Now that the weather here in England is taking a decided turn for the dreary, it has been time to start digging up my rainy day music. Certain artists and albums just seem to fit the mood of a drippy wet day. The Cure's Disintegration is a pretty obvious example. Other good choices include Roxy Music's Avalon, Depeche Mode's Ultra, The Residents' Demons Dance Alone, or just about anything by Enya, or Sigur Rós. However, somewhat surprisingly, I find that late albums by R.E.M. also work rather well, particularly Up, and their most recent Around the Sun.
I got into R.E.M. about the same time as everyone else on the planet, when Out of Time broke through into the mainstream. I was first introduced to the band through my (then future) wife Sunshine, who had a tape of Green/Out of Time which she'd made from a friend's collection. I had actually heard some of their songs on the radio occasionally, but this was the first time I'd put the name to the sound. I almost certainly would have ended up collecting their back-catalog anyway, but the process was hastened during my second term at Caltech when I started hanging out with massive R.E.M. fan Tara Robertson. (Her 'fan-ness' was massive, not Tara. She's quite the opposite in fact, but anyway...) So inevitably R.E.M. often brings to mind memories of sunny Pasadena, endless late-night homework sessions, wandering through the steam tunnels to turn in said homework, skipping dinner to walk to Poo-Bah's, and bow-tie pasta stuck to the ceiling. (On the other hand, the song "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" from Monster is indelibly associated with the image of Patrick Spradlin leaping off of Crud roof into Ricketts courtyard during rotation my junior year, presumably a direct association with the music playing at the time.)
However, such memories are rarely summoned by listening to R.E.M.'s more recent efforts, and it's not entirely due to the my different surroundings when these albums came out, though I'm sure that has an effect. I think that part of this disconnect between R.E.M. as I first got to know the band, and their more recent material is that there has been a subtle change in the group's music. This change became clear to me recently when I followed up listening to Around the Sun with Out of Time. "Leaving New York", the first song on Around the Sun, has a 'classic' R.E.M. arrangement full of 'jangle' and overlapping harmonies, but compared to actual classic R.E.M., it sounds a bit leaden and deliberate. It's this sense of heaviness that marks the biggest difference between the band as they are now and the light and bouncy R.E.M. of old.
It's tempting to attribute this to the loss of drummer Bill Berry, except that this transformation to the deliberate actually pre-dates his departure. To my ears it can be heard as far back as Automatic for the People, with "Everybody Hurts", and "Star Me Kitten". The turning point is Monster however, which in retrospect plays rather like the two versions of the band battling for control. It starts out firmly in the 'classic' mode with "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?," but about half way through "Crush With Eyeliner" you can begin to hear the determined, mechanical rhythm settle in. By "King of Comedy" Michael Stipe is truly set into his late period persona, but Peter Buck's firey guitar and a surprisingly crunchy drum track hold off the change. With "I Don't Sleep, I Dream" we get the first good look at the future with a fully formed Michael Stipe midtempo number. Here, the action is all in Stipe's vocal performance and rest of the band fades into the background. "Star 69" then completely reverses the whole processes, burying Stipe under a wave of fuzz in a song that wouldn't sound too out of place on Life's Rich Pageant if you turned the distortion down just slightly. This back and forth tug continues for the rest of Monster, but by the time of the follow up New Adventures in Hi-Fi it's clear which side has won.
Interestingly, I think the new sound works best when they are not trying to sound like R.E.M. Both New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and Up sound quite nice in their own way. There, the melancholia of the songs seem to fit the mood of the music. It's when R.E.M. tried for a classic sound with Reveal that the disconnect galled the most. Reveal is far and away my least favorite R.E.M. album, and despite a number of attempts I've never managed to get inside of it. Around the Sun is a bit looser, and trying less hard to be a classic. As a result, it works quite a bit better than Reveal, at least on rainy London afternoons.
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