Day 32: "Reveal" - R.E.M. (2001)

I think every music fan has a band that, after a while, buying their albums becomes force of habit rather than conscious choice.  "Monster" was probably the last R.E.M. album which wasn't just a rote purchase for me.  By the time "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" was released in '96, I already owned 9 R.E.M albums.  To stop there would seem crazy, so I just bought it.  I even enjoyed a lot of the songs on "Up".  But the level of quality had already started to fall.  Come the arrival of "Reveal" in 2001, I had to ask myself a dangerous question - did the band I spent over a decade loving suck now?

Listen to me here

If breaking up with Aerosmith yesterday was the mutual agreement of two people to part after the magic has gone, this feels like the gut-wrenching fear that your long term relationship is spiralling out of control, and you desperately want to hold on to how you felt before, convincing yourself that everything still alright, it's alright, just keep telling yourself it's alright.  The fact that this is the 3rd R.E.M. album in 32 posts, and I can see at least another 4 on the pile, should give you a sense of the level of my devotion to this band.  

I get it.  It's hard.  Reveal was R.E.M.s 12th studio album in a career which had already lasted 19 years.  Founder member Bill Berry, owner of the finest set of rock n' roll eyebrows in the business, had left 18 months before, and the band were still trying to figure out where they were after the critical panning of "Up".  And there are songs on here that I like, and none that I hate, so by all rational measures it's a fine R.E.M record.

I always thought"Bill Berry's Rock n' Roll Eyebrows" would be a great name for a band.

But somehow it feels flat.  It's tired, and formulaic, and it doesn't inspire me to seek it out.  In a body of work which includes at least 3 contenders for my favourite record of all time, "Reveal" doesn't even move the needle.

I talked to Catherine about this phenomenon a while back on a long car drive back from the Lake District.  You take a group of young, driven, talented musicians, with a hunger to be noticed and something to say to the world, and you get a band like R.E.M. circa 1983-1994.  But how do you keep going when you're not young, you're not hungry because you've already been there, seen it all, taken everything the musician lifestyle is going to bring you, and when you've said everything you wanted to say?  The talent is still there, and the drive, but everything else is missing, and inspiration strikes less and less frequently, and you can't just sit there and not release an album because there's 4 songs you've written that you really like;  so you make up some extra tracks from things you've been messing with, and it sounds fine, and you put it out.  But at that point, what was your passion is now your hobby.  It's another prop to occupy your time, if you will.

There are moments on this album which feel like they are the standouts, the vintage R.E.M tracks, they're just hidden in a pile of comfortable fluff.  I've a long held belief that you can make an outstanding R.E.M. album, something to rival the heights of "Out of Time" or "Automatic for the People" by selectively lifting tracks from "Up", "Reveal", "Around The Sun", "Accelerate" and "Collapse Into Now" into a tight 12 track album.  

But, in order to keep this from becoming a maudlin reflection on how entropy destroys everything we love in the end, "Reveal", and specifically the Reveal Tour, afforded me the one opportunity I have had to see R.E.M live.  I went with D, and I think The Girl Who Broke My Heart (who was not an R.E.M. fan but came out of solidarity) to Manchester Arena.  I remember I drove our little party over from Sheffield, because at the time neither D nor The Girl drove.  I hadn't driven in Manchester City Centre before, and the one-way system around the Arena got me so turned around that I ended up flustered and going the wrong way down a one-way street and coming head to head with a tram coming the other way (which was fortunately stationary, and I was able to make a sharp exit).

I was psyched to finally see R.E.M.  It was maybe a year before this that I'd looked at my CD collection then and decided I was going to try and see every band I owned a CD of live that it was possible to do so (so bands like Nirvana and The Beatles were obviously excluded).  At one point I actually got the list down to only 5 bands I hadn't seen live, but just a cursory scan of The Pile tells me the tally has now risen much higher.  At the time though, crossing R.E.M off my "seen live" list eliminated like 8 CDs in one go, so that was huge.

I did have some trepidation though.  It was just that same year I'd had a very disappointing Depeche Mode concert experience (of which more later, I am sure), and I went into the show expecting to hear the majority of Reveal, some songs from Up, and a scattering of Out of Time/Automatic for the People era tunes.  R.E.M. proceeded to promptly blow both my up expectations and my mind as they launched into "Don't Fall On Me", a song they'd release 19 years earlier, as like their fourth song.  The entire performance was a discography retrospective.  If I had picked out the set list, it might not have looked much different from what we got that night.  It was exceptional.

Sadly, this was before my "buy a shirt from every gig you go to" phase. But it was R.E.M., so I had to keep something, a little reminder of the one time I saw maybe my favourite band of all time perform an amazing live set.

So "Reveal", for all its flaws, gets a pass.  It makes me sad because, in my mind, it marks the beginning of the end of my love for the band, but because of its very existence, I got to see them live, something I'll never get the opportunity to do again.

You're alright, Reveal.