by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published December 29, 2015
Reveal
released May 15, 2001
Warner Bros. Records
“It’s like a wooden box built by skilled craftsmen which demonstrates their skilled craftsmanship—precision cuts, tightly-fitted dovetail joints—that is still, in the end, a box.”
A couple of my personal rules concerning album buying: If I loved your last record, I'll buy the next one without hearing a note of it. ("Automatic," as they would say over at Weaver D's.) Conversely, if I'm disappointed by two albums in a row, then I'm done actively following you, and anything thereafter has to find me through happenstance and impress me enough to win me over on its own merits. "Daysleeper" had hit the radio just as the latter rule was invoked (though, as previously explained, I've had a big change of heart concerning New Adventures In Hi-Fi), forcing me to bring the boat back to the dock almost immediately after setting it adrift in the first place. Since I enjoyed Up tremendously—and certainly at a level out of proportion with much of the remaining fanbase—Reveal was the beneficiary of the former rule. I did see the intriguing clip for the new single, "Imitation Of Life" (the only R.E.M. video of the 21st century that I've ever seen, underscoring their dramatically-lower media profile in their final decade), which gave me confidence that there would be much to like. It retained the newer electronic flavorings of Up's more experimental moments while backtracking into a more comfortably familiar R.E.M. sound. I bought the record with great enthusiasm; the second honeymoon kicked off by Up was not destined to last, however.
I know that R.E.M.'s artwork has a long association with outsider art, especially during the I.R.S. years; a naive, unpolished look which is so ugly that it often achieves a kind of charming beauty. And unlike bands from The Beatles and Led Zeppelin to Blur and Nine Inch Nails, they never adopted an instantly recognizable logo/brand, so each record has a distinct visual identity, where even their name has never appeared in the same font twice. (Personally, I might have voted for the long, lean hand-lettering of Reckoning to hang around.) That said, Reveal has got to be their most unredeeming cover art. The washed-out photo of a distant line of ducks, with the shadow of the photographer (Stipe, I'm assuming) in frame, the sickly greens and yellows, two astonishingly repellent fonts for both the band name and title, the tracklisting in indecipherably tiny (on the CD, at least) writing in the top left corner. Hideous, all of it. Up's visuals had been saddled with a bland sort of conventionality, and they may have wanted to bring some personality back, maybe even trying harken back to the spirit of those early years. Whatever the reasoning, though, this is not a cover that has me chomping at the bit to play the music.
This gets me thinking. How much of what we like about music has little-to-nothing to do with the actual sounds emanating from the speakers? Suppose you gave someone unaware of R.E.M.'s existence their 15 albums to listen to with no context at all—no artwork, no career narrative, nor even the chronological release order; only the band name, and the titles of albums and songs—what would they gravitate toward? What would I gravitate toward? As tempting as it is to rank the albums in a countdown list (and for a music wonk like me, the temptation is mighty), that approach does the pure music a great disservice, as people will assume a bell curve even where none exists; people naturally figure the halfway marker (#8, in this case) is the line that separates the mostly-good from the mostly-bad, and I even start to look upon it in that manner myself; I subsequently feel a need to be slightly more critical to justify third place coming in behind second place, and fourth behind third, and so on. The point I'm waffling around, I guess, is that I'm not sure how I feel about Reveal, which is fairly easy for me to listen to, yet hasn't stuck with me at all. If I did rank the albums, Reveal would be near the bottom. Not because I believe it's terrible—I don't. I think, despite falling around #13 in my personal ranking, it actually serves the role of my hypothetical #8 as described above—it's the album that sits on the demarcation line that separates the mostly-good and mostly-bad. Which actually speaks highly for the consistency of their catalogue.
In short, I don't think it's a poor album, but neither do I think it's one of their better albums. There's something that turns me off about it, but it's not the songs. At least, I don't think it's the songs. But all of that is based on remembered impressions more than hard reasons I could give. What do you say, Tom—am I tiptoeing through my equivocations skillfully enough?
I suspect my scale is even more skewed than yours where R.E.M. is concerned, so that my #8 divides the outstanding from the merely great and good, and only one or two are actually disappointing to me. That said, Reveal is not disappointing to me. As you say, it's easy to listen to, but I go further, finding the synthetic summery sheen very appealing. Strangely enough, I even like the cover art. To me, it suggests an imminent and unexpected, well, "reveal" of a refreshing or invigorating summer moment. It seems the band were attracted to the retro idea of having the song titles on the front cover, yet chose a font that was deliberately difficult to read (especially at the size on a CD) just to confound expectations. And whereas Up's visual esthetic seemed to be pointing to a Mad Men-like New York of about 1960, Reveal was set around 1966 in intoxicating L.A.
Through the electronic haze of the album, 1966 does suggest itself aurally, too, particularly in "Beat A Drum" and "Beachball" and their echoes of Burt Bacharach as well as Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys. I get the strong sense that this retro/modern mixture was at least somewhat influenced by the band the High Llamas (one of my favorites), who received mountains of critical acclaim in the late '90s for music where banjos, lush strings, and electronic beeps and boops could coexist gracefully.
Before I dive further into the music itself, I feel it appropriate to mention that this was the first R.E.M. album truly of the Internet age, at least for me, as I had only acquired my first computer somewhere around the time of Up's release in late 1998. But now, in 2001, the landscape for everyone was changing quickly, and R.E.M. kept up with it. I can remember the first tease of Reveal's music (besides the single) being a several-second loop of the instrumental part of "Beat A Drum" that played on their website in the run-up to the album's release (I think the intro to "The Lifting" was also used), and then how it seemed such a big deal to be watching the "Imitation Of Life" video online (this is before YouTube, kids!). And I also found the fan-run murmurs.com website, which pointed to some, let's say, unauthorized extras from Reveal as well as the band's official remixes (dubbed r.e.m.IX) for the album, available to the public only as a download. But again, in the U.S., all this ended up impressing music geeks and tech nerds, but not much of a wider audience than that.
Similarly for me, my method of music consumption had begun to evolve by this time. I was mostly listening to music through the computer, via tracks ripped from the original CDs. Due to limited hard drive space, after a few spins of a new title, I'd select a song or three that stood out, upload them, and the disc would then get filed away. As such, "The Lifting" is the only Reveal track that didn't get mothballed for me after the introductory period. The buoyant bass, over a syncopated shuffle, pulls me right in. It's an impressive melding of Up's atmospheric ambience with the band's long-established songcraft, yielding something without an obvious predecessor in the R.E.M. catalogue, yet still manages to sound unmistakably like R.E.M.
A few years later it dawned on me that because I had shifted to listening to music almost solely through iTunes, the individual songs that didn't make the cut into the digital library (which amounted to more than 80% of the new music I was purchasing!) were being virtually abandoned, never getting another chance to catch my ear and win me over. I rectified the issue by getting an external drive dedicated solely to music storage, so I could put everything I had onto it, not just a couple of tracks per album. But Reveal's window had already closed. And so the six-to-eight times I've played each song this week during the reassessment period probably more than doubles the number of times I've listened to any of these songs (save for "The Lifting") in the past decade.
As a salvage mission, though, I may have hauled up some treasure. Two weeks ago, I wouldn't have recognized "Beat A Drum" or "Chorus And The Ring" as R.E.M. song titles, let alone been able to hum a few bars. Today, I'm intrigued by both of them. There are definitely some aspects of the record that, to me, stick out in a bad way—the gym whistle in the programmed beats on "Saturn Return," the mawkish chorus of "I'll Take The Rain," the heavy-handed '80s throwback beats that feel unnaturally (and unnecessarily) grafted onto "I've Been High"—but most of what bothers me comes down to studio choices, over-tinkering. Only "I'll Take The Rain" bothers me enough in its core songwriting (I can't stop imagining Celine Dion having a field day with that chorus) that I wish it hadn't made the record. In hindsight, a lot of Reveal feels like a precursor to the chillwave movement, ten years too early. It's… I still don't know, exactly. It's like a wooden box built by skilled craftsmen which demonstrates their skilled craftsmanship—precision cuts, tightly-fitted dovetail joints—that is still, in the end, a box.
I hear you loud and clear on the storage wars, if I may call it that. Over the past decade and a half, I've imported CDs, pared them down, and then reimported them more times than I can remember, though R.E.M. has never been dumped. I share your lack of enthusiasm on "Saturn Return," but mostly because it just goes on too long and the lyrics seem lazy. I disagree, though, on "I've Been High" and "I'll Take The Rain"—I love the atmosphere and singing of both, and the guitar riff that comes in toward the end of the latter song is a poignant accent, in my opinion. The guitar is also great, and quintessentially R.E.M., on "She Just Wants To Be," a song that became an enduring staple of their live act. "The Lifting" probably is my favorite overall, too.
Where this album does come up short for me is in the lyrics, though, and not just in "Saturn Return." It seems as if Michael Stipe just got tired of being direct and meaningful, and decided instead to throw random words and phrases around ("brittle as a stick," lists of obscure Middle Eastern cities) and engage in lame attempts at wordplay ("have done, will travel"). Since I tend to read along with the lyrics on the first listen of "major" albums in my collection, this made "Chorus And The Ring" especially annoying to me—although, listening recently, I found the song surprisingly lilting and affecting, and in fact the whole album (musically) floats along pleasantly for me, for the vast majority of it anyway.
The one song that breaks the mood most radically, I think, is the single, "Imitation Of Life." It was a huge hit in many other places around the world (I remember watching a local guide on a tour bus in Costa Rica joyously swaying along to it on the radio when we traveled there that summer), but it seems almost too specifically engineered to be a single—it feels a lot like a sequel to "The Great Beyond," which itself was a sequel to "Man On The Moon." I still like it, but it just feels unsurprising, and its follow-up single, the glittering "All The Way To Reno (You're Gonna Be A Star)," I found kind of pointless and, again, not as humorous as Stipe seemed to intend.
So, no, I would not put this album in the top half of their catalogue either, but despite the lyrical shortcomings, I can't help but find it a captivating listen, and I was very much anticipating whatever avenue they decided to explore next, especially in light of the world events that unfolded over the couple of years after this album's release.