REM 'Accelerate' album

Few albums have ever had a title as concisely fitting as Accelerate, the 14th set from R.E.M. But even before the group picked the name, even before they started recording, Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills had a clear idea of what they wanted the collection to be: “Turbo-charged,” says Stipe. “That’s what I’ve been calling it. A turbo-charged R.E.M. record. We wanted to do something really fast and really immediate. The title was the last thing we decided. But even with that, each of us wanted there to be an immediacy and urgency about it.”

And that there is. The 11 songs clock in at a total of 34 crisp minutes, each marked with a sense of electricity and edge, a sense of one of the era’s most beloved, esteemed and creative acts challenging itself to new heights. A sense of wanting strips everything the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame group has built over the course of a more than 25-year span down to its core, from the first spitfire note of “Living Well Is The Best Revenge,” and the soaring glory of the first single “Supernatural Superserious” to the last apocalyptic crunch of “I’m Gonna DJ.”

“We just wanted to reduce this one to its essence,” says bassist Mills. “We wrote shorter, faster songs, wrote almost exclusively on electric guitars. We recorded it mostly live in the studio, usually using the earliest takes. We actually took out verses and choruses that weren’t absolutely necessary, trying to find out what each song needed and getting rid of everything else.” The immediacy also comes from a sharp-eyed sense of the world today. “There’s a lot of urgency, yes,” Buck says. “And I feel there’s some anger. Look at the world and see plenty of reasons to be angry.”

But it’s a positive, forward-moving anger: “I want to end the first decade of the 21st century feeling really hopeful and excited and thrilled with human potential, our potential, all of us,” Stipe says. “So there it is.”

Stipe says that in writing the lyrics he found himself very much in the moment, but also looking back to what in his youth he imagined this place in history would be like – and feeling cheated. And he doesn’t mean that he hoped for personal jetpacks and vacations on the moon or anything, but a sense of global community and progress that hasn’t come to be.

“It challenges the very core of our being that you have the hope of a child, of a dreamer at 13 years old in 1973, taking a course on environmental science in the midst of women’s liberation and the civil rights movement,” he says. “I’m so angry about what I imagined as a teenager that the 21st century would be like and now seeing the sad reality. This record comments on the future I wanted, and I’m going to say, ‘I want my future now!’ ”

The immediacy is being played out not just in album form, but on stage with a world tour and in the very immediate realm of digital space in collaborations with French filmmaker Vincent Moon. A countdown to release launched on Jan. 1 at www.ninetynights.com, each day bringing fans a new high-resolution video snippet available for download, editing and placement in whatever way a user desires, as well as interview features, song previews, live footage and other treasures. As well, the outgrowth site www.supernaturalsuperserious.com gives fans a dozen video variations for the single, some with live audio and some with studio sound, that also are downloadable for editing and mixing, with results being posted at a designated YouTube channel, http://youtube.com/user/REMsuperserious.

Teaming for the first time with co-producer Jacknife Lee – at a recommendation from U2 guitarist the Edge – R.E.M. made the album in compact bursts of sessions in Vancouver, Dublin and, of course, Athens, GA, the band’s birthplace and HQ. The whole process was lean and focused, just Mills, Buck and Stipe with longtime recording and touring associates Scott McCaughey on guitars and drummer Bill Rieflin tracking largely live.

Lee’s credits, including Bloc Party and Kasabian in addition to U2, appealed very much to the group. “I looked at the work he had done and it felt like it would be a harmonious and challenging experience to work with him,” Stipe says. Buck adds, “They gave me a list of things he’d done and it just happened I owned all of them and they sounded great. All the records seemed to have something in common in that they sounded like performances – not a whole lot of sonic cathedral stuff going on, but an actual band performing.”

Buck says the approach grew out of the great experience the band had on its 2005-2006 world tour, an energetic trek captured on the recent R.E.M. Live CD/DVD package. “Everyone seeing us was saying how great we sounded,” he says. “I kept saying, ‘This is what we do, let’s capture the strength of the live performance on record.’ ”

With that in mind, R.E.M. did something it had never done before, performing nearly all of the new songs before an audience at a “live rehearsal” at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre, which also provided the launch point for the video and internet ventures with Vincent Moon.

“Of the songs we played in Dublin, nine made the record,” Buck says. “We could play them five days a week in a rehearsal room, but on stage you realize it should be faster, shorter, tighter. All the songs got road-tested, and that helped make the record feel it was performed and not put together.”

In many ways it marks a break from R.E.M.’s recent albums, 1998’s Up, 2001’s Reveal and 2004’s Around The Sun, all finely crafted works exploring the textures and possibilities of the recording studio. But ultimately, Accelerate ties together the band’s entire canon, from the initial blast of the 1981 single “Radio Free Europe” on, simultaneously serving as a summary and a new start -- the song “Sing For The Submarine” even referencing some earlier works. For Stipe it’s all part of the vision for this album of turning old dreams in to a new reality.

“That’s for me what the whole record represents, all the way through the artwork and the title,” he says. “And the reveal I make in ‘Sing Or The Submarine’ with songs going back through the R.E.M. canon, songs that were written more from my dream world than the real world – that’s from a post-apocalyptic future that is not a frightening place. Everything’s torn down and put back together, but there’s nothing frightening about it.”

The album’s launch point was the song that became its closer: “I’m Gonna DJ.” The track was originally written during sessions for Around The Sun, but didn’t fit the more atmospheric mood. However, it became a feature on the subsequent tours as both a band and fan favorite.

“It’s a good, chaotic song,” Buck says. “A lot of the record seems to be about living in this world – every song on Earth I guess is about that. But musically we wanted to capture that chaotic, energetic angry vibe about what our world is like.”

Stipe says the lyrics were inspired by the 1999 riots surrounding the World Trade Organization’s meeting in Seattle, with the titular DJ scratching his head over what it all meant. “It’s this guy feeling, ‘My God, this is the beginning of the end, or the end itself,’ and wondering what his reaction will be beyond protesting in the streets.”

Next came the song that found its place as the opener. “‘Living Well Is The Best Revenge,’ is in the long ride of Michael Stipe lyrics railing against the media and its place in our lives, how they’ve utterly failed us,” the singer says.

The next song written was of a different tone, the gentler (though hardly tame) “Until the Day is Done.” “It’s one of my 6/4-time fake Irish things,” says Buck. “I’m not really Irish, I think. But for some reason 6/4 feels to me as folk music personified.” “It’s a great vocal,” Mills adds. “I really do love it. Adds a nice balance to the record.”

Each song reveals its own barbed delights. “Mansized Wreath,” Mills says is “like anger delivered with a butter brush.” “Supernatural Superserious” as much as anything here offers a classic R.E.M. combination of witty wordplay and sing-along appeal that Mills calls “R.E.M. 2008 – probably my favorite on the record, or close to it.” “Hollow Man” was one of the songs that took a while to come together and was the last finished for the album, but anchors the set’s core.

“Houston,” Buck says, boils the national shock of the Hurricane Katrina disaster into a minute and a half of emotional poetry. “Michael at one point said, ‘I want every song to be a minute and a half long.’ I wrote two or three that were and this was one. When we first played it on stage in Dublin, we’d never heard either the melody or lyrics. Michael had only sung along on headphones. I never saw the lyric. But I trust Michael and it’s one of my favorites on the record.” Mills concurs: “It’s very powerful – sad, yet ultimately optimistic.”

The title song, the simmering “Mr. Richards” and the sly “Horse To Water” (“Great fun to sing and play – I like calling it a ripping yarn!” declares Mills) complete a collection that never lets up in a way no R.E.M. album ever has before.

“It’s 11 songs, 34 minutes, the whole thing in and out,” says Stipe. “Art and pop culture and music are about right now. And that’s what this record is – about right now.”

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Tracklisting

REM - Accelerate