't find nuttin on tha radio" to which Q-Tip replies, "Uh. Yo, turn to dat station." Cause that would totally fucking rule.

Interestingly, it seems like a lot of the hardcore Murmurs.com type REM fans really love "The Outsiders."

I think there are songs on New Adventures that are worse than either "Make It All Okay" or "Worst Joke Ever."

xp

Hookless, Reveal pt. II.

otm. so bland. perfectly inoffensive AAA smooth pop. and, since they all go nowhere, the songs are at least a minute too long.

100% OTM

"Welcome to the Occupation," actually.

"Welcome to the Occupation," actually.
right, thanks!

There have been less compelling songs with each succesive album, and thus less reasons to give each album a shot, despite the interesting sonic pallete they've grown into.

Since Bill Berry left they have usually had one "Classic REM" sounding song per album, (Daysleeper and Imitation of Life), as if to say "hey we might sound different but we're still the REM you know and love", but on my few listenings of Around the Sun I can't find one song that sounds like "REM", or even that has a great hook that gives me any sort of feeling. it just seems so uninviting.

I think it might be because Michael Stipe makes his melodies uneccesarily complicated, or at least unnatural sounding. Its like they aren't songs anymore, but notes that his voice plays.

but maybe its just because i don't want to put in the effort, because being an REM fan just doesn't seem that urgent. but pop music shouldn't take effort.

Monster and New Adventures are WARM records.

or maybe everybody really just wants their REM with lots of upfront rockin' guitar, but are just too "open-minded" to admit it. i think most people were quite happy with Bad Day and maybe it just primed the audience for the wrong sort of thing.

I agree with this statement. I'd say the same of the title track as well.

xp

Anyway, the point was not about the material on Around the Sun (which some seem to like and some do not) so much as the production and the idea that it could have come out more lively somehow.

That said, I'm looking forward to the next one. I'll never learn.

and i noticed that it really doesn't sound too crazy different from older mellower REM songs, just more lifeless. i think whoever said Stipe's vocal delivery is the problem might be OTM.

like,"i wanted to be wrong" while the verses sure as hell sound like "classic REM", the song as a whole seems flat and drab, which seems like a fairly new phenomenon for REM.

although, i don't hear how "around the sun" sounds like anything REM has done pre-UP, but maybe i'm just being dense.

speaking of UP, it has songs which i think are superb )"why not smile") and pretty damn good ("at my most beautiful") which would fit on this album and are way better than anything on this album, so its not like the lack of Bill Berry is the problem.

anyways, i really want to like this album, maybe i'll try it on headphones..

From what I've heard (acccidental exposure at Borders during the time of release), I thought "The Outsiders" and "Electron Blue" sounded like the most vaguely non-boring tracks. The Q-Tip bit, it's not terrible, it's just not particularly interesting.

Around the Sun is a step forward because it is a move away from the Up/Reveal aesthetic. Post-Bill Berry, R.E.M. bought into a vision of alt-rock albums as bland modernist sonic hodgepodges a la Radiohead - a sort of treatment of alt-rock in its recorded form as electronica, but lacking whatever modernist appeal was actually going on in techno during these years.

They are so talented that they transcend this aesthetic context a lot on Up and Reveal with really strong compositional materials (especially, I think, on Reveal, on which Michael Stipe moved away from the longer narratives on New Adventures in Hi-Fi and Up and the songs tightened up as pop structures). But the aesthetic context of those albums - that bland alt-rock electronica - is important and I believe that people's opinions on these two albums hedge a lotl on their feelings about that genre.

Around the Sun is bland, too; it's basically a blander version of Automatic for the People. But I think R.E.M. are a really good muzak group and muzak is an area where they can excel, whereas they seemed more like dabblers in the whole *treatment of alt-rock as sonic hodgepodge electronica* thing.