Craft Recordings will reissue two more R.E.M. albums on vinyl, in August and September.
It was something of a return to what you might call the band’s ‘classic’ sound. Released in 2001, “Reveal” was co-produced with long-time collaborator Patrick McCarthy.
The album sees R.E.M. experiment with synthesized sound, but also make “a conscious return to their classic sound” . The record features hits “Imitation of Life” and “All the Way to Reno (You’re Gonna Be a Star). R.E.M. delivered “Reveal”, an album that feels like their stab at All That You Can’t Leave Behind — a conscious return to their classic sound.
Because “Reveal” is song-oriented, it initially plays more accessibly than “Up”, but these songs are cloaked in the same kind of deliberate studiocraft that made “Up” feel stilted. It’s not as overt, of course – the drum machines and loops have taken a backseat — but it’s still possible to hear the clipped Pro Tools effects on “Summer Turns to High,” for instance, and most tracks are a little fussy.
That prevents “Reveal” from being an album to wholeheartedly embrace, even if it attempts to be as rich as “Automatic” and even if it succeeds on occasion. There are some very good pop songs here — windswept and sun-bleached beauties like “Imitation of Life,” the dusty “All the Way to Reno (You’re Gonna Be a Star),” and “Beachball,” the one time their Beach Boys obsessions click. “Reveal” winds up sharing the same strangely distant feel of “Up”, even if it’s a tighter, better record. When R.E.M. weren’t trying as hard, when they weren’t meticulously crafting their sound, they made records that were as moody, evocative, and bracing as “Reveal” intended to be.
Since they’re fiercely protective of their anointed position of underground pioneers, they’re not content to sit still and spin their wheels, turning out a record that apes “Automatic for the People“. So, they return to the lushness of “Out of Time“, melding it with the song-oriented “Automatic” undercutting it all with the sober sonic trickery of Up and “New Adventures in Hi-Fi“.
Released in 2008, “Accelerate” The band’s penultimate studio album was intended as a departure from R.E.M.’s previous album, “Around the Sun”, and was lauded for the aggressive, purposeful sound of the songs. The album was described by Rolling Stone as “one of the best records R.E.M. has ever made.” It debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the chart for 18 weeks. The LP contains fan favourite “Supernatural Superserious.”
For years, R.E.M. promised that their next album would be a rocker, an oath to fans that perhaps made sense during the early ’90s, when they were exploring the pastoral fields of “Out of Time” and the gloomy folk of “Automatic for the People”, but in the years after Bill Berry’s 1997 departure, the desire of longtime fans for the group to rock again was merely a code word for the wish that R.E.M. would sound like a band again. Apart from a few fleeting moments “The Great Beyond,” their “Man in the Moon” re-write for the 1999 Andy Kaufman biopic, Man in the Moon; “Bad Day,” a mid-’80s outtake revived for a greatest-hits album R.E.M. not only didn’t sound like a band, but they seemed at odds with themselves and their very strengths, culminating in the amorphous, mummified “Around the Sun”, a record so polished and overworked it didn’t sound a bit like R.E.M., It was a situation so dire that the band recognized the need for corrective steering, so they stripped themselves down to bare-bones for 2008’s “Accelerate”.
In every way “Accelerate” is the opposite of “Around the Sun” at 36 minutes, it’s defiantly lean, it’s heavy on Peter Buck’s guitars and Mike Mills backing vocals, its songs don’t drift, they attack. Even the songs constructed on acoustics feel like they’re rockers, maybe because they hearken back to the eerie, ramshackle grace of “Swan Swan H” whose riff echoes through both “Houston” and “Until the Day Is Done.” This is not the only time that R.E.M. deliberately refers to the past on “Accelerate”, but reverential self-reference is the whole idea of this project: they’re embracing their past, building upon the legacy and the very sound of such underground rock landmarks as “Lifes Rich Pageant” and “Document”.
“Accelerate” benefits greatly from its concentrated blast of guitars, as the brevity of the album makes R.E.M. seem vital even as they’re dredging up the past. By no longer denying the jangle and pop that provided a foundation for the group’s success, they do sound like a band again.
“Accelerate” finds R.E.M. attempting to reconnect with their music, with what made them play rock & roll in the first place, instead of methodically resurrecting a faded myth. “Accelerate” is what makes it such a successful rebirth as R.E.M. no longer denies what they were or what they are, and, in doing so, they offer a glimpse of what they could be once again.
The previously announced vinyl reissues of “Collapse Into Now” and “Around the Sun” have gone back to 1st September, so they’ll come out in between these two newly announced titles!
The Fat Angel Sings 