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R.E.M.: Around the Sun

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Warner Bros. Records
Released: 2004.10.05
Time:
 55:21
Category: Alternative Rock
Producer(s): Patrick McCarthy & R.E.M.
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.remhq.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Leaving New York (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:49
[2] Electron Blue (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:12
[3] The Outsiders (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:14
[4] Make It All Okay (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:43
[5] Final Straw (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:06
[6] I Wanted to Be Wrong (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:34
[7] Wanderlust (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:04
[8] Boy in the Well (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 5:22
[9] Aftermath (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:52
[10] High Speed Train (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 5:03
[11] The Worst Joke Ever (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:37
[12] The Ascent of Man (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:07
[13] Around the Sun (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:29

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Peter Buck - Guitar, Producer
Mike Mills - Keyboards, Bass Guitar, Producer
Michael Stipe - Vocals, Producer, Packaging

Scott McCaughey - Bass, Vocals
Bill Rieflin - Drums
Hahn Rowe - Violin
Ken Stringfellow - Voclas
Q-Tip - Keyboards & Programming on [3]

Patrick McCarthy - Producer, Mixing
Jamie Candiloro - Engineer, Mixing, Musician
Oswald "Wiz" Bowe - Assistant Engineer
Jimmy Briggs - Assistant Engineer
Kirk McNally - Assistant Engineer
Javier Valverde - Assistant Engineer
Ted Jensen - Mastering
DeWitt Burton - Technical Assistance
Bob Whittaker - Technical Assistance
Bertis Downs - Advisor
Thomas Roman Dozol - Photography, Cover Photo
Alex Dixon - Assistant
Bryan Gallant - Assistant
Chris Bilheimer - Packaging

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Ten years after the commercial zenith of Monster and seven years after the departure of linchpin Bill Berry, R.E.M. have never seemed as directionless as they do on their 13th album, Around the Sun. To a certain extent, R.E.M. have seemed unsure ever since Monster - sporadically brilliant as it is, New Adventures in Hi-Fi was an effort to clear the decks and redefine the band in the wake of its breakthrough to superstar status. It pointed in a few directions the group could follow, but Berry left the band before they could follow those paths, leaving Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe at a bit of a loss on what to do next. They initially responded with the overly experimental, overly serious Up in 1998, which gave way to the classicist Reveal in 2001. While these two records were of a piece - heavy on keyboards, containing far more deliberate performances than anything recorded with Berry - they had different characters and feels, which was not unusual for R.E.M.; since the careening, ragged Reckoning followed the hazy, dreamlike Murmur, each album had an element of a surprise, offering something different than what came before. That's not the case with Around the Sun, which refines and polishes the blueprint of Reveal to the point that Q-Tip's rap on "The Outsiders" fades into the background as if it were another overdubbed keyboard or acoustic guitar. This is as slow and ballad-heavy as Automatic for the People, but where that album was filled with raw emotion and weird detours, Around the Sun is tasteful and streamlined, from its fussy production to its somber songwriting. Automatic may have been obsessed with death and regret, but it was empathetic and comforting. In contrast, Around the Sun offers no weighty themes - it dabbles in politics and relationships, but the lyrics never seem to mesh with the music - and it's emotionally removed, keeping listeners at a considerable distance. Here, R.E.M. write songs like craftsmen without distinction - the songs are sturdily constructed but bland, lacking musical and lyrical hooks. The band sound as if they were going through the motions, hoping to save the tunes in the mix. With their layered, low-key production, R.E.M. seem hell-bent on leaving behind anything that could be construed as their signature sound, so keyboards and drum machines are pushed to the front as Buck's guitar strums instead of jangles and Mills' background vocals are buried in the mix under Stipe's double-tracked harmonies. Change is all well and good, but this doesn't feel like organic change; it feels like the end result of too many hours in the studio tinkering with synthesizers and overdubs, resulting in a record as studiously serious as Wilco but as radio-friendly as U2. By straddling these two extremes, R.E.M. wind up with a record that's neither fish nor fowl - all the quirks in the production have been sanded down and glossed over so it can slip right onto adult alternative rock airwaves, but it's too insular, too overthought to appeal to either a wide audience or R.E.M.'s dwindling cult following.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



If Peter Buck listened to this on an aeroplane, he'd drift off to sleep.

Remember that favourite uncle who used to keep you entertained as a kid? Then one day you met up again and you realised he wasn't half as cool as you thought he was. With their latest offering, Around The Sun, REM have become that uncle.

Listening to Michael Stipe's soothing rhetoric is rather like popping on a pair of your favourite slippers. But as the last track of this, their thirteenth album, fades out, you can't help feeling disappointed, not to mention depressed. Stipe has made no secret about his opposition to George Bush and the war in Iraq and Around The Sun reflects his sombre mood.

Getting away from it all is a recurring theme. New single "Leaving New York" finds REM at their blissful, jangly best as Stipe considers escaping his beloved city after seeing "the light fading out", while "High Speed Train" takes him to a place where there's "No war. No hate. No past."

Lyrically they can't be faulted, but the departure of drummer Bill Berry has hit the band hard over the last two albums. This is the man, after all, who wrote the melody to "Everybody Hurts". You won't find a "Losing My Religion" or a "Orange Crush" here. But there a few great songs, enough to pour scorn on suggestions the band are a spent force.

The excellent "Wanderlust", one of the few upbeat numbers, sees REM do Britpop - albeit 10 years too late - and once you've heard "Electron Blue", the chorus will be spinnng around your head for days. There's even another dabble in hip hop, 13 years after KRS-One's appearance on "Radio Song", as Q-Tip collaborates on "The Outsiders", reminding you just how good A Tribe Called Quest were.

The trouble is, there's too many songs that float around without actually going anywhere. By the time you've thought about what you're going to have for dinner, three tracks have flown by without you realising. If Peter Buck listened to this on an aeroplane, he'd drift off to sleep.

Chris Charles - 2004
BBC Review



Critics, as a rule, aren’t too keen on bands of a certain age who refuse to die. Solo artists – a battle-scarred old coot like Neil Young, say – are allowed to trudge on more or less indefinitely. Reunions are permissible, especially if they’re by the Pixies. But continuity, marked by a dogged consistency, is usually seen as a rather unromantic, graceless way of cheating fate. When the tally of albums reaches double figures, your number (critically, if not necessarily commercially) might as well be up.

There’s frequently a good reason for this. Great bands depend on a peculiarly volatile chemistry, one which can rarely sustain creativity much beyond a decade. Money, family, complacency, a sense of being abandoned by fashion, a long-gestated animosity between the singer and the guitarist: all these regularly contribute to a decline in usefulness that arrogance – and a fanatically loyal fanbase – can only hide for so long.

For the past decade, REM have been cursed by such mutterings. From their commercial high watermark of ‘Automatic For The People’ in 1992, their continued potency as a live band (famously lording over Glastonbury in 2003) hasn’t entirely distracted attention from the diminishing sales of their records, last year’s lucrative greatest hits, ‘In Time’, notwithstanding. Had they split up in 1993, leaving eight albums of intense, allusive stadium folk-rock behind them, their position as one of America’s most significant bands would be unquestioned.

But what has happened in the past decade has, if not exactly sullied REM’s legacy, then certainly made their status more confused. Their four albums released between 1994 and 2001 have never been less than engaging, and 1996’s ‘New Adventures In Hi-Fi’ stands as one of their very finest. But the responses to them were, in the main, equivocal, coloured by the assumption that such a venerable band were underachieving, if only because they were expected to underachieve.

The departure of drummer Bill Berry after ‘New Adventures...’ inarguably affected REM. It was Berry, far more than a tubthumper, who wrote the melody to their most enduring song, ‘Everybody Hurts’, among others. But still, 1998’s ‘Up’ and 2001’s ‘Reveal’ got a raw deal, as the remaining members – singer Michael Stipe, bassist/keyboardist Mike Mills and guitarist Peter Buck – toiled hard to sustain a certain oddness, or at least an otherness, while being part of rock’s ruling gentry. “The acceptable edge of the unacceptable,” Buck once called his band. Even the most interesting edge of the acceptable wasn’t a bad place to be.

‘Around The Sun’, though, feels very much like a product of the establishment – and, perhaps, the first REM album to really disappoint. Their unlucky 13th, it purports to be something of a radical document, shot through with a disgust at the state of America and the policies of George W Bush. Curiously, though, it sounds like the band’s most conservative record, where that quest for otherness which had long made them the most imaginative and stimulating of stadium rock bands seems to have been abandoned for plush orthodoxy.

While REM’s imminent pro-Kerry tour with Bruce Springsteen may have all the insurrectionist rock’n’roll cachet of the Democratic party convention, it’s hard to criticise their political convictions right now. This autumn, it seems as if rock’s elder statesmen – Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, um, Green Day – are writing the indignantly charged songs that our newer heroes like The Strokes and The White Stripes have shied away from. As if, disappointed by the apathy of their juniors, the old-timers have taken it upon themselves to shake a stick or two at Republican atrocities.

Michael Stipe, to his credit, does this very elegantly on ‘Around The Sun’. While some of REM’s old songs ( ‘Fall On Me’, ‘World Leader Pretend’, ‘Ignoreland’) grappled with politics fairly directly, these are slippery, insinuating creations. Repeatedly, Stipe conflates echoes of Bush’s war rhetoric and his own frightened emotional responses with the politics of a relationship. “So am I with you or am I against/I don’t think it’s that easy/ We’re lost in regret”, he sings in ‘The Outsiders’, simultaneously paraphrasing his president and addressing an estranged lover. There’s a recurring image throughout the album of Stipe being alienated and scared by what he sees around him, of being torn between running away (“I jump on a high speed train”) and staying to fight for what he believes in, whether that be a love affair or a decent America.

‘Final Straw’, originally released online as part of an anti-war project last year, is less ambiguous. Stipe begins by raising “my head to broadcast my objection”, and laments that “forgiveness takes a back seat to revenge”. Again, though, the singer embraces moral complexities, understanding that his hatred of Bush as someone whose behaviour and culture he doesn’t understand is the same kind of intolerance for which he is condemning the President.

It’s typical of the sophisticated level at which ‘Around The Sun’ operates – as a protest album that strives to register its disgust in an original, adult and humane way. If only the tunes which accompany the sentiments were so artfully constructed. Ostensibly, ‘Around The Sun’ is REM’s equivalent to U2’s ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: a glossy, calculated return to the gravitas of their commercial peak. The model here, inevitably, is the sombre brown textures of ‘Automatic For The People’, and in particular the way the piano ballad ‘Find The River’ hovered between melancholy (ie, we’re all going to die) and a hard-won optimism (but until then we must rage against the dying of the light with love and dignity, etc).

Occasionally, this works beautifully. The opening ‘Leaving New York’ is a small REM classic, all pensive jangles, hazy allusions to 9/11 and Stipe waking up to an uncomfortable new world: “I might have lived my life in a dream but I swear...” he babbles, then pauses magnificently, “this is real”. At times, though, the faintly familiar melodies seem to be stretched rather thin, while the glutinous production, with its emphasis on politely burbling synths, does even the better songs few favours. More problematic still, Peter Buck (who lives in Seattle while the others remain in Athens, Georgia) seems a bafflingly marginalised figure. Recent interviews with Stipe and Mills have mentioned how Buck spent his time in the studio programming everyone’s iPods with carefully-selected songs. Had he contributed more of his rumbustious, cavalier jangle to ‘Around The Sun’, it might have been a more satisfying album.

Instead, too many of the songs slide past in a controlled daze: dignified, full of the signifiers of vintage REM, but with little of the gristle or eccentricity. The pace is so relentlessly genteel that it becomes stultifying, though the variations aren’t too appealing either. ‘The Outsiders’ swings politely, a mumsy approximation of trip-hop that ends with a discreet rap from Q-Tip that would benefit from being more abrasive, more incongruous. ‘Wanderlust’, meanwhile, is grim, forced jauntiness that recalls that Oasis nadir, ‘Digsy’s Dinner’.

But then there are moments when REM can still juggle Stipe’s insights and their well-worn musical strategies into something genuinely striking, when their innate strength can overcome the uptight blandness of their surroundings. ‘Boy In The Well’ has a surprisingly bluesy swagger, a rare moment where the band lose their self-consciousness and let fly on one of those subtly anthemic songs at which they excel. ‘High Speed Train’, meanwhile, builds something hypnotic out of Buck’s distant feedback squall, recalling some of the experiments which punctuated ‘Up’.

REM, it’s clear, are far from a spent force. And the stately passion of Michael Stipe throughout ‘Around The Sun’ proves that their willingness to engage, to confront the 21st century and the iniquities of their culture, puts many younger bands to shame. “In a universe where you see the worst, it’s up to you to fix it”, Stipe decides, finally defiant, on ‘Aftermath’. If they could just swap some of that righteous eloquence for a measure of musical vitality, then REM would have surprisingly little to worry about. Unless, of course, Bush is re-elected.

John Mulvey - www.nme.com



After the surprise departure of drummer Bill Berry, the remaining members of R.E.M. found themselves unmoored and adrift both professionally and musically. They had always presented R.E.M. as a cohesive, democratic whole, with all four members receiving equal songwriting credit. Despite their one-time vow not to move forward as anything but a quartet, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe stuck it out after Berry left. Some fans considered this to be an unfortunate decision, but the remaining members seemed to view it as an opportunity to redefine their sound. R.E.M.'s first post-Berry album, 1998's Up, picked up not where its predecessor, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, left off, but where Radiohead's OK Computer did, with the trio taking a touristic trip into synths, programmed beats, and sound effects, and quoting Pet Sounds almost verbatim on "At My Most Beautiful". It sounded like a transitional record, but then so did the follow-up, Reveal.

On their third post-Berry album, Around the Sun, Buck, Mills, and Stipe have settled on an uneasy mixture of textureless production and tentative stabs at past glory. On lead track and first single, "Leaving New York", Stipe harmonizes with himself in a low voice that could have been sampled from Reckoning. "Final Straw" borrows its whirling organ from Out of Time's "Low", and Q-Tip's cameo on "The Outsider" recalls KRS-One's appearance on "Radio Song". Around the Sun sounds more straightforward than its two predecessors, however none of the instruments - including Stipe's voice - sound live or organic. Instead, they have a sparkling sheen, which has never been the best trait for either Stipe's vocals or Buck's usually piercing guitar.

Concurrent with the band's move away from its rootsy jangle was a trend in Stipe's songwriting toward the blandly declarative, which began with "Everybody Hurts". Each subsequent album has contained more and more full-sentence song titles - "You're in the Air", "I've Been High", "She Just Wants to Be", "I'll Take the Rain", etc. This tendency seems foreign and unexpected coming from a songwriter who in the past sounded unwilling to settle for easy answers, and who even parsed the difference between asking and telling on "Fall on Me".

Perhaps it's impending middle age, perhaps it's the empty drum stool, or perhaps it's Stipe's role as the pop culture attache for the American political left, but his lyrics have become lazily explanatory: No longer content to question the world, Stipe seems intent on simply describing it, often in the most anodyne terms. "It's harder to leave than to be left behind," he sings on "Leaving New York". Elsewhere, he says, "Open up your eyes/ You're so alive" ("Aftermath"), "There's love at the end of the line" ("High Speed Train"), and, "Some things don't hold up over the course of a lifetime" ("Worst Joke Ever"). Too often Stipe sounds like a parent passing on received wisdom to children. At worst, this tendency is grossly arrogant; at best, it's merely complacent, as if success has excused R.E.M. from searching beyond platitudes.

But Around the Sun manages to overcome at least some of its shortcomings thanks to Stipe's new role as shunned lover. Having once promised he would never write a love song - or lip-sync in a video, or carry on past 1999, or play as a trio - he sounds very new to the form, and songs like "Make It All OK" and "High Speed Train" even sound endearingly awkward and vulnerable.

Elsewhere, Stipe's love songs are more cryptic. On "The Outsiders", he sings about meeting someone for dinner and getting life-changing news, but he never reveals the terrible secret. "Make It All OK" - about recriminations between lovers - gives Stipe his best line: He answers rejection with the taunt, "Jesus loves me fine." His tone is so self-serious that the song sounds bled of its humor, pathos approaching bathos. But Stipe's romantic confusion - and the unprecedented hints at what may or may not be his personal life - gives "Make It All OK" and "Aftermath" a prismatically emotional quality, their flaws so naked that they become strengths.

It's too bad the same can't be said of Around the Sun in its entirety. Its chief problem is that every word, every note, and every instrument sounds dry, sapped of most of their personality. Whereas R.E.M. were once Southern eccentrics trying to figure things out, and making lasting music in the process, lately they sound neither Southern nor eccentric and, more to the point, their music is far from memorable.

Stephen M. Deusner - October 4, 2004
© 2015 Pitchfork Media Inc.



Kick me out of the cult. To be a true-blue, diehard member of a rock band’s cult following there are certain unspoken rules. Perhaps the most sacred of which is to maintain that even the band’s worst album is still a great piece of music. “I just don’t like it as much as the other ones,” you may safely admit to other fans, who either nod or politely defend the work in question. But objectivity in rock cults is unheard of. That’s why cults dwindle. The moment a person testifies with all fairness and honesty that a band’s latest just doesn’t cut it, ZAP!, they’re out the cult. So long, jerk. Over the past 10 years no once-formidable rock band has seen its cult diminish more than R.E.M. Formidable? Hell, they were invincible! The consistency and breadth of the band’s catalog in the first half of their tenure has secured their place as one of pop music’s greatest. More importantly, the music endeared itself to millions with its quirkiness, catchiness, intelligence, and deft artistry. All of which has made the past few albums quite dispiriting indeed, with Around the Sun being the most recent disappointment. I will attempt to make my case by addressing standard cult reactions to negative criticism.

1. You didn’t listen to the album enough. It grows on you. There’s always some truth to this argument. Some albums really do take time to unfold and reveal themselves. And to be fair, some moments on Around the Sun do stand out on the ninth or 12th spin, though not to the heights they’ve reached before. “Make It All Okay” sports truly beautiful verses with the refrain of “didn’t you now?” before the wave breaks on a melodramatic chorus. Likewise, “Wanderlust” aims for a bit of pop atmosphere a la Wilco’s Summerteeth, and nearly gets there. But are these moments on par with “You Are the Everything” or even “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite”? No, which leads me right into argument number…

2. You can’t fault the band for not repeating themselves, not replicating past albums. True, true. But Automatic for the People wasn’t brilliant because it sounded like Document or Murmur, because it didn’t. It was brilliant because it sounded like it grew right out of the ground. There was an immediacy in the performances, the arrangements, and the songs themselves that was compelling, and rings true to this day. The same is true of pretty much every album R.E.M. made right up through 1996’s underrated New Adventures in Hi-Fi. However different the early and mid-period records are, they all sounded daring, fresh, and inspired in their own ways. Compare that to the lifeless “High Speed Train” which plods along in perfectly measured time for the longest five minutes I’ve ever experienced with the band. And for a chaser, “The Worst Joke Ever” replicates the numbing pace with an even more lackluster melody. There are unreleased tracks from the sessions, such as “I’m Gonna DJ” that could have provided counterpoint and perspective for the over-consistent tone here, but alas.

3. Michael Stipe once responded to critics of 1998’s Up by saying that if that album had been released as a debut by a new band, people would be rejoicing in the streets. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but they’d be a whole damn lot more excited then they would if the same was true about Around the Sun. Rumored to be a political album, it’s not. The album is about “I”, as in the personal pronoun. No matter what the topic of the song, the gaze is fixed doggedly at the navel. “Boy in the Well” starts right out with “Look at this, it’s me,” which kind of sums it all up. Even “Final Straw” is less about the evils of the current administration than sheer self-righteousness. “As I raise my hand to broadcast my objection,” it begins and then continues with its I’s, Me’s, and Mine’s. Political songs by definition are difficult to pull off, but the band has done it before plenty of times without the callowness of “forgiveness is the only hope I hold”. Behind these sentiments the band plays a familiar, coal-mining folk jangle that recalls both protest songs of yore and the band’s own musical past, but it doesn’t develop. Sadly, it sounds just like a simple prop to occupy your time.

Finally, we come to number four: don’t you have anything nice to say? It wouldn’t seem so, would it? But there are moments that feel right, that have a spark of energy, and don’t suffer as much from over-production and perfectionist tweaking. “Make It All Okay” is a fairly succinct torch-ballad. “Wanderlust” momentarily breaks the 55-minute album out of its torpor, and is the closest to recalling R.E.M.‘s great capacity for un-studied wackiness. “I Wanted to Be Wrong” even appears to be a keeper here, looking outward rather than inward with “the basket of America / The weevils and the wheat” and “gold circle goat ropers and clowns”, and guitar effects and reverb that actually serve the songs rather than muddying them up. Though they seem to be working through a serious funk, these moments could very well foreshadow a return to form. Still, I suppose I’m out of the cult now, just another crass and jaded critic popping your birthday balloons and stepping on your new sneakers. But (lean in close now), trust me when I say: I wanted to be wrong.

Michael Metivier, 17 October 2004
© 1999-2015 PopMatters.com



The first few seconds of R.E.M.'s Around the Sun nearly retrace the opening to rock's archetypal power ballad, Aerosmith's "Dream On." As the song, "Leaving New York," continues, R.E.M. sound remarkably like multiplatinum-era early-Nineties R.E.M.— the band that knew how to combine diffuse lyrics and sonics with hooks and primal rock grooves better than anyone else.

On Around the Sun, that intrinsically R.E.M.-y vibe makes a tentative, muted comeback. Unlike 1998's Up, on which the band crafted beautiful but belabored studio experimentation, and unlike 2001's Reveal, where they relaxed but didn't deliver many memorable melodies, R.E.M. here resemble their classic selves. On its way back home, the band takes the road less traveled. "The Outsiders" coolly floats on a syncopated drum beat that comes to a premature stop, then starts again for Q-Tip to resolutely rap a noble third verse. "Make It All Okay" puts piano to the fore of a strikingly direct post-breakup song. "Jesus loves me fine/And your words fall flat this time," Michael Stipe argues, rejecting a lover's offer to revive a relationship. On the title-track closer, the threesome builds to a humble climax, then fades away on a dreamy coda.

Around the Sun is full of what are ultimately anti-power ballads, the kind that question rather than bluster, favoring maybe over might. It's another slow, meandering CD from a trio that refuses to fake a full recovery in the wake of drummer Bill Berry's departure in 1997. It would be too easy for R.E.M. to ride Coldplay's coattails on a rock-anthem remedy. They'd rather struggle on their own terms.

Barry Walters  - October 10, 2004
RollingStone.com



R.E.M.’s 13th record opens with an echo of the Aerosmith powerballad “Dream On,” a song I doubt the Georgians ever covered, though they once did a hectic “Toys in the Attic.” Still, it’s appropriate, as these ex-indie heroes became arena gurus on the wings of their own power-sharing brand of power ballads (“Everybody Hurts,” “Losing My Religion”). Except for the noisy, underratedMonster, R.E.M. have been soft-rockin’ it in the free world ever since.

But after the tag-team perfection of Out of Time andAutomatic for the People, returns shrank steadily, bottoming out on Upand Reveal, cybernetic affairs recorded after drummer Bill Berry’s 1997 retirement. Each had its moments (“Daysleeper,” “Imitation of Life”), but Stipe’s swoony yowl didn’t mesh well with the electronics employed, partly because his built-in drone competed with the digital ambience.

Not withstanding the machine-kiss of “Electron Blue,” Around the Sun is R.E.M.’s return to folk-rock chamber music; still, this is a low-spark affair. Touted for its political themes, the album is more about loss of faith: in lovers, institutions, oneself. The topical songs (including last year’s Leonard Cohen-meets-Phil Ochs “Final Straw,” originally a Web-only giveaway) are pretty oblique; some are just plain awkward. “The outsiders are gathering, and a new day is born,” Stipe sings (on “The Outsiders”), before an MC cameo by Q-Tip falls as flat as KRS-One’s guest spot on “Radio Song” 13 years ago.

One gem is “Aftermath,” a country-rock number about crying in the kitchen. Indie rockers usually render such moments with sonic modesty, but like the best indie filmmakers, R.E.M. can make them sound huge. And then there’s “Wanderlust,” which struts like one ofthose Lee Hazlewood velvet-cowboy tales. “I wanna kiss the astronauts!” Stipe squeals on the bridge–a reminder of when our nation’s greatness was measured less by how well we killed and more by how well we dreamed. Evidently, he’s still losing his religion. Us, too.

Will Hermes - November 15, 2004
www.spin.com



Around the Sun is the thirteenth studio album by the American alternative rock band R.E.M., released in October 2004 on Warner Bros. Records. "The Outsiders" features a guest appearance by rapper Q-Tip. When the song was performed live, Michael Stipe carried out the rap, as he did on a later b-side release of the song. "Final Straw" is a politically charged song. The version on the album is a remix of the original version, which was made available as a free download on March 25, 2003 from the band's website. The song was written as a protest of the American government's actions in the Iraq War. Around the Sun is also the only R.E.M. album to contain a title track.

Around the Sun generally received lukewarm reviews, and despite hitting #1 in the UK, it became their first studio album to miss the U.S. Top 10 (reaching #13 with 7 weeks in the Billboard 200) since 1988's Green and is still awaiting a gold record. As of March 2007, Around the Sun has sold 2 million copies worldwide and 232,000 units in the U.S. This is less than R.E.M. had previously sold in the first week of an album's release while in their early to mid-1990s commercial peak.

Lead single "Leaving New York" became a UK Top 5 hit, with additional singles "Aftermath", "Electron Blue" and "Wanderlust" becoming minor hits there as well. Around the Sun did not have any singles success in the United States, however. It's the band's first studio album to fail to have a song chart on the Hot 100 since Fables of the Reconstruction in 1985.

After the release of their following album, Accelerate, guitarist Peter Buck said that for him Around the Sun "... just wasn't really listenable, because it sounds like what it is, a bunch of people that are so bored with the material that they can't stand it anymore." The album's songs were largely excluded from the band's live setlists after the release of Accelerate.

In 2005, Warner Brothers Records issued an expanded two-disc edition of Around the Sun which includes a CD, a DVD-Audio disc containing a 5.1-channel surround sound mix of the album done by Elliot Scheiner, and the original CD booklet with expanded liner notes. A remix of the song "Final Straw" appeared earlier in 2004 on the compilation album Future Soundtrack for America.

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