REM — Accelerate

With ease, REM invokes gritty Georgian glory on “Accelerate,” fuzzing it up more like “Monster” than, say, my high school epiphany album (”Out of Time” — I’ll spare you the details). Though the album is not, I feel, 100% golden superbness, it does resonate with Stipe’s genuine artistry and the spirit that has kept REM going through so many years of good & bad albums (that was my obligatory statement, but it is true — one might pause to compare Stipe’s present pits and lines to the scruffyhaired boy-angel from the “Losing My Religion” video (and I know there are those out there (Ron) who are mocking me for not alluding to something earlier. But I’ll admit I don’t have the cred for it.)). The songs mix the trite and the true, ending up in arresting rephrases such as I am not your horse to water. I like that; it’s a stubborn declaration of freedom trapped in a cliché. (Less arresting, though perhaps more popular, might be phrases like everybody here comes from somewhere or living well’s the best revenge.)

What struck me most of all is when I was watching the Blogotheque take-away show and Vincent Moon filmed the band playing “Sing For the Submarine” inside a (says Vincent) “weird silo” on Stipe’s property. On the record it’s not one my favorite songs — it’s sort of rambly and I’m not sure what Stipe’s alluding to. But in the video, Stipe uses his whole body to augment the song; he whangs his elbow on the silo wall to create thunderous percussion — I knew (bang!) that you (bang!) could see (bang!) right through it. This music is still Stipe and Buck and Mills, still recognizably theirs within four bars by anyone with ears. It still comes out of the bottoms of Stipe’s feet and through his elbows and hands and heart and eyes. Sing sing sing, he says, shoulders ticking in time, sing sing sing.

REM — Sing For the Submarine