A Nightswimming Saturday morning

While reading the New York Times online this morning, I ran across an article about the South by Southwest Music Festival (SXSW) in Texas, at which R.E.M. appeared on Thursday to give a concert which focused on their new album Accelerate, due out April 1. I have quit buying new albums by most of my old favorites, like Elton John, Joni Mitchell, and Prince, because they're just not producing music I'm interested in hearing anymore. But R.E.M. is the one band I still follow, religiously buying each new CD even as their mass popularity has fallen off drastically. The article had a link to the National Public Radio site, at which I was able to listen to their entire 90-minute concert from SXSW.

They were in good form, and there seems to be some buzz building around the new album, but this has been happening with each of their albums over the last ten years, with little commercial payoff for the band. Each album debuts near the top of the album chart then quickly falls, and they haven't had a song break the Billboard Top 40 since 1995's "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" Their jangly, indie-folkish-rock-pop sound hasn't changed much since Automatic for the People, in '92 (except for the wonderfully hard and crunchy Monster in '95) and the critics have derided them for not changing with the times.


For the sake of their career, I wouldn't mind seeing them make a major change and have a couple of big hits, but frankly, I have enjoyed their albums of the past decade, partly because they have stuck to their aesthetic guns. In this, I compare them to Enya: both made it to the big time with a certain sound, both have suffered commercially and critically because they haven't changed to suit the zeitgeist, but by damn, when they release a new album, I know what I'm going to get and I know I'm probably going to like it. I don't want R.E.M. to become like LCD Soundsystem anymore than I want Enya to become Patti Smith (or, God help us, Fergie).

While I will admit that none of R.E.M.'s recent albums are as consistently fine as Automatic or Monster were, each album has plenty of good music, and each album has at least one song that has wound up with a regular berth on my iPod: "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us" from New Adventures, "Lotus" from Up, "All the Way to Reno" and "Imitation of Life" from Reveal, and most recently "Electron Blue" and "High Speed Train" from Around the Sun. In fact, "High Speed Train" is one of my favorite R.E.M. songs of all time. Yes, they're all fairly "poppy," and they all sound like they could have come from one album; they still make me happy.

From the sound of the new songs as performed at SXWS, the new material doesn't sound much different--the first single, "Supernatural Superserious," sounds like it could have been recorded anytime since the turn of the century--though a short song they did near the end, "I'm Gonna DJ," has a much harder, almost post-punk edge. The critics seem to want them to revert to their pre-Warner Bros. sound, but honestly, while I like several of those early songs ("Radio Free Europe," "Rockville," "Fall on Me"), I find none of those albums as listenable as anything from the 90's on. When April 1st rolls around, I'll buy the new CD and probably be in sheer bliss for a few days.