R.E.M. shifts into full throttle for their best record in over a decade, Accelerate. The alt-rock icons pass the quarter-century mark by leaving much of their higher, more electronic work of recent years behind. What’s more, they up the tempo to a level not even seen in their early nineties heyday, or their mid-to-late eighties college rock cult status era. While few tracks quite reach the rarified heights of the venerable band’s greatest works, there’s hardly a spot on the record you could call ‘weak’, either.
Accelerate starts in high gear with maybe its top number, “Living Well Is the Best Revenge”. The quick-tempo alt-rock has the album hitting the ground running with a call to action that is not pedantic, but invigorating. The group has long worn their politics on their sleeves, but their approach has far more savvy than much of today’s rather banal anti-war material, having cut their teeth during the Reagan-Bush years. While the attitude of the following “Man-Sized Wreath” doesn’t add a whole lot to its almost country-rock procession, with guitar explosions and expansive moments, middle track “Houston” has a far more comprehensive outlook; yes, political, but neither solely nor heavy-handed, exploring the whole lives of the Katrina diaspora through a dark, but not leaden, voyage, its somber effect touching.
Moreover, Accelerate is anything but exclusively a ‘political’ record, as the band also goes for the more personal, immediate concerns. Single “Supernatural Superserious” is a teen-focused drama with a catchy pop-weight (though maybe not the best pick for the first single). “Hollow Man” is some arena-filling alt-pop/rock that switches from restrained to grand, while “Mr. Richards” has a catchy electric strum that swings along nicely. Finisher “I’m Gonna DJ” is admittedly the ‘least good’ piece on the record, the stop-start party trying a little too hard, but it’s not bad, just not ‘great’.
The most notable aspect of Accelerate, however, is the speed. While R.E.M. is hardly a stranger to ‘fast times at Richmond High’ (witness their frenetic 1987 classic, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”), it’s never been a staple of the band, especially in their most recent work. Perhaps as a response to their poor-selling (for them), middling-received last record, 2004’s Around the Sun, one that even the band eventually admitted was flawed, the tempo has jumped all the way from first to third. Accelerate is more a twenty-first century version of 1994’s Monster, a reinvention akin to that of zombies going from the ‘walking dead’ of George C. Romero to the feral beasts of 28 Days Later. The title track is pressing and driving, living up to its name with its solid dark energy, but perhaps better, more representative of this new approach is the penultimate “Horse to Water”, a high-speed drive that is still laden with hooks.
“People are calling this your comeback album,” stated the recent Peabody Award-winning faux anchor, Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, in his recent interview with the band. “When you hear people say that,” he asked, “Do you want to tell those people to go [bleep] themselves?” R.E.M. certainly hasn’t ‘disappeared’ in the past ten years, with sales impressive for any alternative act (if not matching the Out of Time/“Losing My Religion” stratosphere – or justifying their then-unprecedented $80 million contract with Warner Bros. in 1996), and putting out interesting records like 1998’s Up and 2001’s Reveal. But ever since the 1997 retirement of drummer Bill Berry (and departure that same year of charter manager Jefferson Holt, under rumors of allegations of sexual harassment), the self-proclaimed “three-legged dog” of singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, and bassist Mike Mills, has never quite been able to regain their rhythm. Perhaps it was the worsening effects of the Bush administration (and the band’s failure to stop its reelection as part of 2004’s ‘Vote for Change’ tour) that reinvigorated the band; maybe it was new producer Jacknife Lee (Editors’ An End Has a Start (QRO review), Bloc Party’s A Weekend In the City (QRO review); or maybe it was being inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame last year (playing the ceremony with Berry back on drums for the night). Whatever the reason, yes, R.E.M. are ‘back’; not quite the classic titans of their I.R.S. years or Automatic For the People, but more than justifying their continued relevance.
