Reveal

7.5/10

  We have firmly arrived in the era of R.E.M. that most critics have agreed to dump on as much as possible.  I've once again heard the accusation that there are no memorable tunes on this album, but that is completely not the case.  The truth is R.E.M. have once again delivered a highly melodic album, and many of the songs feature lushly appealing arrangements as well as upbeat and catchy hooks.  So why does everyone seem to hate this album so much?  I can only guess that on some level they're still bitter about the band carrying on without Bill Berry.

  I'm here to tell you that this is not actually a bad album.  It's not particularly their most innovative album either, and there are a couple songs I'm ever so slightly less fond of, so that's why I rated it a little lower than Up.  They've retained a lot of the electronic sounds from the previous album, but they've also married them to more of the traditional R.E.M. jangly guitar sound.  One thing this album lacks, as did Up, is much in the way of Mike Mills backing vocals.  They were such an integral part of the early R.E.M. sound and I'm not sure why they wandered so much away from that on their later albums.  If you want to use that as an excuse to hate later R.E.M. albums, I'm willing to concede you that point.

Reveal kicks off in nice fashion with The Lifting.  You get some cool spacey synth sounds right off the bat followed by a catchy melody.  This is a good song, damn it.  They really put the electronic touches to good use here.

  The next track I've Been High is a bit slower and maaaaybe breaks up the momentum a little.  It's not a bad song at all, but maybe track 2 wasn't the right spot for it.  On the other hand it doesn't really ruin the album for me either.  I'm fine with it where it is, I'm just trying to think of ways in which other people might like this album better.

  Next up is All The Way To Reno, which features some cool guitar parts that almost sound like they could be in a western movie to me.  They somehow evoke dusty trails and tumbleweeds to me.  Also it has some pretty genuinely funny lyrics, what with the whole notion of somebody going to Reno to become a star.  I think Stipe is making some sort of joke here.  That prankster.

Elsewhere we get another Beach Boys homage in Summer Turns to High and what clearly sounds like a Burt Bacharach tribute to me in Beachball.  There's certainly nothing wrong with tipping the hat to either of these acts in my book and I quite enjoy both tracks.

Imitation of Life got some airplay at the time and it's a damn catchy song.  I've seen it pointed out elsewhere that it follows the same chord progression as Driver 8, but the melody is different.  Plenty of songs have been written using the same chord progressions and numerous artists have done much more blatant re-writes of their own songs than this.  Plus if you're going to steal something, you may as well steal from yourself, right?

I don't dislike any of the songs on this album really, but I'm maybe not quite as huge on Saturn Return or Chorus and the Ring.  On the other hand I think I'll Take The Rain is a pretty epic song that never seems to get any love.

To my ears the songwriting remains pretty strong overall on this album.  There are possibly some slight signs of dwindling inspiration here and there and I wouldn't recommend this as a starting point to someone who's never heard R.E.M. before, but it's nowhere near as horrible as the critical consensus would like you to think it is.  It's like everyone just arbitrarily decided it was time to turn on R.E.M. because they had been around for a long time and because of that, they just had to suck.  But people really jumped the gun on this one.  They wrote them off a couple of albums too early.  It's not really until the next album that things took a noticeable downturn... (cue scary music)