Givens, Ron.
Out of Time. (sound recording reviews)
Stereo Review v56, n6 (June, 1991):85.
Pub Type: Review.
COPYRIGHT Hachette Magazines Inc. 1991
R.E.M. (vocals and instrumentals); other musicians. Radio Song;
Losing My Religion; Low; Near Wild Heaven; Endgame; Shiny Happy People;
and five others.
Performance: Twitchy
Recording: Good
These guys sound bored. In addition to they typical R.E.M. tracks,
driving folkbased rock with murky overtones, you can hear a wild catalog
of special effects in this album, from the guest rap of KRS-1 to the
spoken recitation of lead singer Michael Stipe to syrupy strings and
horns. It sounds like overthinking was needed to keep everyone awake.
That's okay as long as there's something to keep us thinkers at home
satisfied, too. Listening to R.E.M. has always been an interactive
experience (if only to decode Stipe's vocals), and the process has become
only slightly easier now that the band is recorded more cleanly. Without
their puzzles, R.E.M. would certainly be less interesting. In fact, the
songs in "Out of Time" that are easiest to figure out - Near Wild Heaven,
Endgame, Belong, and Texarkana - are the ones that quickly become tedious.
The rest, however, are packed with nuance. Losing My Religion may
literally be about a loss of faith, or it may be about the loss of
romantic love, or maybe about how these two things are the same thing, or
maybe it's about performance anxiety, or maybe it's about none to these
things. Maybe I'm getting some of the crucial words wrong. In
conversations with journalists, Stipe has offered a clue by describing
"Out of Time" as a collection of "love songs," but I don't know how much I
trust him.
No faith is needed to get the music, although a chart identifying the
stylistic tics would be helpful. Tiny bits of influence pop out in the
strangest places, like the quavery, nasty electric guitar in Country
Feedback that seems straight out of Jefferson that seems straight out of
Jefferson Airplane. In Half a World Away, the instruments just keep coming
- after the mandolin, organ guitar, bass, and harpsichord, the strings
show up. The whole album has the same sort of overdone, more-is-more
quality. Maybe R.E.M. should have called it "Out of Ideas," because after
using everything they could think of here, they can't have any left.
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