R.E.M.

Here's part two (after Up) of the band's search for a reason to keep going as a trio. This time the group actually sounds enthused about the prospect, though whether the public agreed depends on who you ask. The thing about middling R.E.M. albums, though, is that they only sound middling compared to other R.E.M. records. Compare them to albums by just about any other band on the planet, and they're pretty damn impressive.

It's been twenty years since R.E.M. released their debut single, "Radio Free Europe,"
declaring their independence from the rock cliches of 1981 with a few self-evident truths:
guitars, drums, hair, soulful moaning, spasmodic melody, raw emotion, pretensions and
sexy mumbles nobody has deciphered to this day. Jesus, it sounded good. They were the
archetypal American band of the Eighties, but it wasn't till the Nineties that they... More >

Not as bad as it first sounds, but also not as good as they thought when they released it, or they wouldn't have, I hope. Suffused with somnolent tempos and pensive arrangements, the romantic trials and spiritual quests of struggling rock and rollers can be pretty hard to take, so why should we care about the ditto of wealthy movie producers with a record contract to fulfill and 21 individually acknowledged string players on call? Even a movie producer who knows the names of Japanese carp and French emotions that he'll happily print out in the booklet now that he's e-nun-ci-a-ting ev-ry sing-gle word? (Grade - B-)