R.E.M. – Out of Time – 1991
REM had put out a record every year from 1982-1988. But the touring for their major label debut was exhaustive and they wouldn’t enter the studio for another couple years after Green. The result? Their first massive international smash.
Everybody had this record. Everybody. It was ubiquitous. It was huge. Alternative music was everywhere in 1991. Gen X had finally taken over. REM led that charge.
Let’s get this out of the way first: “Losing My Religion” is just as wonderful now as it was back then. I haven’t heard it in about 10 years because I heard it every day for about a year back then. It’s lush, melodic, sad, sweet, as I said, wonderful.
That being said, the record isn’t all Losing My Religion. Even the generically titled “Radio Song” and the uber pop of “Shiny happy people” are beacons on an otherwise dark and experimental record.
Depending on your mood, “Low” is either deliciously harrowing or unlistenable cliche. That’s the inherent irony and joke about REM: Here they are, the darlings of the independent music movement, heroes of the left, multi-millionaires who never had to compromise, right? But they always straddled universal acceptance with a desire to be Sonic Youth. Depending on where you stand on that kind of experimentation determines your appreciation for the band. I have to wonder what the teenage girl who bought this record because of it’s hit singles thinks of something like “Low” or “Country Feedback”. She was either bummed out or just hit forward to get to the shiny brightness of “Near Wild Heaven”, a song I always forget about because I have to get past “Low” to get there.(Not that it’s that great. It’s piffle, at best)
In other words, Out of Time is not a great experience for the top forty listener who buys it on cassette.
The record is about as disjointed as you can imagine but one thing I’d like to point out is, regardless of how cheesy and annoying and downright cloying “Shiny Happy People” is, it’s the closes to early REM that we’ve gotten in a while. It’s a good sense of where they might have ended up had they followed that muse to it’s own endgame. It’s catchy as hell, kind of a shame they’ve never, if rarely, played it live.
The album certainly feels like it’s over by the time the dour “Country Feedback” finally exhausts its welcome. But then! Encore time! “Me In Honey” comes on like the band has been asked back for one more.
Because of the schizophrenia of Out of Time, I would never recommend it to a casual listener, however, because so much of it is rewarding I have to place it higher in the canon than my memory would have let me.
Grade: B-
ASide: Losing My Religion, Near Wild Heaven,
BlindSide: Belong, Texarkana, me In Honey
DownSide: Endgame, Half a World Away, Country Feedback
