You know it’s going to be a good year if R.E.M. are coming out with a new record. The once-prolific Athens, GA icons have taken their sweet time since the departure of founding drummer Bill Berry in 1997, and word of a completed, Spring 2011 slated follow-up to 2008’s hard rocking Accelerate has fans standing in the places where they work with excitement.
In case you’ve been living under a non-alternative rock, R.E.M. all but invented the genre on IRS Records in the ‘80s, releasing an LP each year beginning with 1983’s jangly, cavernous classic Murmur and concluding with Document in 1987, featuring their biggest hits of that decade: “The One I Love” and “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”. They shocked many by “selling out” with Warner Brother records in 1988, but proved that an independent band could maintain creative control on a major label and paved the road for groups like Sonic Youth and Nirvana to do the same. Out of Time and Automatic for the People made them the biggest group on the planet, but a difficult tour following 1994’s proto-grunge Monster lead Berry to bow out, focusing on his family life and leaving R.E.M. without an anchor. Spending years between discs, R.E.M. underwhelmed many with the downbeat and electronic Up, synth-pop glossy Reveal, and the uninspired Around the Sun, which alienated fans, critics, and R.E.M. themselves. Uncertain if they should even continue, Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills kicked back with a vengeance on Accelerate, an expertly tuneful, classicist R.E.M. record and their hardest hitting since Lifes Rich Pageant in ’86.
The post-Berry years have held a lot of sonic surprises from R.E.M.—the keyboard pop on “Imitation of Life”? A guest spot from Q-Tip??—so it’s really anybody’s guess what the untitled new album will sound like. As a huge, huge fan I can only hope it will bring back their classic jangle-pop and melancholy, acoustic early ‘90s sounds—another classic R.E.M. revivalist record, fingers crossed. Of course, it could be another Around the Sun. With Peter Buck focusing on Tired Pony (a super group that includes Jacknife Lee, producer of Accelerate and the new R.E.M. LP), will the band’s heart really be in it this time around? "I will not report on the sound or the dimension of the recordings so far,” said band manager Bertis Downs in a statement, “To my ears it all sounds like quite a wonderful set of songs."
Well, that’s all we really needed to hear. Stay tuned to our Musicology channel for all breaking R.E.M. news.
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