After an eleventh month Green tour and the longest studio hiatus for the band to date, R.E.M. returned for their next with a lot of time and a lot of clout. The latter is not just apparent in the polished studio production and the multitude of studio musicians, but how they could bring in other musicians such as B-52’s goddess Kate Pierson and the rapper KRS-One (a popular rapper in the nineties before he became a popular controversy magnet in the 2000’s).
The clout extended to clarity. There is always talk about how Green was the catalyst for the band’s future work, but Out of Time is the one that feels closest to the solute.* This album is still a unique entry – as indeed is every R.E.M. album up to this point – but this is the first album which feels like an extension of, as opposed to, the previous one. The new instrumentation returns – particularly organs, strings and the trusty mandolin – but here the experiments have been refined, making the whole album feel like a cohesive whole more than Green. So cohesive in fact the band did not work on this like a stereotypical unit, instead swapping around instruments and roles when necessary. So in case I get names wrong here, I’m just going to say that Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry continue to be awesome.
Out of Time is noticeably R.E.M’s purist pop album, with the brightness so much to the surface that on the word chart of the album one of the biggest entries would be “happy”. But it is hard to define it just by that, for this album also contains some of the darkest internal emotions from the band to date: self-doubt, separation and even suicide. Like the title suggest there is an element of the apocalypse – “the world is collapsing” being the first sung lyrics – a topic familiar to a band who wrote a long, titled song about it. There’s a song called on this album called “Endgame”, if the underlying darkness couldn’t be made more apparent. Even the most despised songs on this album have elements of that (but more on that shortly).
It’s also hard to define this album as just “pop”. Despite its influence being apparent since Murmur, Out of Time is the most country album of the R.E.M. oeuvre, with sounds for the southern roads as conveyed by the admittedly ugly cover. And with a genre associated with a certain kind of confessional directness, Stipe decides to follow suit – as indeed the band was proving to do in this period – with this being the first album which is the majority of the first person. This combination also birthed something that hadn’t really existed for the band before: love songs. Cryptic, contradictory, very R.E.M love songs, but they are still there.
I’ve been very positive so far, but I will concede that the first song on this album, “Radio Song”, is a misstep. It is shame because underneath all the superfluous elements this is an incredibly pretty tune, with bright appegiated chords and soaring strings counteracting with a straight up funky organ (the bass work has been close to funky, but this is the first time the band have dabbled in that genre). It also deals with an interesting idea, that DJ’s play sentimental sad songs in a repeating cycle that in turn makes us feel sad and want to listen to more. I’m not sure how applicable this is in the internet era, but I guess it can be something to consider as we have returned to a more melancholic era in pop music. The problem here is KRS-One, babbling over the track in a way that would be somewhat prescient in nineties rap (Diddy!) and dates the song immediately. Also, while R.E.M. might be aiming to be more direct, the final lines here are pretty damn obvious. I’m sure it was great live, though, without all that stuff.
Any misgivings one may have after that, though, are immediately shattered with the next track, probably the band’s most popular and enduring song in a catalogue of many, “Losing my Religion”. Fortunately, unlike popular songs from famous bands that are not indicative of the act’s work, this has so many elements that are quintessential R.E.M. Chief here is Stipe, who combines both direct emotion and contradictory statements (“I’ve said too much/I haven’t said enough”) to portray someone obsessing over another person and being crippled by a sense of anxiety; a more sympathetic “Every Breath You Take.” The composition is also very much like R.E.M, full of minor chords, tight drums and great bass work (when heard below the lush strings). The big difference here of course is the instrumentation, primarily the acoustic guitar and ukulele to create a sound large, melancholic and lush.
“Low” in contrast to that starts sparse and quiet, with only muted guitar notes, quiet conga drums an organ playing elongated chords for a long period of time. Stipe also, in a change of pace, uses the register of his voice, giving him an almost Johnny Cash vibe in the choruses as he sings about a seemingly lonely person who “skipped the part about love/it seems so silly now”. For the longest song on the album it doesn’t do a lot of changing tone (except for strings towards the end), but still as a result it creates a slow, almost meditative mood.
In his meditation Stipe stands back for the next song to give the lead vocals to Mike Mills. He hasn’t done this prominently since the Fables and Lifes Rich Pageant era, and after the worried tone of the last song his vocals help the song to sound just just uplifting (even if the character himself isn’t: “And I always thought that it would make me smarter/But it’s only made me harder”). This is certainly helped by the instrumentation, which is the closest the band has come to sounding like the Beach Boys in both tone and backing vocals, helped in no small part by the sunny tones of Kate Pierson, as well as the combined bright nature of the pianos and guitar.
“Endgame” also has sixties music, but more like the melancholic baroque pop crossed with the country element of acoustic guitar. Of particular note is the simple beauty of the pizzicato strings the woodwinds that simply play the melody. This is almost an instrumental, in that their are no lyrics, but the vocals by both Stipe and Mills paint a picture that is both beautiful and desolate, like the Endgame in question. With the title in question I’m not sure if it’s meant to be like the last moments before apocalypse or death, or even if it is just the wilting waves of sleep. Either way, it is a gorgeous way to end the first half of the album.
And Side Two begins with…a conversation piece, I suppose. “Shiny Happy People” is pretty notorious at this point for being hated by both a great deal of fans and even the band themselves. In the “U Talkin’ U2 to Me” podcast, about that other famous 80’s band, the song reputation is enough for a joke about the top 10 R.E.M. songs to just be ten slots of Shiny Happy People. But is it entirely fair? I mean the strings are beautiful, and do bring the melancholy needed t juxtapose such a bright piece. Kate Pierson’s campy vocals compliment the song perfectly, and to make a great piece of bubblegum pop. And after a song possibly about the apocalypse, the happy tone has quiet a paranoid sense in the context of the album…oh god, I can’t do it! I thought I wasn’t going to come here and be a defender, but I can’t. I really really really do hate the lyrics. They’re not particularly funny to be ironic, and if sincere then the calls of “happy, happy” just don’t work in Stipe’s register. Oh and the video is annoying, and unlike the “Discotheque” video by that other famous 80’s band doesn’t become endearing with the passage of time. Call me a cynic, but please know I did try. Onwards…
Back to the sombre with “Belong”, a cross between the Johnny Cash like country infliction and the spoken storytelling like the Velvet Underground song “The Gift”. Mike Mills is of particular note again with both his sturdy bass and the pianos that decorate the solemnity of much of the song. Stipe meanwhile details a story of a family, in a rarity from the third person, and seems to be detailing another kind of apocalyptic scenario. Or maybe her own “world” Maybe this is like a proto-Babadook, where the monsters of the mind will still be there to take care of no matter how much you fend them off.
We then return to the mandolin for what appears to be an underrated gem in the R.E.M. canon. Building upon the cross between melancholic baroque pop and country music that the band have established until this point, Stipe uses this beautiful base to produce some of his best lyrics on the whole album (only not the best because of one other song). It seems to be very similar to “Belong” in some respects, with the state of the world outside – “the saddest dusk I’ve ever seen” – reflecting some aspect of the narrator’s personality; in this respect the band’s gothic tendencies never went away. And despite that nightmare scenario, and the worries of Stipe, he still plows on, with the repeats of “hold” and the music raising a semitone and giving a great sense of elevation. It’s a great song, and a nice template for the things that would be found on Automatic for the People
The last three song on the album are the most country sounding on the whole record, with “Texarkana” highlighting this enough to supply some slide guitar. Mike Mills again returns to vocals, and this time supplied his own lyrics after Stipe struggled. And Mills himself is no slouch on that front, following on from the last song with what feels like a shy and paranoid road trip song. It is one of a few R.E.M. songs that was never performed live, and honestly it easily could have. My guess is that they felt they felt they couldn’t replicate the power of those soaring strings.
But my favourite song from this album just so happens to be maybe Michael Stipe’s favourite R.E.M. song: “Country Feedback”. The title for this music seems hilariously on point; it is indeed a country song and the guitar does indeed have a lot of feedback. The disconnect between the two creates those contrast that R.E.M. loves, particularly orchestrated blues are punctuated with tiny bells. But amidst all of this is Stipe, with his passionate cries, detailing the end of love in all its fracture and all its mess. This song is both disarming in its directness, detailing many scenarios with just a few words and lashing out with self pity “It’s crazy what you could have had, I need this”, but that comes only after some trademark symbols and euphemism, showing a transformation from hiding behind language to using it to attack. It’s almost a good metaphor for the bad itself.
The album ends with the quieter “Me In Honey”, and in the fashion of this both anxious and optimistic record it is about a man going through the mixed and confused emotions of his partner being in childbirth. Of course this is not the most obvious reading, as the use of baby is always in context of the woman, and the woman is also called “Honey”, and the title suggested the person is him (which, to many a parent, they essentially are). But this mix of pronouns and people, in an album which had been mostly first person, is appropriate, showing how it is both a confusing time and a time with multiple perspectives. It shows this another to have Kate Pierson make a wordless, but poignant, cameo as a howling voice. And all this is conveyed through a song where the acoustics and electric guitars meet together in harmony where they did not before, and help bring the album to both a clear and unknown close. Contradictory, just the way the band likes it.
Out of Time has its missteps, but in between them is also some of the band’s most creative moments, although I would say except for “Shiny Happy People” the second half is stronger than the first. But with this record came the metamorphoses into full on megastars. Would it take them then another three years to produce another record? Well, no. And the record that came out much differently than they intended. It is like the music came out of them…automatically!.. Sorry, not sorry.
What did you think, though?
R.E.M Album Rankings
- Lifes Rich Pageant
- Murmur
- Document
- Reckoning
- Fables of the Reconstruction
- Out of Time
- Green
- Dead Letter Office/Chronic Town
* If I am the first person to make a “solute” pun on an article, please let me know!