The Strange Splendour of R.E.M.’s Around the Sun
20 years later it is still often called R.E.M.’s worst album, but I’ve always connected with Around the Sun.
Part of that might be the timing. A few years before it came out, my father gave me his cassette of Automatic for the People, which I listened to front-to-back countless times. The band then had a smash hit in the UK with their 2003 compilation In Time, which put many of their greatest compositions in one place, including non-album tracks like The Great Beyond. The set’s release had roared out of the gates with the lead single Bad Day, a boisterous reworking of an unreleased track from the ‘80s that later partly inspired It’s the End of the World As We Know It. R.E.M. reinforced themselves as a going concern commercially in the UK with all of this and I was excited for whatever they would do next.
Another reason is probably seeing them tour the album in Cardiff in support of the album, the first rock concert I went to and a truly formative experience.
But in hindsight it is odd looking back at their exuberant presence on the album and single charts in 2003 and knowing they were simultaneously cooking up an album with a far more stately pace and languid atmosphere. Its detractors might tell you it’s full of dirges, erring towards slower songs throughout without as much of the glistening Beach Boys influences of a Reveal or Up.
Admittedly, it is an odd duck – its one guest appearance is Q-Tip, and it challenges listeners who had just once again ringingly endorsed the high drama and radio-ready choruses of Everybody Hurts and Losing My Religion with their wallets to a largely restrained, stoic series of songs.
For me, I enjoy the hazy, rainswept landscape it conjures, where sudden electric guitars emerging from the melancholic beat of a song like The Outsiders feel like watery sunbeams cutting through grey clouds. Stipe’s lyrics and performance express a doleful, reflective quality throughout, showing a very different side to the band to Bad Day and the other recent new song, the snarling Animal.
Leaving New York was the lead single and would probably fit most comfortably on In Time, or for that matter on the sunnier Reveal. Make It All Okay recalls the poetic balladry of Automatic For The People at its best. Stipe tries to take solace in faith but still feels the weight of this mortal world bearing down on him, with perhaps more nuance than the song most closely associated with the band, Losing My Religion. On Final Straw, he sings “what silenced me is written into law”, on a protest song redolent of what Tom Morello would do with his Nightwatchman project. Wanderlust is one of only two tracks to up the tempo a little, a jaunty number that would be at home on their swan song Collapse Into Now.
The bleary album art that shows the band members out of focus on a white background is fitting for the album, a very different visual approach to the chunky iconography of their course-correcting followup Accelerate. By the time you are into the album’s back half proper, that rheumy aesthetic has taken hold and that is where the album’s power lies for me. If you haven’t become bored of slow songs and Stipe’s measured, morose intonations, you might have found yourself as immersed in the atmosphere as me.
The Spotify numbers for the album tell the story – of the back half, the more rocking Aftermath (sounding like an update of Imitation of Life but with the lyrical blend of everyday crestfallen resignation you expect by this point in the album) is the only one with more than a million streams, compared to healthy numbers throughout for Collapse into Now.
Boy in the Well, High Speed Train, The Worst Joke Ever, The Ascent of Man and the title track all take their time to reveal themselves. Each has a flinty eloquence to it that makes the occasional burst of melody all the more captivating. When a song is called High Speed Train but presents as a disconsolate, yearning crawl of a composition, it gives you a totally different picture in your mind’s eye. Its sentiment of devotion keens all the more in this form. Cresting through the solemn instrumentation of The Ascent of Man is the album’s best chorus, a clamour of pealing, proclamatory “yeahs” and murmured chants from Stipe that makes it without exaggeration one of my favourite songs from the band.
It’s when the closing title track (also an all-time favourite of mine) begins that the album’s spell is complete, at least for me. You get the same pace, the same sound as the rest of the record, but the vocals are bolder, the chorus confident, and a great section halfway with pounding, almost tribal drums. It really sounds like the soundtrack to observing the earth from some astral perch.
Both fans and the band themselves reacted against the finished work, and R.E.M’s last two albums were far more accessible and effervescent. For my part, I feel like this really works as a companion piece to ‘90s R.E.M. favourites like New Adventures in Hi-Fi, while gesturing at the austere grandeur of the timeless Automatic for the People. I’m not trying to persuade anyone that this is a lost classic or an under appreciated masterpiece, I just appreciate it for what it is. Around the Sun is its own strange little world, both a reflection of and a riposte to the colourful platter of greatest hits they prepared during its recording sessions. I find myself rarely returning to the comparatively saccharine Collapse Into Now, but along with the rest of R.E.M.’s canonically beloved albums I can always go for another trip Around the Sun.
