Out of Time

9.0/10

  I can't possibly be objective about this album.  Not that music criticism is ever anything but subjective, but for this album in particular my outlook will almost certainly be different from most.  The thing is this is the album that got me into music, plain and simple.  Every music fan has an album that was their first one they ever really got into.  For me it's this one.  Prior to this I casually listened to the radio.  I wanted to like music, but I wasn't super thrilled with the music I was discovering.  Then when I was about 14 years old one of my friends showed me this album and I got completely obsessed with it.  I remember taking a road trip to California with my friend and my cousin and we just played this album on repeat over and over again.  It set me off on the path of becoming a music fan, and for that reason I could never possibly give this a bad rating.

  It's kind of weird because the general critical consensus of this has seemed to cool off, but I remember at the time all kinds of people being totally enthralled by it.  It was very loved by a lot of people and now I see it listed as one of their worst albums on a lot of critical review sites.  I guess it goes to show how much context can play a role in how albums are perceived.  To me, at the time, it was a breath of fresh air in the midst of a vast musical wasteland.  If I were to come to it for the first time now at this point in time, without ever having heard it before, I can't say it would have the same effect on me.  It probably wouldn't.  So for the average person coming to it new, you could probably expect to knock that score down a little bit.  But not too much.  I think this album has come to be underrated.

  As far as I know Out of Time was the first album on which R.E.M. utilized guest musicians, and they're all over this dang thing.  Kate Pierson from fellow Athens band the B-52's lends her vocals to 3 or 4 of these songs, which is the first time we've heard female vocals on an R.E.M. record.  The album kicks off with guest rapper KRS-One saying "Hey I can't find nothing on the radio" before a pretty arpeggiated chord kicks in and Michael Stipe sings.  KRS-One pipes up intermittently throughout Radio Song's "funky" verses before taking over entirely for the final verse with an actual rap.  A lot of people don't seem to like Radio Song very much, and while I agree the guest rapper thing was a little incongruous for R.E.M. as we knew them, his part is pretty short and not terribly obnoxious.  Plus it was kind of a bold thing for them to do at the time.  I also can't resist the whole "pretty" section of the song where Stipe is singing "The world is collapsing around our ears."  It's not my favorite R.E.M. song, but it was different from anything they'd really done prior to this, which may have something to do with why so many people don't like it.

  The next song was the gargantuan single from this album.  I still hear Losing My Religion all over the place.  I heard it in a bar just the other night.  And I still dig it.  It's a good song and after all these years and how much it's been overplayed I'm not completely sick of it.  Plus there aren't too many hit songs that prominently feature a mandolin.

  I don't have too much to say about Low other than it's kind of got a Doors-y vibe and Stipe sings in a deeper register than normal.  I always thought it was kind of cool how his voice goes lower as he says the word low over and over again.

  This album features Mike Mills lead vocals on two songs, which in my opinion is a good thing.  I'm pretty sure this is the only time you get so much unfiltered Mike Mills goodness in the R.E.M. catalog.  Both songs are catchy as all get out, if not necessarily breakout single material.  I think they might have released Near Wild Heaven as a single anyway.  Still, Mills has a nice melodious voice that's maybe lacking a little in some sort of "oomph" or "grit" or something, but is never anything less than pleasant to listen to.

  Endgame is a mostly instrumental song with some wordless vocals.  It's possibly a little slight, but it's super pretty.  They even bring in cool instruments like flugelhorns and whatnot on it.  It's relaxing and you could totally fall asleep to it and I mean that in the best possible way.

  Shiny Happy People gets a bad rap these days.  I've heard even the band has disowned it.  I see how the lyrics are maybe kind of embarrassing or cheesy, and I've also heard they were intended to be taken ironically.  Whatever the case may be, this was released as a single and got plenty popular at the time.  It's still a catchy as hell song, and I have a good memory associated with it that overrides any potential embarrassment over the lyrics.  I remember being on vacation in the Poconos during the summer of probably 1992.  My parents were part of some group that was having their annual meeting there and there weren't too many kids there in my age range.  But one of the other "kids" that was there was a cute blonde girl who was probably about a year older than me.  At that age under normal circumstances I would have been way too shy and flabbergasted to talk to her, but since we were pretty much the only teenagers we got to hanging out and she was really cool and it ended up being a pretty awesome time.  At any rate we were talking somewhere and Shiny Happy People came on in the background and she exclaimed how much she loved the song and started singing along to it.  Wait a minute here, a cute cool older woman loves a song by the band I am currently obsessed with?  Sorry, this song officially rules.

The rest of side 2 stays strong with Country Feedback being a particular highlight.  There's like a pedal steel mixed with guitar feedback, which is how they very cleverly came up with the title.  Add in the fact that Stipe says the F-word, which was unfathomably cool to me when I was 14 or 15.  Also the part at the end where he keeps repeating "It's crazy what you could have had I need this" is totally awesome.

It's Out of Time, god damn it.  It doesn't really "rock" and maybe the production's a little slick, but I'll always remember how awesome this album was for me when I discovered it.  I've heard it a bajillion times since then, but in the right mood it can still evoke that same sense of awesomeness it did back in the day.