Adam Sweeting
CD OFTHEWEEK
Reveal (Warner Bros) is the second album REM have made since the departure of drummer Bill Berry, and (on disc at least) it finds them settling into a convincing identity as a trio. The puzzle is how to fit the born-again REM into their own 20-year legacy. While Reveal undoubtedly reveals an REM, it might not be the one you thought you were looking for.
Superficially, there’s a variety of tell-tale musical triggers that instantly identify this as the work of the men who made the likes of Document or Out of Time. The way the chorus of Imitation of Life lifts dramatically out of the verses, Michael Stipe’s voice straining upwards for the high notes from the jangling vortex of Peter Buck’s guitar, is a classic signature moment. The way Stipe delivers Disappear as an incantation over a lapping sea-shanty beat wouldn’t have sounded out of place on their earliest albums.
But despite these palpable historical links, perhaps the most striking facet of Reveal is its debt to California. That isn’t to say it sounds like some glib Eagles-style studio confection, even if there is a discernible emphasis on clarity, melody and accessibility running through the dozen songs here. It’s more a matter of musical sensibility it’s as if they’re lost in a reverie of an idyllic West Coast, where time runs very slowly and Brian Wilson is perpetually huddled over a white grand piano with Burt Bacharach.
The more you look, the more you can hear it. In All the Way to Reno Stipe sounds as if he’s floating across the desert from LA on a magic carpet; the ensemble create a perfectly weighted slow-motion groove pushed along effortlessly by big guitar twangs, a fake sitar and dreamily rippling keyboards.
Sometimes, you could be wandering in the forgotten backlots of Pet Sounds or Surf’s Up. Among Beach Boys-isms almost too numerous to count, Beat a Drum exhibits a plonking piano set against a magical mesh of instrumentation. The concluding Beachball has a sunshiney middle-of-the-roadness refracted through Bacharach horns and a gently wheezing accordion, while a drum machine clatters away in the background.
What’s missing from Reveal is any sense that REM have anything left to prove. Presumably this is because, rock deities that they’ve become, they haven’t.
But they can still knock together a heart-rending anthem out of next to nothing. I’ve Been High is the album’s simplest song and possibly its finest moment. There’s not much more to it than Stipe’s voice plus some electronic percussion and keyboard chords, but he sings it without mannerism, allowing the minimal clarity of the lyrics to shine through. We may never get another Finest Worksong or Orange Crush, but there are compensations.