REM - Accelerate
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Ah, the creaky old “return to form”. Like a three-man Bob Dylan in nattier suits, REM have threatened to revisit past glories with every album since, well, their last good one. This is generally regarded to be 1996’s New Adventures In Hi-Fi, seen at the time as confirmation of a slide that began with 1994’s Monster. With such fidgety goalposts, how can you expect to score?
Three wan efforts – Up, Reveal and Around The Sun - have passed since New Adventures, and it’s now reasonable to write off Georgia’s most famous sons. But we don’t want to. We have such warm memories of ‘80s and early ‘90s peaks that we want a vital, firing REM whether we need them or not.
Accelerate has been tipped as a revival of the aggressive and politically engaged REM that reared up in the mid-‘80s with Fables Of The Reconstruction and Life’s Rich Pageant. It packs a punch, no question. The old one-two-three of ‘Living Well Is The Best Revenge’, ‘Man-Sized Wreath’ and ‘Supernatural Superserious’ plants the flag, riff-heavy and pedal-floored. Michael Stipe turns on the telly and spits at “A pageantry of empty gestures/All lined up for me”, adding “Nature abhors a vacuum/But what’s between your ears?” Stirring stuff from an angry oldish man.
The rhetoric never lets up – “If the storm doesn’t kill me/The Government will”, Stipe makes clear on ‘Houston’ – but the thrill fades, and, by the second half of an album that clocks in at less than 35 minutes, interest wanes with it. The Byrdsy jangle of ‘Mr. Richards’, vague menace of ‘Sing For The Submarine’ and the weary ‘It’s The End Of The World’ retread that is ‘Horse To Water’ drag a quickfire comeback to a sluggish conclusion. Here’s to the next one.
Matthew Horton
