How do you answer the world when your first album as a trio is roundly, soundly and decidedly shunned by everyone? You “go back to your roots”. Or you say you’re gonna do that and then you do whatever the hell you want and call it music.
R.E.M. – Reveal – 2001
“The Lifting” starts off the proceedings and it’s a definite improvement in openers from the last two records. It’s not the soporific “Airportman” nor is it the plodding “How the West….”. But, even though it’s energetic, it’s nearly fogettable as soon as it’s over. And before you know it, we’re back in slumbertown’s “I’ve Been High”. It’s a mood piece and sets the plate for “All the Way to Reno”, which is not bad but not the best the band has ever had to offer. What band? By this point it’s really the Michael Stipe show, isn’t it?
I recall when Beck’s Sea Change came out I was really angry. Some of the songs on that album were gorgeous, just lovely but Beck insisted on gleeps and blips and effects and tricks that distracted from the songs. As if the songs themselves weren’t enough. They should be. I hear the same shit happening here. It’s as though the guys are just bored and trying to find ways of making the music interesting to them. In the end, all we’re left with is hollow sounds strung together as though they are songs. But anyone can construct a song. Trust me, I’ve done it. It’s not hard. And with enough studio time you can do it too. There’s more to it than that. But not on Reveal.
PopSongs said this about “She Just Wants to Be” There’s something a bit uncomfortable about the way “She Just Wants To Be” feels simultaneously strident and languorous, and Michael Stripe’s atrocious grammar ruins the lyrics for me. (In fairness, one shouldn’t come to rock music expecting excellent grammar, but “it’s not that the transparency of her earlier incarnations now looked back on weren’t rich and loaded with beautiful vulnerability” is a truly horrendous construction, especially if English is your first language.) It’s about a minute and a half too long, and in concert, Peter Buck extends it further with a guitar solo that is neither impressive or exciting. It’s not entirely unpleasant, but man, it’s hard to imagine someone actively wanting to listen to this song, much less perform it live.
That’s how I feel about the whole record. It’s insipid. Worse than that, it seems to want to evoke treacly, faux hippy, groovy tones and lava lamps. Even “Imitation of Life” which was the lead single and called to mind the best years of the band, stuffed in the middle of this record just retains the stink of the everything else and no longer sounds like a song crafted on its own, but instead a piece of one, dull whole.
Reveal does sort of end with “I’ll Take the Rain”, which is about as abysmal a song as they’ve ever recorded, but they come back for that encore with “Beachball” (I know I’m reading into this shit, but at this point I need something keep me going.) However, as an encore I would gladly ask the band to not come back out.
I absolutely hate this record.
Grade: D-
ASide: All The Way to Reno, Imitation of Life
BlindSide:
DownSide: The rest of it.
