Accelerating

The new REM album arrived with lots of buzz about how it was their hardest-rocking work in years, going back in inspiration to the early days of Murmur and Life's Rich Pageant. As I've stated before, I like REM in all their stages; my favorite album of theirs is Automatic for the People, but unlike many fans, I've stuck with them through the recent quieter, artsier albums, and I quite liked the last one, Beyond the Sun, which all the critics hated and seems to have sold about 12 copies.

Accelerate is a return to form, of sorts; the sonic atmosphere is like that of the earlier albums, but the melodies are stronger and the recording is sharp and clear, not as murky as Murmur. It's certainly their "hardest" album since Monster in 1994, and I like listening to it in the car, but so far nothing has jumped off of it as a great REM moment for me. The single "Supernatural Superstitious" opens with a hell of a riff, but the lyrics make the song yet another whiny ode to teenage-angst; it's about time Stipe got over the "humiliation" he felt in his "teenage station." As usual, the lyrics are weak, but I'm mostly used to that; the best songs lyrically are the dreamy "Sing for the Submarine" with its references to older REM songs, "Houston," which takes an oblique approach to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and "Hollow Man," in which the singer believes he's turned into the kind of person he hates ("Believe in me, believe in nothing/Have I become the hollow man I see?'). Almost all the songs are catchy, especially "Supernatural" and "Mr. Richards." The album has done well on the charts, but it's not quite the miraculous re-invention it was reported to be.