Ack Phhht!

Accelerate

I’ve been listening to Accelerate for a couple weeks now, and it’s been an interesting experience.  I went into (too much) detail here about my decision to buy my first R.E.M. album in almost thirteen years, but in short, they were a favorite in high school and early college, but after that I lost interest and stopped paying attention to the band.  As a result, hearing R.E.M. now, after so long, is of course going to have that warm feeling of nostalgia – particularly when the record is a back-to-basics record like this, with the band stripping their sound back to a fairly spare rock n’ roll approach.

Whether it makes for an ultimately rewarding album is a more difficult call, and I’ve gone back and forth on this one.  Sonically, this sounds like something from around the time of Document, all sparse production and chunky guitars, but with (on the good side) more raw power and aggression and (on the bad side) less of that album’s sense of cohesion and deliberation.  Supposedly written and recorded in the space of weeks, the album gains a sense of immediacy at the expense of polish.  Some of the album’s lyrics suffer badly, and not all the pieces click the way they should – it’s hard not to feel that some of these songs would have benefited from being played live for a few months to work the kinks out.

On the other hand, given the reputation of the band’s recent work – overbaked, too deliberate by half (a trend that was already showing up in their early Warner albums) – I’ll take this any day.  For all its flaws, the band sounds excited and vital here, and the effect is contagious.  One of the things I always liked about R.E.M. was that at heart they were always a rock n’ roll band, even if they cloaked the fact under mumbled lyrics, muffled production, and mysterious album art.  So hearing them rock like this is a treat.

The album works best when the band cuts loose on rock songs:  “Living Well Is The Best Revenge” starts things off at a gallop, and may be the most punk thing the band has ever recorded (though I haven’t actually gone back through the catalog to look).  Lead single “Supernatural Superserious” is a solid rocker, with a catchy riff, a good chorus, and a lot of Mike Mills backing vocals.  “Accelerate” has a particularly strong, urgent chorus.  And “Horse To Water” is a fantastic rush of fuzzy guitars, possibly the best thing here.

Elsewhere the results are more mixed.  “Houston” and “Until The Day Is Done” are both acoustic dirges, both with interesting elements but neither quite working.    “Mr. Richards” sounds like an artifact from the mid-90′s with its droney alt-rock guitars and double-speed chorus, but I rather like it.  “Sing For The Submarine”, with its dark circular guitar riff, seems reminiscent of Fables Of The Reconstruction, but the results are, again, missing something.  And “I’m Gonna DJ” is just embarrassing.

So, at the end of the day, it’s a solid effort – the good tracks outway the mediocre by a good margin – but it doesn’t knock it out of the park.  Hopefully, though, the positive reaction that the album seems to be getting will convince the band to try this approach again.  There’s a lot of good stuff here, and if the band could find a way to retain the urgency and excitement of this record, while adding some of the polish of their “mature” albums, they could have some really great albums in their future.