Are Seven

I’d held off posting any kind of review of REM’s new album Accelerate partly because I’m not really that qualified to do it. I’ve only listened to it twice through and it bores me to tears. The basic review that I gave last night to Christian at the monthly funfest that is Heavywax goes a little something like this:

New Adventures in Hi-Fi is now rightly acknowledged as being REM’s most underrated album. It has some beautiful, solidly constructed songs. But it’s also becoming a little overrated in the acknowledgement of its underratedness, because it’s also an uneven album. While songs like “Bittersweet Me” or “So Fast So Numb” were as well-constructed as anything on Green or Monster, and “Electrolite” or “E-Bow The Letter” would have held up fine beside anything else on Automatic For the People, the successes were tempered with exercises in phoning it in like “Leave”, “Wake Up Bomb”, and “Departure” and acoustic clunker “New Test Leper”. These were songs that never rose about their most simple intentions: a rock song with rock chords and some lyrics on top. They were free of dynamics and inspiration and sat as bland pieces of song that begged to be skipped. Which I did. A lot.

These are the songs that the reviewers of Accelerate must consider the peak of REM’s form, because when they repeat over and over that the new album is a “return to form”, this exactly what they’re returning to: songs that are no more than songs, taking basic ingredients that might still be good with some creativity, but cooking them to a bland mush. You can tell you’re devouring something, but that’s about the end of it.

I remember reading a biography about REM back around 1990 (don’t remember the title) that included a bit about how the guys in REM were bothered by their constant comparison to The Smiths. But the funny thing is, I can’t get over how much their career has resembled Morrissey’s in recent years, as they put out albums that are being blindly hailed as returns to form only because people are ready to like them again, when they’re not even as good as the records that both acts were turning out ten years ago, let alone in their creative heydays.

And that sums up my review. But what’s really been bothering me about Accelerate, an album which I could otherwise ignore, are the boring reviews of it. In a way, they’re highly appropriate, because they’re approach their craft with the same rote drudgery as the album was made. It says an enormous amount about the pitiful state of mainstream record reviews. Pick up any copy of Entertainment Weekly and you can see it: music reviews which really say little new and are there mostly out of obligation to include music, but clearly taking a backseat to movies and TV, which are able to paint a broader stroke and have more interesting things to say in just as many pages.

Pitchfork has gotten to its lofty perch of influence simply through it’s sincerity. Whatever the review, it’s clear that it’s the actual feelings of the reviewer, and more often than not, a read of a Pitchfork review gives me a clear indication of what the reviewer liked or didn’t like about it. They’re able to shine a light on the reasons for the review. Which is why I listen carefully to everything they have to say.

It’s something that I’ve said more than once, but there’s still a gaping hole in the way that we discover and devour music. The blogs have helped, but they’re still just mostly just unformed blurts and when a blogger posts all the time, it’s tough to figure out what exactly they recommend and whether they’re just writing about. There’s still a lot of refinement needed, because rote writing that’s little more than either quilts of press releases or pointless claims of “this is awesome” are just not cutting it.

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