1) Airportman; 2) Lotus; 3) Suspicion; 4) Hope; 5) At My Most Beautiful; 6) The Apologist; 7) Sad Professor; 8) You’re in the Air; 9) Walk Unafraid; 10) Why Not Smile; 11) Daysleeper; 12) Diminished/I’m Not Over You; 13) Parakeet; 14) Falls to Climb
Channeling their internal confusion and melancholy through electronic elements and noise textures, R.E.M. begin anew and create their most ambitious and incredible record.
Key tracks: "Walk Unafraid", "Daysleeper", "Falls to Climb"
First time I heard “Lotus”, one of the key singles from Up, I wasn’t particularly thrilled. Granted, I was about 10 and my music taste wasn’t particularly good at the time in general, but I still vividly remember hearing it and how odd and disjointed it sounded to my ears - to the degree that I still remember it. I guess many people were in a similar position to me at the time, likely including R.E.M. themselves. Bill Berry had left and given the others his blessing to continue without him, and they did so with mixed feelings, describing themselves as a three-legged dog. Things didn’t just have to change, they were forced to change. 1998 was a peak year for alternative rock heroes discovering electronics and R.E.M. found themselves caught in the tide by half-accident: occupying Berry’s empty drummer’s seat with drum machines was a logical step, but they dug deeper than just that, hiding their own troubled thoughts into sonic layers and scratching the traditional R.E.M. melodies with organised chaos.
It’s up for debate how much of it was influenced by the general melancholy lingering among the band at the time, but Up hatched into an introspective mood piece. Much of it is moves along the same mid-to-low tempo and the soundscape is full of detailed textures, soft keyboard walls and electronic fuzz. Peter Buck’s guitar takes a backseat and instead of his traditional bright melodies, he hides the harmony under distortion, replaces it with heavy e-bow treatment or leaves guitars out altogether in favour of keyboards. Stipe alternates between worn-out, frustrated and completely given up throughout the album and the narrator characters of his lyrics are all at their lowest point - people who have been beaten by the world and are too tired to rise up again, who succumb to accusing everyone else but themselves, feel eternally confused and out of place in the world, or just plain give up. The band members look sullen and lost in their own worlds in the back cover and that about sums it up. R.E.M. weren’t really ready to continue just yet, but they did and the emotional exert comes through in the music.
Despite the abrupt 180 in the mood from New Adventures’ rock and roll breeze, the band are still very clearly riding atop the creative wave that guided them through the 90s. Look no further than the opening twin act of Up, which is one of the most perfectly complimentary pairings of songs I’ve come across. “Airportman” starts the album in a most un-R.E.M.-like fashion, with a tiny electronic percussion pecking in the background while a strong, distorted bass appears and disappears intermittently amidst a sea of all sorts of ambient noise. A tiny piano melody seems to wander its own way, a tiniest trace of harmony all by itself, Stipe whispers and mutters his words almost incomprehensibly. This goes on for four minutes until the song gently fades into total silence. And then everything crashes. The next in line “Lotus” breaks the silence with a drum roll and launches into a surreally funky, thick and groovy number that sounds like it’s coming from the depths of a fever dream. The mood is tossed completely topsy-turvy from “Airportman”, the ambient drone switched into a loud interpretation of a rock song. But “Lotus” retains its mysterious atmosphere - Stipe’s lyrics border on nonsense in their extremely abstract obliqueness, his vocals are double-tracked throughout the song to play both the parts of a softly seductive whisperer and a guttural crooner, and the song’s instrumentation has something very beautifully unsettling to it with its swooping strings, thick bass and endlessly buzzing keyboard lines in the background, all the bells and whistles thrown around and throughout in-between (the band would release a “Weird Mix” of the song as a b-side to the single, which reverses the mix i.e. everything that was in the background is now in the fore and vice versa - you genuinely do not get just how busy the song is until you listen to it). Suffice to say I’ve turned my opinion around on “Lotus” from my ten-year-old self’s take on it, an as an opener salvo both “Airportman” and “Lotus” is a jawdropper.
“Lotus” is by far the most frenetic of Up’s lot but it’s far from the only curve ball the album throws; if anything, Up is nothing but curve balls. The running current through the album is its focus on the introspective aspects of R.E.M.’s music, but how it expresses that varies wildly. “The Apologist” swivels between self-loathing and one “I’m sorry” after another as it jumps from its loopy verses into something vaguely resembling a hook-oriented chorus, “Hope” pushes onward like a train in its electro-acoustic glory, covering its acoustic guitar bones with a dissonant electronic wail, “Walk Unafraid” increases the tempo to create something that resembles a traditional rock track although in a twisted, masqueraded form, with a habit of falling apart piece by piece. On the other end there’s the dreamy “Suspicion” with its gentle lullaby melody that sounds alarmingly otherwordly rather than soothing (and on an album bereft of traditional Buck moments, features a guitar solo), the gorgeously swirling “You’re in the Air” that reaches a place somewhere between desperate and aching, and “Diminished”, an unassumingly calm and collected with a dark heart, and another case of the arrangement favouring a selection of odds and ends to twist the song sonically into something far beyond its calm lurch forward. Even something as simple as “Why Not Smile” with its downstated melody and one of the most straightforward arrangements of the album, mostly centered around Mills’ organ, drowns itself into guitar feedback before too long, countering its own saccharine notions (or faux-saccharine, given the song can be either venomous or genuine depending who you ask).
Parts of Up do drop these obscuring elements and the stark nakedness and simple beauty of them are arresting in comparison. The ethereal and sleepy single “Daysleeper” captures its 2AM burnout blues mood perfectly and lifts off like a soothingly melancholy cloud: it’s the most traditionally R.E.M.-esque song on the album in a myriad of ways, from its tone to heavily band-centered arrangement, and on Up it serves as a palate cleanser and a brief oasis of straightforward grace. “Sad Professor” serves a similar purpose, an acoustic song full of late-night, isolationist melancholy that could have come from any album in the last decade of R.E.M. and now sounds like a traditional look back. It’s full of weary blues like nearly everything in Up, but there is a genuine spot of light as well: “At My Most Beautiful” is the album’s one moment of honest happiness. It’s R.E.M.’s most straightforward love song and a tribute to Beach Boys musically and vocally (with the vocal harmonies making up so much of its theme), a simple and heart-in-sleeve confession of pure love and infatuation in form of a celebration to all the silly little things you do when hopelessly in love. It’s the only moment on the album with no strings attached or doubt sown at the back of the mind and that alone makes it stand out, but it’s generally a little marvel of a song: a genuine heart-warmer of a love song. Both “Daysleeper” and “At My Most Beautiful” were also singles, somewhat deceivingly open invites to an album that otherwise retreats into itself.
That retreat makes Up special, though. The argument that a lot of the best music comes from personal hardships is painfully true too often, and it’s happened here as well. Up isn’t a traditional kind of R.E.M. album, certainly not a beginning of a new chapter even if it feels like it: it’s an abrupt interlude and gear change which needed to exist, rather than a new iteration of the band making their bold first step. But it’s an album soaked with meaning, feeling and power. Its dense sound is an aural chest of wonders that begins to create its own reality as it begins, enveloping the listener within the production and demanding attention to every little detail. Within that production is a selection of songs full of ache and confusion, brought forward by a captivating emotional performance. They’re songs that are subtler about their intentions than most of the band’s music, but which pack every bit as much strength inside them: if you want hooks you have them, but there’s a whole realm of inspiring musical passages, fantastic instrumental parts and fantastic areas where strong songwriting and deliberately emphasised production choices seamlessly merge, where both are as important as each other. It hits hard. Up isn’t a signifier of R.E.M.’s most obvious strengths but through the band challenging themselves and pushing through their hardships, they have created a superlative album that is, quite honestly, their best record.
That statement isn’t a slight towards Bill Berry - the man was essential, as some of the other later-day R.E.M. albums prove. And it’s a statement obviously loaded with an incredible amount of personal bias: over time Up has found me at times when I’ve needed something like it the most, it was one of the key albums that made me re-think and realise certain facets of music that I thoroughly love, and its weary mood mixed with its gorgeous songs have a power even today that takes me aback.
I’ve held back on mentioning Up’s closer until now. As fantastically as it started, Up’s complimenting bookend has a similar importance to its cycle. At the final moments of a long, contemplative album, “Falls to Climb” offers its final confessional. Built entirely around a swirling organ and Stipe’s tortured, waiting-on-release singing, “Falls to Climb” is the final act of release, with the narrator accepting his faults and the effects of his actions with martyr-like openess. The music gradually builds element by element each go-around, sometimes with bogus steps - the acoustic guitar that only appears for a moment before disappearing forever again - until it finally lifts off with a simple marching beat, Stipe yelling out his final lines of the album - “I am free” - over and over again before the music quietens down. It’s the perfect finale for Up: an emotional expunge to settle the score, to bury the emotional conflicts of the album and to relieve as much the narrator as the listener. It’s one of the very best songs R.E.M. ever did, and as a closer it’s one of the rare ones which present such an impactful finale that after the album stops to silence and you emerge back into the real world, everything feels a little different, your own emotional charge feels different.
It’s hard for me to describe exactly why, but this is among the very, very greatest records ever for me, likely even in the top 2 of all time if you want to go list-y. Should I consider reasons why I love music so much, it’s albums like this.
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