Around the Sun

(Warner Brothers)

As Americans, it is always hard for us to confront the remnants of former greatness, skewed and corrupted by a decided lack of originality and misguided attempts to be hip and cool. It’s what is vaguely depressing about Rod Stewart cutting an album of jazz standards; the plight of rock stars bereft of new material can’t help but make us sad. In this grand tradition, R.E.M’s new album, Around the Sun, is at some points so frankly ill-advised that one wonders if Michael Stipe had his ostrich feather boa tied too tightly, cutting off essential blood circulation to his brain.

There was a time, of course, when R.E.M., the Georgian architects of such paralyzingly catchy tunes as “Losing My Religion” and “Everybody Hurts” were the darlings of the college rock scene, selling nearly 45 million albums. Even after leaving indie IRS Records for Warner Brothers in 1988, R.E.M. maintained musical credibility, generally lauded by critics and fans alike. The combination of Peter Buck’s lush guitar work and Michael Stipe’s piercing, emotion-choked vocals, made their sound truly unique.

Unfortunately, Around the Sun fails to explore any new terrain for the band. Songs like “Make it Okay” and “Aftermath” recycle past R.E.M guitar lines, and Michael Stipe’s vocals sound disinterested and rangeless. “The Worst Joke Ever” might have been a fine song on Out of Time, but by this point in R.E.M.’s career, playing these same mildly-pleasant melodies is nothing short of redundant. The single “Leaving New York” paints a sepulchral image with a sweeping chorus that uses Stipe’s vocals to the fullest. It, alongside the oppressively peppy “Electron Blue,” which comes off somewhere between Radiohead and a Celtic James Taylor, makes up the album’s creative peak. But their striving for innovation leads them astray on “The Outsiders,” a bizarre didactic tale featuring some weird, tangentially connected rap performed by Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest.

Lyrically, the album leaves something to be desired. It swings between wistful generalities such as “I want to breathe again / I want to dream / I want to float a quote like Martin Luther King,” and stuff that just makes no sense, like, “I want to bathe in grape / must swim the length of the milky way.” Stipe’s whiny drone lends itself to unspecific philosophical maxims, so R.E.M. has always gotten away with more than a normal amount of this sort of thing, but many of the lyrics seem to shy away from actually making any points.

Unfortunately for the aging rock star, one has to either reinvent oneself completely or bow out with the desire to age gracefully. In Around the Sun, R.E.M does neither of these things, and the effort fails. There seems to be a pervasive air of weariness that populates the entire album, a knowledge that the songs are contrived and re-used, but an inability to refrain from the certain clichés that once made R.E.M who they were. Even attempts at originality are completely based in contrivance, such as Q-Tip’s appearance for the motivational portion of track three—and the consequence is another band discovering that radical reinvention might be their only salvation.