Michael Stipe is gay?

Here's my review of R.E.M.'s Accelerate. Those who know about me and my relationship with the band can probably predict what I will say.
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Who could have predicted 20 years ago that R.E.M. would become the venerated institution that it is today, a stadium rock juggernaut comparable to U2 or the Rolling Stones? Certainly I wouldn’t have, nor would I have predicted that their precipitous (if somewhat unstable) rise to mainstream fame would coincide almost perfectly with a string of albums containing increasingly diminishing returns. Accelerate, R.E.M.’s 13^th album, has already been hailed in some critical circles as a “return to form” (a coded message for fans to stay away if there ever was one) and even as their best album since 1996’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which was the last album to involve their long-standing drummer Bill Berry. Don’t believe it, though: despite the increased prevalence of distorted guitars for the first time in a few years, there’s nothing here on this album to distinguish it from R.E.M.’s last several mediocre efforts. As much as I love this band, I have to admit that R.E.M. should have given this up a long time ago, if only to save us the embarrassment of the last few albums.

I am saying this as a passionate R.E.M. fan. I think I started listening to R.E.M. at around the same time that their previous album, 2004’s awful Around the Sun, came out. Like many, my first real exposure to R.E.M. came in the form of their debut album Murmur, as perfect a piece of music as has ever been conceived, in my opinion. The music contained on that album seemed to be the embodiment of everything I loved in a self-contained album: songs with wonderful, lilting melodies that would often veer off into unexpected rhythmic and harmonic tangents; hooks aplenty, all of them perversely discarded when other bands would have beaten them to death; the phenomenally gifted rhythm section of Berry and bassist Mike Mills, who could play off of each other with deadly precision; the comparative dead weight that was Peter Buck, the most endearingly ham-fisted guitarist of his generation; and finally Michael Stipe, perhaps the key innovator in a group of staggering talents, who kept the album afloat with his mumbled, half-sung vocals that begged to be listened and relistened to. I spent many hours in my room playing that record through, wondering to myself how such a group of misfits could make music so touching while rocking so hard, all while refusing to resort to stock punk or classic rock clichés.

Many people still regard Murmur as their finest achievement, and I would be inclined to agree, except that each of their succeeding albums were just as great and even greater in some respects. The albums that R.E.M. made on IRS before signing to Warner Brothers (Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, Lifes Rich Pageant, Document) have, I would wager, about three bad tracks total between the five of them. For a while, R.E.M. was just one of a dozen or so American underground bands that couldn’t stop churning out one great album after another. I couldn’t believe that, in the span of five years, R.E.M. had released five great albums in a row. Who had done that, and after batting .1000 for so long, could they continue?

The answer was yes and no. R.E.M. became one of the many underground bands to sign a major label record deal, and in terms of musical quality, they would never reach the heights of those first five albums (although it should be noted that R.E.M., unlike many of their peers, was never on an independent label proper—IRS was just another wing of A&M Records, who nevertheless gave the group complete autonomy in marketing and distribution). There were still plenty of great songs, at least at first, but as complete works the albums didn’t cohere like they used to. At first it’s hard to complain about bad songs when an album like Out of Time contains a song as good as “Losing My Religion.” However, after a few albums, R.E.M. couldn’t even produce good singles. Meanwhile, songs like “Losing My Religion” and “Stand” became big hits on MTV, Michael Stipe started losing his hair and the band started playing stadiums. They released some good albums, like Automatic For The People, and some awful albums like Monster. After New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Bill Berry had an aneurysm onstage, left the band, and from then on the band functioned essentially as a three-legged dog, deprived of not only a technically adept and expressive drummer but also a key composer as well. The songs became even more languid, with more electronic flourishes: from then on out, basically everything R.E.M. did was deathly boring.

This brings us to Accelerate, which, if it doesn’t alter R.E.M.’s crash course downward, will at least serve to inoculate their inevitable disintegration with some loud guitar riffs. The thing is, though, that the riffs, no matter how loud you play them, are still pretty boring. The sheer impersonality of Buck’s sub-Mission of Burma lick at the beginning of Accelerate’s opener, “Living Well is the Last Revenge,” is enough to make me want to turn off this album and listen to Murmur again. Without Berry to inject his light, intuitive touch into these very simple songs, everything sounds the same. Not that I think he could have done anything with this songwriting: I’m pretty sure that Accelerate’s first three songs all use variations on the same three chords. As a singer, Michael Stipe can do no wrong in my opinion, but the less we hear of Mike Mills’ whiny backing vocals, the better. Then again I’ve always felt the worst parts of any R.E.M. album were Mills’ solo songs.

The album’s first single, “Supernatural Superserious,” is the only song on the album that has any discernible hook in the chorus, and it’s actually a pretty good one: “Yeah, you cry and you cry/he’s alive, he’s alive.” I gather that a lot of this album’s so-called energy comes from the band’s opposition to the Iraq War, and I must give Stipe some credit for not coming off as preachy or simplistic (as opposed to, say, his old Vote For Change buddy Eddie Vedder). I’ve always been divided on whether or not it’s a good thing when Michael Stipe’s lyrics are intelligible, but I think this album has some of his best lyrics yet. The song “Houston,” though it’s basically another dirge musically, starts off well, with Stipe intoning, “If the storm doesn’t kill me, the government will/I’ve got to get that out of my head/It’s a new day today and the coffee is strong/I’ve finally got some rest.” No preachiness, no pomposity, just an honest attempt at trying to enter a soldier’s head.

Even if I can detect Stipe’s renewed energy, I don’t think the rest of the band seems that engaged. Putting aside whoever the drummer is now, the one that Stipe & Co. refuse to make an official member of R.E.M., it seems like Mike Mills has never played in such a pedestrian fashion, and Mike Mills was a bassist I always thought could really play. Maybe it’s because he devotes more of his time to playing keyboards. Peter Buck remains as always my primary source of disappointment, however: when did he start trying to sound like a nondescript Clear Channel alt-rock guitarist? The gulf between Buck and his many imitators is no longer there. One of R.E.M.’s charms, originally, was that you could hear the instrumental interplay between all the members, but now it sounds like Buck’s guitar is just played by a computer, autotuned and turned to a reasonable level for maximum convenience. He needs to stop with the enormous amount of overdubs.

I’ve listened to Accelerate twice now and I already see no reason to listen to it again. Unfortunately it seems that R.E.M. has achieved the unthinkable: they’ve become a relic. That such a vital band, one of the best in my opinion, could keep producing such sub-par material is depressing, but then again R.E.M. is hardly alone among rock bands in this respect. That may be the secret history of rock ‘n’ roll: on the one hand, you have the stories of people dying tragically before they had a chance to achieve greatness; on the other hand, you have the artists that overstay their welcome, flog whatever is left of their fame in order to court their aging fans, and fail continually to produce material that anyone would find engaging. The fact that this happened to R.E.M. proves that it can happen to anyone.