R.E.M's Up

Here’s my latest radio show:

The year is 1998. After suffering an on-stage aneurism during the Monster tour, drummer Bill Berry decided to leave R.E.M. to live a relaxing life on a farm. Ever the workaholic group, the rest of the band were left stunned but still committed to the ideas they’ve put to paper. They’re thinking of mixing in some electronics. Baroque pop is also on the mind. Up is a strange final product. It sounds ahead of its time but not quite. Both forward and backward thinking.

I had never listened to this album until a couple weeks ago. Something about “electronics” and “R.E.M.” never inspired me to turn it on. The band had basically forgone any electronic dabbling in favor of typical rock-band and acoustic piano/string arrangements until this point and I just assumed it wasn’t that much of a success—maybe a little tacky. It’s better than I had guessed. It doesn’t sound like R.E.M. was gunning to change the feel of rock music, it feels like they knew what they could work into their sound and where their limitations sat.

Of course, it’s basically impossible to read “1998 rock album the incorporates electronics” and not think “so is it like OK Computer?” It is and isn’t. The riff from “Walk Unafraid” basically sounds like the riff from “Airbag,” sure, but Yorke and the boys hadn’t crooned “Everyythinnnnngggg” yet when “Hope” came out, which vaguely sounds like a major key analog to the Kid A sound. Before listening and after listening, I’m not convinced that Michael Stipe ever bought anything from Warp Records, but it certainly doesn’t feel like a band trying to ape Radiohead’s whole thing.

It’s problems are mostly that it just doesn’t really feel like a band completely committed to one sound, perhaps for the first time in their career. Even fans who may have been disappointed by the glam-rock era or the ear worm tendencies of certain sections of Out of Time could probably admit that the band had made always made albums that felt whole. Up veers a little wildly.

We have our typical tone-setter opener in “Airportman.” It hums with machinery, feels a bit like a sunrise. Stipe is looking up. Does it mesh with the album’s single though? “Daysleeper” is back to the band’s folky sounds of yore with a sing-able twee chorus. I suppose the lyrical contrast between these two songs could be illuminating—the working class man on the nightshift a foil to the jet-setting business man—but this doesn’t seem to really connect to an underlying theme of any kind. Instead, I get the impression of a band unsure of themselves torn between two places.

Just one track after the opener, R.E.M. reverts back to a big drum sound rocker about drugs. “Suspicion” brings out some light touches of keys and drum machine but feels a little incomplete. “Hope” is the clear highlight. It’s probably the truest execution of an R.E.M. sound that is electronic. Stipe is brilliantly melodic and his lyrics address the “should I trust the system?” ennui that the band had been reckoning with for the whole 90’s. After that we’re right back to baroque pop with these corny backing vocal arrangements. Then “The Apologist” shifts back to a stark attempt at electro-R.E.M. The album just kind of meanders on like this, sometimes the band seems to strike some new ground, other-times they revert back to something else.

It’s well documented that R.E.M. had a lot of trouble carrying on after Bill Berry left. The famous Michael Stipe quote is: “A three-legged dog is still a dog…It just has to learn to run differently.” I don’t find that Up feels like a band struggling to be themselves, but I do think it sounds like they hadn’t settled on which version they wanted to be.

-Donovan Burtan