Reveal | R.E.M. | Wistful & Brilliant

Reveal | R.E.M. | One of R.E.M.'s Very Best Albums

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Reveal

	Reveal R.E.M. Warner Bros / Wea, 2001 average customer review:based on 417 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

R.E.M. have no right at this advanced stage in their career to be making such a spirited and beautiful album as Reveal. Twenty years after "Radio Free Europe," they're still jiggy as year-old pups. Reveal is the sound of a band that's beyond feeling the need to change or to prove themselves to each new generation, but retains its passion. Michael Stipe's voice is at its most evocatively beautiful on "I've Been High," and Peter Buck's eclectic tunes continue along the highly accessible vein mined on 1998's Up. Stipe continues his emergence as an up-front vocalist whose lyrics, if never entirely self-explanatory, now make ingenious use of more readily identifiable phrases, images, and vignettes. Hovering over much of the album is the spirit of Brian Wilson, whose genius is echoed in "Beachball" and almost transcended in the astonishingly plangent "Summer Turns to High." With so much to live up to, it's not far short of astonishing that R.E.M. can still come up with a song such as the gorgeously chiming and shimmering "Imitation of Life," which, on its own, is worth the price of admission. But, from the first synthesizer swirls of the opener "The Lifting" onward, there's nary a dud to be heard on Reveal. --Johnny Black

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Wistful & Brilliant

I just can not believe some of the negative reviews for this record. I get that the early diehards are disappointed. Hey, there's some good stuff back there but this is brilliant. I realy like the mood on the last couple--Up on: wistful, intelligent, subtly upbeat. This is exactly what ageing rockstars should be doing: mining the subtler notes of life, going "in" on life's rich pageantry. This record is seting the mood for my evening perfectly. Listen and you will be revealed.

One of R.E.M.'s Very Best Albums

Reveal is a quiet melodic album with a lot of fine songs that are bound to grow on you. First impression may be that only the two singles "All the Way to Reno" and "Imitation of Life" - and yes they are standouts - among the very best of their long list of hit-singles.

The opening "The Lifting" is one of the punchier songs, and a great one too.

The quiet ballad "I've Been High" is a moving song that seems get get better with everytime you listen to it.

Another favourite is "She Just Wants to Be" with its quiet acoustic start and great chorus.

Musically there seem to be a lot of inspiration from Brian Wilson - "Beat a Drum", "Summer Turns to High" and "Beachball" are very good examples of this - all fine tracks.

Though maybe not as high-profiled as classics like "Life's Rich Pageant" or "Out of Time" I would easily rank "Reveal" as one of REM's strongest and most consistent albums.

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angelic

Like the Beatles and few others, REM has moved from their rock and rolling mass-appeal youth to a sophistication that both maintains their distinctive sound and delivers hope for the new. There are several wonderful tracks here but I nominate Beat A Drum as the best song of the 21st century. It will be difficult to displace.

a calm I haven't come to yet

R.E.M's fans love the fact that the threesome does not tinker overmuch with their successful recipe. REVEAL is vintage R.E.M.: spare orchestration, Michael Stipe's incessantly cool voice providing virtually the only vocals, stream-of-conscious lyrics that *seem* to say something deep even when--just maybe--they don't.

It's all here.

R.E.M. scores the formula like few others. Over and over, yet without wearing fans like this reviewer.

This 2001 release was all about doubting one's disbelief, wondering what's real, reveling in this moment, occasionally looking back with wistfulness before turning to engage the present.

Stipe's voice is almost tender. Like many singers and songwriters of his generation, he wonders a lot, wonders aloud, wonders for others like him who find more authenticity, more reality, or perhaps more convenience in wondering than in discovering, establishing, believing, even trusting.

Stipe's words even take on bitterness without his voice once *sounding* bitter. He coaxes more emotion out of a vocal inventory that is not wide than any singer except, perhaps, Jagger.

This CD's best piece--arguably one of REM's greatest--is She Just Wants to Be. Poignant, provocative, ironic, we learn of the genre's unnamed woman who once was here with so much promise, but has now taken her magic and her madness far away:

'It's not that the transparency
of her earlier incarnations
now looked back on, weren't rich
and loaded with beautiful vulnerability
and now she knows

now is greater
and she knows that

she just wants to be somewhere
she just wants to be'

The band assumes its rhythmic, driving mode for this song, which they pull of with exceptional, memorable, tuneful beauty. Yet it got little air time. One wonders what the radio jockeys were *listening* to.

Stipe and R.E.M. seem resigned to what they know, too careful about the pain to believe with dangerous naivete in something better, something more:

'I used to think, as birds take wing,
they sing through life, so why can't we?
we cling to this, and claim the best
if this is what you're offering
I'll take the rain, I'll take the rain

the nightime creases
summer schemes
and stretches out to stay
the sun shines down
you came around
you loved the easy days

but now the sun
the winter's come
I wanted just to say
that if I hold
I'd hoped you'd fold
and open up inside, inside of me'

Like so many artistic peers but better than most of them, R.E.M. takes the rain, or *would* do so if it were still on offer. As they do, they gift the songed narrative of it all to wistful listeners like this one. They bring this tribute to their fans in REVEAL, just as they have done in the album's predecessors and will do - no doubt - in worthy successors just now under design.

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Good, but the album's production and self-conscious songwriting brings a rather calculated feel to the whole affair

The whole album has a bright, sunny atmosphere to it. The best time to first listen to reveal is in the summer. It's just summer music, and you can't help but think the ghost of Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys (artistically, not literally, since Wilson's still alive as of this writing) hangs over the whole affair. It's bright shiny pop music. As much as the band hates "Shiny Happy People", for me, from a production, if not necessarily a lyrical, standpoint this is a shiny happy sound.

When Bill Berry split in 1997, R.E.M. was forced to decide if they would stay true to their original intention of disbanding when any member decided to leave, or to continue. Obviously, they chose to continue. Originally the band said they would call it quits by the year 2000, but that didn't happen either.

While NEW ADVENTURES, the last studio album recorded by the full band, was quite the good record, you could tell listening in retrospect they weren't quite sure what to do after MONSTER. Then the 1998 album UP, awash in strings, keyboards, and moody soundscapes, was quite the departure for the band, it still sounded very much like R.E.M. They were just experimenting to experiment, and it never went anywhere.

In 2001, R.E.M. tried to clear the deck, and record what is known as a `classicist' album in other words, they took all these different elements from their previous records and self-conciously wrote songs to emulate them. Sunny pop from OUT OF TIME? Check. Vague electronic moments from UP? Check. Introspective lyrics and lovely string arrangements from AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE? Check. Some good rock moments from NEW ADVENTURES? Check. Some grunge obsessed, dirty sounding songs from MONSTER? Well, no actually, but you get the point. It does have Stipe singing in some rather unnaturally high pitches

What does this all mean? Well, that's simple to deduce: REVEAL is neither fish nor fowl. It feels like a very self conscious amalgamation of their past songwriting efforts, starting with OUT OF TIME and working its way forward. REVEAL sounds like R.E.M. trying to write what they think an R.E.M. album should sound like, rather than just writing great music like they did in previous years.

Another issue I have with this record is how overproduced the record sounds. Everything has bright and shiny surfaces and layers of overdubs. OUT OF TIME is a lot of production fluff as well, but, even given how really uneven that record is, it still has some great songs. On REVEAL, just sounds like they're trying to gussy up songs that don't really have anywhere to go. And the whole Beach Boys pastiche of "Beach Ball" is rather off-putting, but it works better than some of Stipe's other BB sendup tracks. Still, REVEAL better than UP and AROUND THE SUN. Kind of like a bright spot between two dirty spots.

While my comments may be rather damning, the album does have some great moments. "Imitation of Life," "She Just Wants to Be", "Disappear" etc. I bought the album back in 2001 when it came out, and it is an album I periodically return too, mostly because I'm an R. E. M. fan than because of any high regard I have for this. Still, I do listen to it, and I would be lying if I said I don't get enjoyment out of the album.

Ultimately, REVEAL is modern, Berryless R.E.M.trying to sound like 1990s R.E.M. Self-conscious to the point of awkwardness, but it does have some great songs on it.

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