by Tom Demi and Bryce Napier, first published January 4, 2016
Around The Sun
released October 5, 2004
Warner Bros. Records
“This record had obstacles stacked in front of it that it simply failed to clear.”
By the time R.E.M.'s Around The Sun album came out in late 2004, their home country had endured the trauma of the September 11th attacks and the subsequent start of two wars, the second of which being a war of choice in Iraq. As with many of their fellow musicians, they were unhappy with this latter military foray and decided to record a song, "Final Straw," to express their displeasure. Released as a free download shortly after the invasion began in early 2003, it was kind of a folky broadside addressed directly to President Bush. While it likely didn't change anyone's mind about the issue, it was an intriguing teaser for their next album. Would they continue in this political vein? Were we in store for a return to the fiery attitude of Document?
The answer turned out to be no. Aside from the above song and the related "I Wanted To Be Wrong," there was nothing overtly political on the album, and the overall mood was pensive, at times even tired and defeated. The political fire was instead reserved for the concert stage, as they joined a cross-country tour of shifting musical artists on the Vote For Change tour in October 2004, ahead of the presidential election. Unlike in 1992, the outcome did not tilt in their favor, but it did result in an impassioned performance when I saw them at the Wachovia Center in Philly, doing an abridged set to make way for their co-headliners, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (Bright Eyes and John Fogerty also performed). We sat behind the stage, but we could definitely still feel the energy of the crowd, especially when the artists mixed and matched on songs like "Man On The Moon" and "Born To Run."
This show marked my second R.E.M. show in as many years, after missing them ever since the Monster tour in 1995. When I saw them in 2003, touring behind a hits collection, they played two of the new recordings for that set, "Bad Day" and "Animal." The latter was a glammy rocker, while "Bad Day" was a fascinating reworking of an unreleased track from the '80s that would later evolve into "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" and shares its breakneck propulsiveness. One wonders what the subsequent Around The Sun would have sounded like if they hadn't relegated these songs to a compilation in the interim. But one thing was certain: They were beginning to reassess their place in musical history, letting a substantial number of pre-Warner-era tunes filter back into their live set for the first time since 1989. By this point, they must have concluded that their live audience in the U.S. consisted largely of hardcore fans once again, so they might as well please them onstage, even if their recent studio output wasn't doing the job as well as it used to, as evidenced by Around The Sun's lukewarm reception both critically and commercially.
There are stretches where I acquire more music than I have any real expectation of getting to know intimately. My first child was born 10 days before Reveal was released, so she was an attention-hoarding toddler by the time Around The Sun hit the racks. Plus, earlier in 2004, I'd moved with my family from Northern Virginia to Overland Park, Kansas. My plate was pretty full. I do read reviews, though, and when nothing at all caught my ear from this album (if I even ever gave it a serious listen, which I may not have), I think this may be one of those occasions when the consensus opinion about this album (that it fell somewhere on the spectrum from extremely disappointing to god-awful) became my default opinion, without the input of my own insight. I've yet to see a ranking of the R.E.M. discography that doesn't have this one in last place—whether they are championing or abandoning Out Of Time; defending or trashing Monster; crowning Murmur or Automatic or cheekily proposing a dark horse favorite for the top honor; whatever any given fan's predilections are for R.E.M., Around The Sun landed in the cellar on each and every list. Even the band members themselves were quoted disparaging it. Who am I to argue with that kind of universal agreement?
Part of me was dreading this entry in the project, having to actually listen to this terrible album and come up with things to say about it. How surprising, then, when I finally did take the plunge, to (mostly) find it quite palatable. I wasn't electrified, true. The mood is subdued, no doubt. Nothing rocks. The existence of the contemporaneous peers "Bad Day" and "Animal," as Tom pointed out, demonstrates that they hadn't lost their ability to rock. So the evidence points to a conscious choice to make their folkiest album since Murmur, an understandable impulse, considering the world events of the day. It's no more somber than Automatic For The People, though, which was hailed as a masterpiece. It has an Eagles vibe, to my ears, especially when Michael Stipe starts, at times, to sound a little like Don Henley (which, okay, might be anathema to the R.E.M. fanbase); the 1970s easy-rock of the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac that was too studiously constructed to ever transcend into blistering rock music, even when the tempos sped up. If one can absorb that vibe and accept the album on its own terms, I think there's quite a bit of rewarding material on Around The Sun.
I wouldn't call it unpalatable, just relatively uninspired, and most of that is the production, but also some of the performances. Even a folky album can have some "zing," but there's just very little of it here. There are barely any backing vocals, and they're almost completely done by Stipe, as if Mills wanted as little to do with this project as possible—and there's a lot of that "vocal fry" in Stipe's lead vocals that I find wearing. "Wanderlust" just feels flat, and it shouldn't, considering Stipe's vocal leaps and Buck's sprightly guitar frills. Something is missing.
After listening again, I've had some of these songs sticking in my head, though, and not in an annoying way. Actually, many of these songs came off much better live, as evidenced by the R.E.M. Live album, which came out a few years later and was culled from this tour. In any event, it's telling that they dropped Pat McCarthy as their producer after this three-album stretch that had begun with Up.
Sure, there's rewarding material: I do like "I Wanted To Be Wrong," with its spacey interludes and woodsy acoustic guitar rhythm. "Leaving New York" was a promising start to the album, but I still don't get the message—Why is it never easy to leave, exactly? Are we supposed to be thinking about 9/11, a romantic relationship, the stately beauty of the city, all three? I can never decide, although it is still somehow powerful. Similarly, the title song, which ends the album, really lifts off, and it has one of the more unusual musical structures in R.E.M.'s canon. "Electron Blue" is a great one, too, but the guest rapper (Q-Tip, of A Tribe Called Quest) in "The Outsiders" feels unnecessary, and in fact Stipe handled it fine in live performances.
The necessity of having a guest rapper is a totally different question, of course, but given that they decided to do it, I will say it works for me a hundred times better than when "Radio Song" did it thirteen years earlier, and that Q-Tip's chill is a much better fit than the militant and boisterous KRS-One. "The Outsiders" in particular is one of the songs that has been earning my attention. The clean, cosmic blooping is a nice change of direction in the electronic textures, which they had mostly been using to inject some fuzz and industrial grit into the mix. And in the vein of unusual musical structures, "Wanderlust" sports a 7/4 chorus (seven beats per measure, that is), and "Final Straw" threw me off course until I realized the verses have a 15-beat loop, which is ultra-rare experimental jazz territory.
This record had obstacles stacked in front of it that it simply failed to clear. The album art didn't look like R.E.M. The songs were gradually pieced together, and the emergent mood made the feistier tracks feel out of place, so they were punted to the best-of, or back-burnered until Accelerate. The release of the In Time retrospective, which, as Tom noted, the band chose to promote with a tour (successfully, as it achieved platinum sales in the US—the only post-Adventures release to do so), interrupted the recording schedule of Around The Sun. The delay hurt the timeliness of some of the subject matter, while simultaneously causing it to come too hot on the heels of In Time. And again, with the exceptions of "Final Straw" and "I Wanted To Be Wrong," it was more of an oblique mindset reaction to the state of world affairs than a direct shot across the bow. By 2004, the politically-agitated were ready to be angry again, not contemplative. In 2003, it was still taboo enough to undermine the intense national solidarity that took hold in the wake of 9/11 that Natalie Maines expressing a mild anti-Bush sentiment during a concert left the gazillion-selling Dixie Chicks reeling into a tailspin from which they did not recover. A year later, the greater public was ready to embrace the gloriously bratty vitriol of Green Day's "American Idiot." Meanwhile, R.E.M. and McCarthy had taken so long fussing over every detail that they lost the bigger picture, and ended up with an over-produced platter without a hint of spontaneity. It was more like an album they all contributed to, less like an album they made together.
The songs are there, though. In addition to those already mentioned, I feel that "Boy In The Well," "High Speed Train," and especially "The Ascent Of Man" could all sit proudly on a record that had a better overall sense of pacing. Really, only "Make It All Okay" and "The Worst Joke Ever" strike me as stinkers. I doubt that "tired and defeated" was what they were aiming for, and I don't disagree that it does sound tired and defeated—still, I gotta say, it kind of works for me. After all, my own sense of disgust with the political system (which too often feels like being forced to choose between Coke and Pepsi when what I'd actually like is a cup of tea) is more likely to manifest as discouragement and disenfranchisement than fuel for action. I seek refuge from the world deep in my own psyche, and this record is not half-bad as a soundtrack for that process.
Before we officially began this post, Bryce had written a note that I think referred to the cover of the album. I don't want to presume, but I will say I've always found it odd, kind of a cross between Radiohead's OK Computer and Genesis's We Can't Dance. I'll also add that, by the time this album came out, I had probably had my first interactions with Bryce, as we were both members of an online fan forum dedicated to the group XTC. It wasn't long before I noticed the similarities in our appreciation and analysis of music, not to mention the endless permutations of the songs in our collections, but I can't recall discussing R.E.M. specifically. And finally, more significantly, my boyfriend and I got a civil union in 2003, after four years together.
That's true, we had likely crossed paths by this time. XTC, a band that never reached beyond cult status in America, was not exactly a direct link to R.E.M. fandom, despite their mutual fondness for three-letter all-cap monikers. And since I'm not quite sure where else to put this, I'll add that it's been interesting to see that Tom, as a gay man, was more attuned to the questions surrounding Michael Stipe's orientation. It was nothing I had ever thought about or caught wind of in the press until I saw a shrugging acknowledgment by Stipe some time after there had been a more official announcement (maybe? it was presented in such an offhand way that it didn't seem like the first time it had come up); the "news" gave me a chuckle, as it seemed to belatedly answer the question of why Stipe and Natalie Merchant hadn't become an item all those years earlier, when they seemed like such an ideal—painfully earnest, socially conscious—match. Beyond that, I absorbed it and moved on.
As far as Around The Sun, however, put me down for "unjustly-maligned." Perhaps it's just the exact opposite of my early experiences with Murmur, where sky-high expectations led, for years, to an ambivalent reaction. My expectations were set so low here that familiarizing myself with it (again and for the first time) has been a pleasant surprise. If I were to do a ranking of the full discography, maybe it would still bring up the rear, I don't know. But I kind of doubt it.