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R.E.M.: Out of Time

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Warner Bros. Records
Released: 1991.03.12
Time:
 44:08
Category: Alternative Rock
Producer(s): Scott Litt & 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] Radio Song (B.Berry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:12
[2] Losing My Religion (B.Berry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:26
[3] Low (B.Berry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:55
[4] Near Wild Heaven (B.Berry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:17
[5] Endgame (B.Berry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:48
[6] Shiny Happy People (B.Berry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:44
[7] Belong (B.Berry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:03
[8] Half a World Away (B.Berry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:26
[9] Texarkana (B.Berry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:36
[10] Country Feedback (B.Berry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:07
[11] Me in Honey (B.Berry/P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:06

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Bill Berry – Drums, Percussion, Congas on [3], Bass Guitar on [8,1], Piano on [4], Backing Vocals on [4,7,10], Producer
Peter Buck – Electric & Acoustic Guitars, Mandolin on [2,8], Producer
Mike Mills – Bass Guitar, Backing Vocals, Organ on [1,3,6,8,10], Piano on [7], Harpsichord on [8], Percussion on [8], Lead Vocals on [4,9], Keyboards & Arrangement on [2,9], Producer
Michael Stipe – Lead Vocals, Bass Melodica & Arrangement on [5], Backing Vocals on [4,9], Producer, Packaging, Photography

Jay Weigel – Orchestral Liaison on [1,3,4,5,6,8,9]
Paul Murphy – Lead Viola on [1,3,4,5,6,8,9]
David Arenz – Violin on [1,3,4,5,6,8,9]
Ellie Arenz – Violin on [1,3,4,5,6,8,9]
Mark Bingham – String Arrangements on [1,3,4,5,6,8,9]
David Braitberg – Violin on [1,3,4,5,6,8,9]
Andrew Cox – Cello on [1,3,4,5,6,8,9]
Reid Harris – Viola on [1,3,4,5,6,8,9]
Dave Kempers – Violin on [1,3,4,5,6,8,9]
Elizabeth Murphy – Cello on [1,3,4,5,6,8,9]
Peter Holsapple – Bass Guitar on [1,3], Acoustic Guitar on [2,6,9], Electric Guitar on [7]
Ralph Jones – Double Bass on [1,3-6,8,9]
Kidd Jordan – Baritone Saxophone on [1,4], Tenor Saxophone on [1,5], Alto Saxophone on [1], Bass Clarinet on [3,5]
John Keane – Pedal Steel Guitar on [9,10]
Krs-One – Rapping on [1]
Scott Litt – Echo-Loop Feed on [1]
Kate Pierson – Vocals on [4], Duet on [6,11]
Cecil Welch – Flugelhorn on [5]

Scott Litt – Producer, Engineer
Dave Friedlander – Engineer
Tom Garneau – Engineer
John Keane – Engineer
Ted Malia – Engineer
Mike Reiter – Engineer
Stephen Marcussen – Mastering
Frank Ockenfels – Photography
Tom Recchion – Packaging
Ben Katchor – Illustrations
Ed Rogers – Illustrations
Karina Santo – Photography
Doug Starn – Photography
Mike Starn – Photography

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Recorded in September–October 1990, Bearsville Studios, Woodstock, New York, United States; John Keane Studios, Athens, Georgia, United States (recording); Soundscape Studios, Atlanta, Georgia, United States (strings); Prince's Paisley Park Studios, Chanhassen, Minnesota, United States (mixing). Mastered at Precision Mastering, Los Angeles, California, United States



The supporting tour for Green exhausted R.E.M., and they spent nearly a year recuperating before reconvening for Out of Time. Where previous R.E.M. records captured a stripped-down, live sound, Out of Time was lush with sonic detail, featuring string sections, keyboards, mandolins, and cameos from everyone from rapper KRS-One to the B-52's' Kate Pierson. The scope of R.E.M.'s ambitions is impressive, and the record sounds impeccable, its sunny array of pop and folk songs as refreshing as Michael Stipe's decision to abandon explicitly political lyrics for the personal. Several R.E.M. classics - including Mike Mills' Byrds-y "Near Wild Heaven," the haunting "Country Feedback," and the masterpiece "Losing My Religion" - are present, but the album is more notable for its production than its songwriting. Most of the songs are slight but pleasant, or are awkward experiments like "Radio Song"'s stab at funk, and while this sounds fine as the record is playing, there's not much substantive material to make the record worth returning to.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



Youthful idealism is a bitch. Just ask R.E.M. Ten years after the release of their first single, a punky shot of garage-band heaven called ”Radio Free Europe,” the Athens, Ga., bohemians seem to have it all. Acknowledged as shapers of the off-the-beaten-path course of ’80s rock, they are the proud possessors of a million-dollar record contract with a conglomerate, they play concerts in 20,000-seat halls, their song ”Stand” is the theme for a TV sitcom (Fox’s Get a Life), and they can take as much time as they want between records: Their latest, Out of Time, comes 2 1/2 years after its predecessor, Green. They’ve managed to become our most popular semipopular underground arena band, with their integrity and core following relatively intact.

Anybody else would be satisfied. But the R.E.M. we hear on Out of Time sound fidgety. Anyone anticipating the murky uplift of old better stick with the band’s early work. On the new album we get string sections, organs straight out of a church service, a cameo by rapper KRS-One of Boogie Down Productions, a spoken-word recitation (set to music) by singer-lyricist Michael Stipe, and a mood instrumental that plays like 101 Strings Play the R.E.M. Songbook.

Any band that tinkers so dramatically with its trademarks may simply be trying to plow through its own creative sandbags and break new ground. But on Out of Time R.E.M. merely come across as bored: bored with their links to corporate rock and their newfound audience (most of these songs sound too intimate for arenas), bored with the sound of Peter Buck’s guitar (there’s so little of it here), bored with the sound of Stipe’s voice (bassist Mike Mills sings lead on an unprecedented two songs). In the end, they sound bored simply with being R.E.M., and they’re not very good at hiding it: With its weight-on-their-casually-dressed-shoulders feel, Out of Time is the least satisfying, most forced album they’ve ever made.

Granted, even the best bands begin to lose focus or repeat themselves after nearly 10 records. But there’s something lacking here that seems to be the result of more than creative exhaustion. Starting with their first album, 1983’s Murmur, R.E.M. demonstrated that some traditional rock values — the strummed guitars and pensive lyrics of folk-rock, the raw edge of ’60s garage bands — were still valid. At the same time, the group’s sonic rush and Stipe’s buried-in-the-mix vocals blended together for a sound so enigmatic that you could read nearly anything you wanted into it. And in the mid-’80s, plenty of people — particularly white kids in and around college age — did. Listening to R.E.M., it was easy to take comfort in the fact that there were four guys out there who were just as baffled and inarticulate — and just as unsure of their place in society — as you were. Their haircuts were as bad as yours, too.

R.E.M. weren’t alone in connecting with this Reagan-era audience. From Hoboken, N.J., to Los Angeles came an onslaught of young bands who sought a comfortable place between the Top 40 and hard-core punk. The result was a vibrant grass-roots community courtesy of feisty, independently distributed record labels. Like anything else in life, however, the scene didn’t last. Thanks in part to R.E.M., major record companies began using the indies as farm teams, in the process decimating them. Today, R.E.M.’s legacy has been reduced to the mostly interchangeable college-rock bands that sprout up on every major label. And be it from arrogance or simple lack of talent, most of those bands seem lost — outdated, unwilling to meet the MTV audience even halfway, and hence landing nowhere except in the cutout bins. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

That is hardly the brave new utopia envisioned by postmodern rock. And from the fatigued feel of Out of Time, no one seems to sense it better than R.E.M. The first single, the poignant, mandolin-laced ”Losing My Religion,” is as lyrically ambiguous as ever. But its chorus — ”That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight/Losing my religion/Trying to keep a view/And I don’t know if I can do it” — could easily be the group’s comment on sacrificing itself on the altar of the commercial church. Their success clearly hasn’t done much to improve the sad state of contemporary radio, at least as Stipe tells it on ”Radio Song”: ”The world is collapsing around our ears,” he gripes, before going on to chastise radio for playing annoyingly catchy hits.

”Radio Song” is as good an example as any of the album’s misfires. It kicks off with a treacly mix of guitar and strings that could have come from a Monkees single, then juxtaposes album-rock power chords, a KRS rap, funk guitar licks, and orchestration that swells around the chorus. The arrangement works so hard to not sound like an R.E.M. song that it doesn’t sound like anything, other than a mess. Out of Time is filled with such failures, like the recitation ”Belong,” which veers dangerously close to collegiate-poetry turf.

Out of Time is not an outright failure, because there is still an intrinsic beauty to R.E.M.’s sound — the combination of Stipe’s gruffness, Mills’ wholesome harmonies, Buck’s spare, elegant guitar parts — that no amount of weak material can ruin. You can hear it on ”Near Wild Heaven,” which springs to life like a meadow full of daffodils, and ”Half a World Away,” an achingly pretty ballad with a forlorn stranger-in-a-strange-land melancholy that speaks volumes for the band’s state of mind. But mostly you come away with moments, not songs: the wash of guitars and strings on ”Texarkana,” the chilling moment in the lost-love ballad ”Country Feedback” when Stipe sings ”I neeeed this” as if he were a desperate junkie.

With any luck, the joylessness that pervades Out of Time will turn out to be just rock & roll malaise. But the world-weary tone bespeaks a spiritual | collapse no platinum records can cure. Throughout the album, whether in bits of pastoral beauty or the exuberant harmonies of Stipe, Mills, and guest Kate Pierson of the B-52’s on ”Shiny Happy People,” there are glimmers of the band’s continuing belief in the possibility of a better world. But you also get the sense they’re taking the commercial failure of alternative music (and its inability to rearrange the universe) personally, as if they did too much or too little to help it along. Out of Time marks the end of the world as R.E.M. knows it, and they don’t feel so fine.

David Browne, January 17 2015
Copyright © 2015 Entertainment Weekly Inc.



R.E.M. Recovers as Boy George Goes Dancing: R.E.M. "Out of Time" Warner Bros. (3 of 5)

The de-Greening of R.E.M. gets off to a rousing start with "Radio Song," a propulsive, funk-accented dig at irrelevance on the airwaves that goes out on a fiery rap by Boogie Down Productions' KRS-One. The rest of the Georgians' first album since 1988's uncertain, compromised "Green" is a less emphatic recovery, but it's a recovery nonetheless.

The band's experiments with string arrangements and droning minimalism restore R.E.M.'s early air of mystery in a less opaque manner, and though the inspiration level is uneven, the musical probing reflects the kind of independence that first endeared R.E.M. to the alternative-rock generation.

If the band's first prime forebear was the Byrds, the antecedents here are more Velvet Underground/Lou Reed and Beach Boys: the former in the dry, deadpan voice and ominous aura of "Low" and the spoken narration of "Belong," the latter in the overlapping vocal parts of "Near Wild Heaven" and in "End Game," an instrumental with some of "Pet Sounds"' luxuriant melancholy.

There are moments of briskness, but the album is dominated by taut meditations in a chamber-rustic setting: acoustic guitars, mandolins and deep-voiced strings forming a gray sanctuary for contemplations on faith and love in a confusing world. Even B-52 Kate Pierson and a psychedelic-pop buoyancy can't exclude a strain of wistfulness from "Shiny Happy People."

If it's not always as absorbing as the band's previous peaks, the album suggests that R.E.M. remains worthy of its standing, and that it has a new foundation on which to build, while preserving its original values of integrity and individuality.

Richard Cromelin - March 10, 1991
Copyright 2015 Los Angeles Times



Yes, it's a departure, but no, it's not so radical a departure that it is unrecognizable as R.E.M. Out of Time moves this unconventional band another step forward; a discernible connection to past records remains, but it is not constricting. The point is that R.E.M. has done it again: defied and fulfilled the conflicting expectation of a broad, mainstream audience and a smaller, more demanding — and possessive — cult. This may well be America's best rock & roll band, as this magazine's cover once proclaimed, but the group would probably wave off that honorific. Surely, however, R.E.M. is America's most resourceful rock & roll band.

R.E.M.'s greatest resource is its four members — not their musicianship, in technical terms, so much as the ideas and personalities that they express through their music — and they've remained unerringly true to their instincts. Such fidelity is difficult to maintain amid critical acclaim and climbing sales figures, which you'd expect might lead them self-consciously to break with or replicate a successful formula. But R.E.M., unpredictable and self-invented, has always operated more on intuition than formulas. This band does not carry a map, and not knowing what lies around the next curve is part of the fascination and fun of following R.E.M.

Musically, Out of Time is R.E.M.'s most baroque album; it breaks out of the guitar-bass-drums-voice format to make room for everything from harpsichord and strings, on "Half a World Away," to funky, Jimmy Smith-style organ and a cameo rap by KRS-One of Boogie Down Productions, on "Radio Song." The songs are enriched, not cluttered, by these embellishments. Kate Pierson of the B-52's sings on three numbers, shining on the roistering folk-country duet "Me in Honey," and Peter Holsapple, the former dB's leader who accompanied the band on its last tour, lends a hand here and there on guitar and bass.

All of this indicates that R.E.M. is no longer a closed circle, and the outreach allows the group to broaden its scope without diluting its essential character. As on Document and Green, the band and Scott Litt share the production credit on Out of Time, and despite the added flourishes the album is certainly not overproduced. There's no superficial glazing, and the raw, unvarnished content of the songs cuts through. The strings convey emotion, whether they are as sepulchral as doomsday ("Low") or as lithe as springtime ("Near Wild Heaven"). Even when instruments are layered upon one another, as in the subtle swell of strings, guitars and mandolins on the existentially despondent "Losing My Religion," they make a point. That point is "Life gets bigger," and R.E.M. deals with life's billowing complexities throughout Out of Time.

The band members, especially bassist Mike Mills, move outside of their prescribed roles to experiment a little. Mills, for instance, pumps up the jam on "Radio Song," ripping into its prickly innards on organ, while guitarist Peter Buck creates sparks with his serrated "Fame"-style attack and drummer Bill Berry syncopates like an honorary Funkadelic. Mills's organ also sets the funereal mood of "Low," on which Berry can be heard tapping congas, and Buck's stinging sustain drenches "Country Feedback" in plaintive, rippling waves of sound.

As the instrumentalists open themselves up, singer Michael Stipe bares his soul. He's long since stopped concealing his identity in an artful murmur, of course, but the extent to which, on Out of Time, he unburdens himself of doubt, disappointment and bile — and suggest maybe just a faint ray of cock-eyed hope — is nothing short of revelatory. Except for "Endgame" and a strange, fable-like ramble entitled "Belong," all of the album is sung in the first person. Every song has an "I," "me," "my" or "mine" in it, and there's often a "you" as well. Even "Radio Song," an in-your-face number that makes an objective statement about the world outside the self, springs from a subjective reaction: "I tried to sing along, but damn that radio's song!" Most of the time, Stipe waxes downbeat, sounding "low low low" and outcast. He sings, "This could be the saddest dusk I've ever seen," on "Half a World Away," and "It's all the same, the same, a shame, for me," on "Me in Honey." Technically, he has never sounded better, singing with surety, power and control. He dissects interpersonal relationships with a resigned sense of inevitability, filling songs with concrete details and unsparing analysis: "It's crazy what you could have had/I mean it, I need this," he sings with mounting emotion in "Country Feedback." The effect is arresting; his verisimilitude can't be denied, because his voice insists on it.

In contrast, there's the heavenly pop chorale of "Near Wild Heaven" (recalling nothing quite so much as "Good Vibration"-era Beach Boys) and the breezy, evocative "Endgame," the former largely sung by Mills and the latter mostly played by Buck. Stipe himself gets joyful, or appears to, on "Shiny Happy People," which commences with a sprightly waltz figure, then is yoked by a spunky riff from Buck before Stipe chimes in: "Meet me in the crowd/ People, people/Throw your love around/ Love me, love me/ Take it into town/Happy, happy/Put it in the ground where the flowers grow." These are either the most absurdly sunny or bitingly cynical lyrics he's ever written, and your guess is as good as mine or maybe even Stipe's. More characteristic of "Out of Time " is "Half a World Away," in which urgent, minor-key music is married to doleful words as the singer steels himself "to go it alone and hold it alone, haul it along and hold it."

The songs on Out of Time are seemingly small scale in their first-person obsessions, but their meanings spread out to encompass shared feelings of dread, loneliness, anomie and a growing loss of faith. There are no treatises on ecology or foreign policy, no oblique strategies or hidden agendas. There doesn't have to be; all of that is implicit in the atmosphere of entropy, of things falling apart, that's evoked and detailed candidly, with glimmering beauty and unsurpassable sadness, on Out of Time.

Parke Puterbaugh - March 21, 1991
RollingStone.com



Out of Time is the seventh studio album by the American alternative rock band R.E.M., released on Warner Bros. Records in 1991. With Out of Time R.E.M.'s status grew from that of a cult band to a massive international act. The record topped the album sales charts in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom, spending 109 weeks on American album charts and enjoying two separate spells at the summit, and 183 weeks on the British charts, and spending a single week at the top. The album has sold over four and a half million copies in the US and over 18 million copies worldwide. The album won three Grammy Awards in 1992: one as Best Alternative Music Album, and two for the first single, "Losing My Religion."

Out of Time combines elements of pop, folk and classical music heard on their previous album Green, with a new concentration on country elements that would continue on 1992's Automatic for the People.

Preceded by the release of "Losing My Religion", which became R.E.M.'s biggest U.S. hit, Out of Time gave them their first U.S. and UK #1 album. The band did not tour to support the release. In Germany, it is the band's best-selling album, selling more than 1,250,000 copies, reaching 5× gold. Out of Time was the first R.E.M. album to have an alternative expanded release on compact disc, including expanded liner notes and postcards. In Spain, a contest was held to have a limited edition cover with the winner being an abstract oil painting.

The album was featured in Time magazine's unranked list of The All-Time 100 Albums.

Wikipedia.org
 

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