Up

8.0/10

  I feel a certain amount of pressure to rate Up lower.  That's certainly the general consensus when it comes to this album.  This was their first album without drummer and founding member Bill Berry, who as previously mentioned retired to become a farmer.  I think a lot of people were somehow offended that they decided to continue on without him.  But it's not as if Bill Berry himself was pissed they went on.  From what I understand one of his conditions for leaving the group was that the rest of them not break up.  And I also recall reading somewhere that he considered this their best album.

  It seems like they took the opportunity to play around with some different sounds and textures.  Specifically there are a lot more synths and electronic sounds and drum machines than we've ever heard on an R.E.M. album before.  They actually might have been a little ahead of the game here as all kinds of rock bands seemed to start "experimenting" with electronics around the late '90's and early 00's.

  They open up the album with what's probably the most radical experiment on the record in the form of Airportman.  It's not really a traditional verse chorus verse kind of song, but rather almost a drone with some pretty and ethereal synth noises as Stipe quietly sings "Great Opportunity" several times.  It's not exactly a super flashy start to the album, as it's a kind of quiet, almost barely there sort of song, and it doesn't really have hit single potential, but I think it's sort of a bold choice to kick the album off with and it does set the tone for what's to come.  It's really different from anything they had ever done up to this point, too, and I honestly quite like it.

  The second track Lotus takes us back to more familiar territory.  It's more of a rocker and could have easily fit on New Adventures in Hi-Fi or even Monster, for that matter.  I can't say it's a ripoff of any of their earlier songs or anything, but it definitely sounds much more like R.E.M. as we've come to know them at this point.

  They ended up giving Leonard Cohen a co-writing credit on the song Hope since they felt the song bore some similarity to his smash hit Suzanne.  I'm actually a pretty big fan of Leonard Cohen so it didn't really bother me that they were using his song as inspiration.  Listening to Hope the melodic similarity is most definitely there, but I think they did it differently enough that they could have gotten away with not crediting Cohen, but kudos to them for just owning up to it and doing it anyway.

  The next song At My Most Beautiful sounds distinctly Beach Boys influenced, but they decided not to credit Brian Wilson for that one.  Not that they're ripping off any particular Beach Boys song, but the sound in general is very Wilson-esque.

  The single off of this one was Daysleeper and I seem to remember it being a pretty moderate hit at the time.  It's a catchy song that sounds more traditionally R.E.M. than most of the other songs on here.  It could have easily been on Out of Time without drawing undue attention to itself.

  I don't think Walk Unafraid was released as a single, but in some alternate universe I think it could have been a decent sized hit.  It's got a nice melody and a pretty anthemic chorus.  I don't hear people talking about it too much, but it's a really nice song.

  Overall I think Up shares some of the same flaws as it's predecessor.  It's probably a little too long at over an hour in length again.  Also a lot of the songs clock in at over five minutes again.  Once again I have difficulty pointing to any weak link songs that should have been cut.  I think they actually manage to do some interesting stuff with the synthesizers and end up creating some fairly complex soundscapes at various points throughout the album.  I think people's biggest beefs with this album are that Bill Berry isn't on it, they dared to use electronics, and it's kind of long.

I've read a lot of reviews that claim the songwriting sucks on this one, but I have to disagree with that.  These songs possess melodies, and I can actually remember how they go after the record's over, unlike a lot of stuff that critics seem to freak out over.  I think this album gets a bit of an unfair bad rap and is most certainly underrated.  I'm not going to attempt to argue that it's their best album or even among their top five, but it's not the unmitigated disaster that the critical consensus would have you believe.  And I would gladly listen to this over anything that's been featured in the past several Grammy awards.  But that's just me.