This is a rewrite – the original review was the first and only review I’ve had that was only a “helpful” plus looking back, it was pretty pitiful, so here’s a new version, which hopefully better reviews this album – but I still haven’t quite got the swing of music reviews.
I've have been a long time REM fan and at the time that the Reveal album was to come out, I was eagerly waiting for the new album to be released. I had heard the new single, Imitation of Life on the radio for a few weeks before hand and at the time, I was not sure what exactly I was expecting of the entire album, but I think something along the lines of UP, their previous album.
The album Reveal is not like REM’s album Up (the prior album) and is generally unlike most of REM’s previous albums, such as Green or Fables of the Reconstruction or Automatic for the People.
I have never been able to really listen to this album for any length of time and I consider myself a fairly die-hard REM fan. Whenever I have it in my CD player, I am quite often skipping through songs or forwarding while I was listening because it would seem like the song would go on forever or just start to really drag. That disappointed me, as before Reveal came out, I had never had an REM album where there were songs that I just didn't want to listen to and forwarded through them.
Maybe it's just a bit to slow in places for my taste, or a bit too symphonic and produced. I have always found that REM had some amount of energy and a certain kind of instrumentation in their music and this album, save for maybe Imitation of Life, seem like one big relaxing sigh without any of that energy. I know I say “slow” when describing this music and maybe that’s the wrong word, but there seems to be a certain similarity between all of the songs and in general between the production on each song and just the songs’ tempos, the entire album floats along at this mellow pace that just rubs me the wrong way. Take a song or two, such as All the Way To Reno or Disappear and I enjoy the song, but when you put it all together, it doesn’t work for me.
With Reveal, it seems like REM are mellowing out in their music. This album feels almost like a complete turn-around from anything else that REM has produced before. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but for me, it’s a direction for REM that I don’t really enjoy. The songwriting is still strong and there is a lot to hear if you listen, but with the presentation of Reveal, I just don’t want to listen and I can’t bring myself to hear more than a song or two at a time. Thank god for MP3s and burning your own CDs.
I've got "average" marked down and it's my honest feeling that REM has done much better than this album on almost any of their prior works. Even though the "not recommended" thing is checked off, for a true REM fan, I would tell them to get Reveal to have in their collection, for someone new to REM, I would steer them to earlier works that are more representitive of REM.
Playlist:
1. The Lifting
2. I’ve Been High
3. All the Way To Reno
4. She Just Wants to Be
5. Disappear
6. Saturn Return
7. Beat a Drum
8. Imitation of Life
9. Summer Turns to High
10. Chorus and the Ring
11. I’ll Take the Rain
12. Beachball
In the end the album is not awful, and at times, depending on my mood, I might even consider it a good one that is a welcome addition to my collection of REM, but is not the REM album that I listen to the most.
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