In anticipation of Around the Sun (out October 4), R.E.M. have released a free download of new song snippets on iTunes (also available here and here), which includes “Leaving New York,” Around the Sun,” “Wanderlust,” “Electron Blue,” and “I Want To Be Wrong.” That goofy voicemail intro aside, I think this is strong stuff by our boys in Athens, easily better than Reveal and definitely more confident-sounding than the intermittent greatness of Up. “Electron Blue” — R.E.M.’s best run at an synth-driven tune yet — just might be my new favorite song-of-the-moment. And with the official word that the Tribe’s Q-Tip is also on one of the tracks (“The Outsiders”), this could be the choicest R.E.M. album in a decade or more.
2 thoughts on “Tomorrow’s Gaining Speed.”
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I just heard they had a new album a few days ago. I used to keep up with R.E.M. much more closely, but “Reveal” left a bad taste in my mouth. Although many cheered it, the album seemed timid and stodgy to my ears. I loved “Up,” though — poor, slandered “Up.” It was an adventurous album. Does the new stuff resemble it at all?
Hmmm, no, not really…although the snippets of “Electron Blue” and “Around the Sun” both include synth sounds like much of Up. Basically, the difference between these excerpts and the songs on the last two albums seems to be confidence. Every since Bill Berry left, it seems to me the band has been tentative about their rhythm, which also explains the overproduced feeling of both Up and Reveal, as if Stipe, Mills, and Buck were hiding behind studio flourishes. This sounds much more like a straight-out R.E.M. album, with the distinctive jingly-jangly minor key rock of classic R.E.M. fused to some of the new approaches they’ve discovered post-Berry.