Music : Accelerate

Rating: - I LOVE R.E.M.
I didn't love all the songs at first, but by the second time I did. Lots of songs to remind my of early 90's R.E.M. style. And some great tempos to keep me moving at the gym!! I can't wait to hear them live this June!!!

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Rating: - It's all good
Previewed with the online stream prior to release, so I knew that I wanted to buy it. Really good album, I recommend it.

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Rating: - Best in Years
I have suffered through almsot a decade of sub-par albums from my favorite band hoping to relive the glory days of Murmer, Green, Out of Time, and Automatic for the People. This album finds them focused and firey for the first time in years. It is great to hear how even Michael Stipe has evolved and changed as a singer and songwriter, and yet, still manages to stay exactly the same as he always was. This is a beautiful album and a great example of why sometimes, you don't just download one song; you listen to the entire thing begining to end. There is something new to find with each listen, and that is what a good album is all about.

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Rating: - Their finest worksongs
And about frickin' time. After too many years away from the ramparts, after a string of records that sadly underwhelmed, R.E.M. is back in the mix with "Accelerate," the band's 14th studio album and the one we've been waiting for: a musical document that fights the powers that be with raucous conviction, and a renewed confidence in the power of rafter-rattling rock as a musical and social force.

Talk about the passion? It's back, in what's already being called the album of the year.

"Accelerate is our turbocharged response to the times we live in," Stipe told iLike. Longtime fans have wondered where that response has been for so long. There's some acclimation for the idea that the group lost focus and cohesion after the health-related departure of drummer Bill Berry in October 1997. The doubt and uncertainty that surely accompanied Berry's exit seeped into the records to follow. The three post-Berry studio releases -- "Up," "Reveal" and "Around the Sun" -- had little of the spark of their predecessors.

"Up," the first without Berry in tow, used either guest drummers or drum machines to replace him, but a lingering melancholy about his leaving coupled with a failure to jell creatively left many listeners uninspired. "Reveal," while a beautiful, nakedly emotional record that explored rock's dream aspect and its poetic possibilities, still lacked much of the raw drive common to R.E.M.'s earlier, more memorable work. A listless exercise in navel-gazing, "Around the Sun" just lays there.

Sales for those three releases reflected a growing public indifference. The band's release of no fewer than six greatest-hits and retro compilations (not counting last year's live album), and its relative absence as a musical entity during the Bush years, validated for listeners what was once an unthinkable idea: R.E.M. didn't matter anymore.

That was then, now is better. With "Accelerate," the pride of Athens, Ga., returns to its rightful place as a top-rank band.

The band storms from the gate with "Living Well Is the Best Revenge," an acid cri de coeur whose angry lyric explosiveness recalls "Ignoreland" on "Automatic for the People." The fiery "Man-Sized Wreath" decries the "pageantry of empty gestures" of the present day. "Houston" takes dead aim at U.S. governmental inertia after Hurricane Katrina and the bureaucracy that forced residents of New Orleans to relocate to Texas.

Stipe turns the mirror on himself, his own inadequacies and insecurities. On the song "Hollow Man," Stipe owns up to his own place in the pop-culture constellation, as candid and painfully confessional as anything from the band's past. And on the title track, he's grappling with that search common to all of us: looking for an avenue to personal change.

"Accelerate" had a public birthing; most of the songs were forged in the furnace of live performance, used as the set list for a series of test-drive concerts in 2007 at the Olympia Theater in Dublin -- attended, no doubt, by a tough crowd. The evidence is in the tracks: R.E.M. has shaken off the doldrums with a return to the guitar-driven energy of its earliest and best incarnation (even while the band's acoustic, folky soul remains a constant) and an apparent willingness to go with the first or second draft, rather than fussing about trying to craft a masterpiece.

You can sprint through the album's 11 songs (not counting the two in the CD/DVD package) in about 37 minutes. Most of these tracks clock in in under four minutes, some a hair over three minutes long -- it's a return to a musical economy that characterized much of the band's "Document" and "Green"-era work.

"Accelerate" anticipates change -- from vast sweeping social change to the more incremental shifts in our own lives -- and embraces it, acknowledging the relentless pressures of mortality, even while confronting that mortality with an engaging, refreshing defiance.

To R.E.M., life's rich pageant is still a going concern. It's that force driving the flower through the green fuse again. The days are getting longer, the grass won't stop growing, the ice of too much winter is beginning to thaw, and redheads are walking with the promise of the season in their eyes ...

It's springtime, and R.E.M. is rockin' again. Give thanks.

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Rating: - What happened to originality, musical complexities, pensiveness, eccentricity and all those R.E.M. hallmarks we came to love?
R.E.M.'s new album ACCELERATE marks quite a change from their last, 2005's Around the Sun, the meek and keyboard-driven effort which found little following. On ACCELERATE they now present a loud, energetic front. Unfortunately, the album is a tremendous disappointment for several reasons.

From the very first song, "Living Well is the Best Revenge", one notices that Michael Stipe's voice has greatly deteriotated. He gives here a hoarse cry instead of the more eloquent vocals of times past. Yes, even by REVEAL's "Beat a Drum" people were commenting that his voice was clearly going downhill, but it's even worse here. In terms of instrumentation, the songwriting gave more of a role to guitarist Peter Buck than on the last album, but production-wise ACCELERATE is a "loudness wars" casualty where there's no room for the sound to breathe and most of the time the guitar is overwhelmed by everything else pressed into a tiny dynamic range. Finally, the musical content of the album is extremely limited, with very basic chord progressions and nearly every track here reminiscent of something the band has already written as well as little distinguishable from the other material of the album.

ACCELERATE is not entirely bad music if encountered on its own, but anyone familiar with any of the band's previous work will find that they are now retreading old ground, but much less successfully than before.

I'm not one of those people who think R.E.M.'s career ended in the late '80s or early '90s. I enjoyed UP and REVEAL, for example. However, I think it would not have been a great loss if R.E.M. had already decided to retire. I don't understand this idea that the band must go on, even as album by album the cracks show larger and larger. It can't be about the money, since the members of the band are super-rich.