Slow and steady may indeed win the race, but it can also make for some decidedly challenging rock records. That’s the argument at the crux of so much of the criticism of R.E.M.’s post-Bill Berry history―and, with converse irony, the widespread praise of the stripped-down and supercharged ethos that powers their new album Accelerate. Arguably their most consistently engaging release in over a decade, it’s a release with a sound as focused and energized as the handful of ’80s releases that established them, economized into a 35-minute running time that would have seemed brisk even in the LP era―less is indeed more here. Much.
Anchored by an energized core of songs―“Living Well’s the Best Revenge,” “Horse to Water,” “Man-Sized Wreath,” and “Supernatural Serious”―that don’t so much revisit R.E.M.’s past glories as reconsider the creative road they’ve traveled in recent years, the aptly named Accelerate gratifyingly finds that the alt. rock pioneers can still bring the heat in the studio as well as they do on-stage. Though still revolving around the axis of Michael Stipe’s distinctively opaque vocals and Peter Buck’s variously chiming/distorted guitar licks, the inclusion of the band’s longtime touring musicians (Scott McCaughey on second guitar and drummer Bill Rieflin) into the studio mix has helped push the material―much of it previously worked out on-stage in Dublin―to a higher plane.
Stipe admits he’s not particularly surprised at the widespread positive response
Accelerate has generated―or the criticism of some of R.E.M.’s other recent efforts that’s often inherent in them. Speaking of critical reaction,
Stipe told Pitchfork Media, “You’re going to read that over and over again, and we freely admit we lost focus on the last record [
Around the Sun]. But we also say, and people tend to downplay this part, that I really like the material on that record. It’s just the way we approached them in the studio that didn’t make them shine as much as they might have.”
But the R.E.M. vocalist is also quick to downplay much of what’s written about his band―and the new album in particular―by turning the tables on a pop press he accuses of too often engaging in agenda-setting instead of journalism: “[Every writer] comes into an interview situation with their own story and their own idea and then they cherry-pick the comments that help create their argument. So I think that for the band members [
Accelerate] is not as much of a reaction to the last record as you might read. It’s simply that we all realize that we’d lost focus, and we did the most obvious thing, which is to write really fast songs that are really in your face and kind of raw.”
And if the band who infused
Accelerate with a notably leaner and more focused musical ethos also seems somehow more comfortable in their public skins―as gleefully displayed by
a loopy recent appearance on Comedy Central’s
Colbert Report―it may not necessarily be a coincidence: Michael Stipe took the occasion of the album’s release to free himself of some more longstanding personal baggage, using an interview in
Spin magazine to speak more directly about the often conflicted life he’s led because of willfully obscuring his true sexual orientation for so long―he’s gay.
“It was super complicated for me in the ’80s,” Stipe told the magazine. “I was totally open with the band and my family and my friends and certainly the people I was sleeping with. I thought it was pretty obvious.”
Stipe admitted he’d been deliberately evasive about the issue in public for years, not convinced that outing himself could be of any help to others struggling with such a deep personal identity issue. “I see now, of course, that’s the case,” Stipe says. “I’d just never felt strongly enough about a particular relationship to say, ‘Yeah, he’s my boyfriend, that is what it is.’ Now I recognize that to have public figures be very open about their sexuality helps some kid somewhere out there.”