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R.E.M.: Reveal

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Warner Bros. Records
Released: 2001.05.14
Time:
 53:43
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] The Lifting (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:39
[2] I've Been High (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:25
[3] All the Way to Reno [You're Gonna Be a Star] (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:43
[4] She Just Wants to Be (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 5:22
[5] Disappear (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:11
[6] Saturn Return (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:55
[7] Beat a Drum (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:21
[8] Imitation of Life (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:57
[9] Summer Turns to High (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:31
[10] Chorus and the Ring (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:31
[11] I'll Take the Rain (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 5:51
[12] Beachball (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:14

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


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

Ken Stringfellow - Guitars, Vocals
Scott Mccaughey - Vocals, Bass
David Agnew - Woodwind
Joey Waronker - Drums, Percussion

Johnny Tate  - String Arrangements
Marcus Miller  - Strings
Annette Cleary - Strings
David James - Strings
Eileen Murphy - Strings

Patrick McCarthy - Engineer, Mixing, Producer
Jamie Candiloro - Engineer, Mixing
CZach Blackstone - Engineer
Christine Tramontano - Engineer
Dean Maher - Engineer
John Keane - Engineer
Bob Ludwig - Mastering
Chris Bilheimer – Art, Packaging
Michael Lachowski - Photography
Dan Donahue - Photography
Octavio Arizala - Technical Assistance
Kevin Sweeney - Technical Assistance
Bob Weber - Technical Assistance
Bertis Downs - Advisor
Mark Fitzgerald - Assistant

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Recorded in May 2000, Vancouver, BC, Canada; August–October 2000, Dalkey, Ireland; October 2000, Athens, GA, USA.



Give 'em credit for realizing that Up was a dead end, an avenue paved with forced experimentalism that signified nothing. Dock them points for harboring the desire to wander down that path, choosing to indulge in fuzzy details that add texture but not character. These two impulses balance each other as R.E.M. delivered Reveal, an album that feels like their stab at All That You Can't Leave Behind - a conscious return to their classic sound. Since they're fiercely protective of their anointed position of underground pioneers, they're not content to sit still and spin their wheels, turning out a record that apes Automatic for the People. So, they return to the lushness of Out of Time, melding it with the song-oriented Automatic - and undercutting it all with the sober sonic trickery of Up and New Adventures in Hi-Fi. Because Reveal is song-oriented, it initially plays more accessibly than Up, but these songs are cloaked in the same kind of deliberate studiocraft that made Up feel stilted. It's not as overt, of course - the drum machines and loops have taken a backseat - but it's still possible to hear the clipped Pro Tools effects on "Summer Turns to High," for instance, and most tracks are a little fussy in their aural coloring. This prevents Reveal from being an album to wholeheartedly embrace, even if it attempts to be as rich as Automatic and even if it succeeds on occasion. There are some very good pop songs here - windswept and sun-bleached beauties like "Imitation of Life," the dusty "All the Way to Reno (You're Gonna Be a Star)," and "Beachball," the one time their Beach Boys obsessions click. Still, none of these moments shine as brilliantly as the best moments of New Adventures and ultimately they're weighed down by the album's aesthetic, which emphasizes sonic construction over the songs. This is mood music, not music that creates a mood, which becomes evident as the record stagnates during its second half. Reveal winds up sharing the same strangely distant feel of Up, even if it's a tighter, better record. When R.E.M. weren't trying as hard, when they weren't meticulously crafting their sound, they made records that were as moody, evocative, and bracing as Reveal intends to be. Here, it's just all a bit too studied to ring true.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



Whenever Michael Stipe encountered writer's block during the gestation of 'Reveal', he got on a plane. Somewhere on the way, the search for the next phrase must have become a search for himself. [I]"I spend half my life figuring what comes next"[/I], he laments in the heat-hazy 'Disappear'. For the world's most enigmatic rock star, that must be quite a job.

As the band's 12th studio album, 'Reveal' offers REM the latitude to make a bold statement, test the boundaries, make us question how well we really know them. Instead, they've chosen the opposite. Just as 1998's 'Up' suggested that drummer Bill Berry's absence would result in careful minimalism, 'Reveal' is REM remembering who they are, and reaffirming why they do what they do. Nothing fancy. Just a perfect circle, drawn freehand.

All the defining REM characteristics are in place. The effortless grasp of melody, the vertiginous emotion, the comforting appreciation of beauty and the preservation of sanity in a world which hurts and confuses at every turn. The characters that populate the songs are all questing - a travelling businessman soul-searches in woozily spectral opener 'The Lifting', a failed entertainer travels to Nevada in the jangly 'All The Way To Reno', a drifting woman realises [I]"now is greater than the whole of the past" [/I]in 'She Just Wants To Be'. Like Stipe, they are taking a look around, evaluating, and switching on the optimism.

Much has been made of 'Reveal''s similarities to 1992's 'Automatic For the People' (there are traces of 'Try Not To Breathe' in 'Disappear', 'Nightswimming' in 'Beat A Drum'), but it's actually much closer to 'Up'.

The emphasis is on minutiae and subtlety over grand gestures. Peter Buck's promises of futurism aren't readily apparent, but there is an underpinning modernism. The entire album is buoyed along with a resonant swirl of strings and fizzy synth - 'Saturn Return', especially, squelches and whirrs like frayed electric wires writhing in an empty road. This lightness of touch means that 'Reveal' is initially underwhelming, but in time gracefully rewarding.

'Reveal' is the slippers, fire and photo album - but this doesn't mean REM have resigned themselves to the placid lethargy of age. It just means that they've

found a place to sit back and take stock after a long, colourful journey. Like Dorothy observes at the end of the yellow brick road - if you can't find what you're looking for in your own backyard, maybe you never lost it in the first place.

April Long - September 12, 2005
www.nme.com



1998's Up felt like a truly important step for R.E.M., their finding a new way of expressing themselves. Down to a threesome after the departure of drummer Bill Berry, the band shook off potential irrelevancy by heightening their songs' emotional power while broadening their musical range. Nearly rock-free, Up saw the band using synthesizers and drum-programming almost more than their usual rock-band instruments. The album's strength lies in this new, wide-open sound, one which emphasizes atmosphere as much as traditional rock/pop songwriting.

Musically, Reveal follows Up‘s lead but pushes even further in that direction. Guitarist Peter Buck has traded his electric in for an acoustic, and then allowed guitars to generally take a backseat to piano, synths and strings. The rock energy that drove much of their early career has given way to a perfect sense for texture and sound. Reveal is a lush, dreamy pop mood-piece that hovers in the realm of rumination and introspection.

While continuing to develop a more refined and layered sound, the band is tapping back into the more enigmatic side of their music. As the band grew in popularity, their songwriting style got crisper, more pop, less “arty”. Reveal finds the band retreating into introspection and mystery, yet doing so within the context of their new sound. Reveal has the sound of Up, but the RE.M. style it most closely resembles in terms of songwriting is the melancholy, midtempo pop of Fables of the Reconstruction. While things have changed greatly since those days, as evidenced by Michael Stipe’s less timid, more powerful singing and the presence of song lyrics in the liner notes, Reveal has a number of things in common with Fables and other early forays into artful melancholy, particularly lyrics that emphasize the personal without being as straightforward as their ballads have been in recent years (especially on Out of Time, Automatic for the People and Up) and a style of songwriting which is vaguer, moodier and darker.

Reveal‘s 12 tracks document people searching for some sort of truth or happiness. The album’s opener, “The Lifting”, is a dreamy pop swirl with Stipe singing about some type of seminar of self-examination. Other tracks, like the slightly countryfied “All the Way to Reno (You’re Gonna Be a Star)” or the Leonard Cohen-ish “She Just Wants to Be” follow the life journeys of other people, but all convey a feeling of searching for a place to belong or a feeling of contentment. On “I’ve Been High”, a low ballad that is one of the album’s best tracks, Stipe sings, “I’ve been high, I’ve climbed so high but life sometimes just washes over me.” On “Disappear”, he has similar thoughts of unsettledness: “There is a calm I haven’t come to yet / I spend half my life figuring out what comes next.”

Complementing the album’s stellar lyrics of personal disenchantment and longing is a style of songwriting that emphasizes both mystery and hope, through dreamy atmosphere. Reveal has a cohesive mood of pondering and deep thought, yet musically takes R.E.M. in many new directions. A few are especially compelling: the abstract poetry of “Saturn Return”, the emotionally sweeping ballad “I’ll Take the Rain”, the first single “Imitation of Life”‘s unique mix of sunny pop and strings, the faux-French pop of “Beachball”, and “Summer Turns to High”, a warped Beach Boys-style lullaby that’d work nicely as a flip-side to Up‘s equally Brian Wilson-influenced “At My Most Beautiful”.

Considering that R.E.M.‘s legacy is well-established and their place in rock history confirmed, it’s indescribably pleasant to see that they’re doing some of their most intriguing, most complicated and most fulfilling work now, almost 20 years after their first release. Reveal beautifully pushes the group along in this next phase of their career; it showcases their newfound musical confidence and openness while containing the same artful tunefulness and lyrical impact that made the best of their early works so memorable and lasting.

Dave Heaton, 14 May 2001
PopMatters Associate Music Editor



On the scale of human accomplishments, turning out a classic album ought to rank up there with climbing Mount Everest. Stoned. With one leg. And no oxygen. Given the infinite potential for obnoxious excess within the Rock genre, it's no small feat to assemble an album that's so well phrased, so deftly stated, that its impact extends far beyond the realm of the audible. Turn out two or more such albums and you're headed for legendary status. Turn out five or six and you're R.E.M.

One of the great things about R.E.M.'s musical history is how they've managed to retain a distinctive sound while releasing a series of sonically diverse albums. The wistful ruminations of Automatic for the People evoked images of the grandiose and darkly beautiful. New Adventures in Hi-Fi served as a companion piece to the barren yet oddly gorgeous landscape of the west. And despite all this change, R.E.M. has always remained R.E.M.

The good news is that R.E.M. are still R.E.M. Every song on Reveal possesses that inimitable stylistic element present in all of their work to date. And in many ways, Reveal is a comforting listen. While it does rely more heavily on synthesized sounds than any of their past albums, the songs themselves bear a stronger resemblance to the archetypal R.E.M. song than anything post-Monster.

What makes Reveal so disappointing is that the additions to the classic R.E.M. sound are all merely superficial. The increased reliance on burbling, jittering synthesizers actually makes the album a less engaging listen, turning many of its songs into messy sonic muddles. The band's better works demonstrated a certain aural economy - each sound had a purpose; nothing was extraneous or unnecessary. But far too many of the effects on Reveal seem added to the songs as afterthoughts, and prevent the tracks from materializing into coherent, compelling pieces of music.

This, however, is only part of a greater problem facing the album: most of the songs here simply don't go anywhere. A chord progression, a rhythm, a basic structure for the song is introduced. And oftentimes, that's it. Slight variations may factor in, but far too many of these tracks just sort of chug along, uninspired and drained of the energy that once made these guys so vital. Were this lack of variation coupled with wrenchingly beautiful melodies, it would be a lot easier to swallow. But as it stands, much of Reveal simply drifts by, failing to register emotionally or evoke the kind of rich, vivid imagery that earlier albums brimmed over with.

Which is not to say that Reveal is entirely devoid of merit. "The Lifting" opens the album promisingly, with an undeniably great melody and an all-enveloping background of piano, strings, and synthesizers. But even this, one of Reveal's better tracks, can't escape from some of the record's pitfalls (most notably mind-numbing repetitiveness). Its first single, "Imitation of Life," bears a strong resemblance to the painfully awkward "The Great Beyond" single from the Man on the Moon soundtrack. But it makes up for terrible lyrics by providing two things that Reveal lacks as a whole: a catchy hook, and a sufficient degree of sonic variety. It's certainly not a perfect song, but when held up against the browns and grays of the rest of the album, it provides a welcome glimmer of sunshine.

In a documentary about the making of R.E.M.'s last album, Up, Michael Stipe spoke of "moments of clarity," glimpses of the transcendental beauty and truth that he aims to convey in R.E.M.'s music. There are no such moments to be found on Reveal. The album is so muddled and repetitive that it's almost impossible to pick out any kind of individual moments within the album's framework. When I put on most R.E.M. albums and close my eyes, my mind is flooded with crystalline imagery, with miniature explosions, with the very moments of clarity that Stipe described; when I put on Reveal and close my eyes, I fall asleep.

Matt LeMay - May 14, 2001
© 2015 Pitchfork Media Inc.



It's been twenty years since R.E.M. released their debut single, "Radio Free Europe," declaring their independence from the rock cliches of 1981 with a few self-evident truths: guitars, drums, hair, soulful moaning, spasmodic melody, raw emotion, pretensions and sexy mumbles nobody has deciphered to this day. Jesus, it sounded good. They were the archetypal American band of the Eighties, but it wasn't till the Nineties that they grew up and hit the roll of their lives: In a mere six years, they gave us four classics, in Out of Time (love vs. war), Automatic for the People (love vs. death), Monster (love = guitars) and New Adventures in Hi-Fi (guitars = sex). But the past few years have been rough on R.E.M. and their fans, especially with the departure of drummer Bill Berry. So it's inspiring to hear Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills brighten up on Reveal, telling a few fables of their own reconstruction with an album of gorgeous, woozily sun-struck ballads. Reveal won't need to grow on you - thirty seconds into the opener, "The Lifting," you can tell these guys got lucky with the muse again. Like U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind, it's a spiritual renewal rooted in a musical one.

The last we heard from R.E.M. was the 1998 transitional album Up, their first without Berry, a sour, parched affair that hasn't gained any luster with time. The one keeper was the Brian Wilson smile of "At My Most Beautiful," best heard on the Never Been Kissed soundtrack (a stronger album song for song than Up). But if you go back to Up after hearing Reveal, you get the idea that this is the album they were trying to make then, and that this time they got all the way there and found a parking spot. The Eno-style keyboard textures have more room to breathe amid the largely acoustic guitars, with the arcane sound effects intricately woven into the songs. After a few dozen spins, the only ones I'm sick of are "Disappear" and "Saturn Return," for no good reason except, in the latter case, astrology filtered through Goldie and Gwen Stefani. The rest? Merely the R.E.M. of your dreams, all rambling guitars haunted by Stipe, who makes flesh and blood out of the lyrical riddles with his most effusive and emotional growls.

Reveal doesn't rock out much, which was never R.E.M.'s department anyway. Instead, they stick to the ruminative midtempo strum-groove where they feel at home, with guests Joey Waronker on drums, as well as the Posies' Ken Stringfellow and the Young Fresh Fellows' Scott McCaughey on keyboards. "Imitation of Life" might be the most beautiful song these gentlemen have put their names on since "Man on the Moon" back in 1992. Buck returns to the Rickenbacker-style guitar jangle of his early, hairy days, while the surging strings and playful keyboards raise goose bumps you didn't even remember you had. Like many of the highlights on Reveal, "Imitation of Life" finds Stipe singing about the pleasures of love and their aftermath ("This sugar cane, this lemonade/This hurricane, I'm not afraid"). But whether he comes on terrified of love, in "I've Been High," or devastated by it, in "I'll Take the Rain," he talks about the passion with a different disguise in every song. He even gets ecstatic in "Beat a Drum," a pastoral sex reverie where he knocks the Birkenstocks with a mysterious lover who takes him "halfway from coal, halfway to diamond" over an unironically blissful piano melody.

The songs on Reveal have lushly layered hooks that the band couldn't have pulled off ten years ago: the prairie-guitar twang of "All the Way to Reno (You're Gonna Be a Star)," the melancholy Al Green horns of "Beachball," the Another Green World synth sparkles of "I've Been High." But the music never gets cluttered, thanks largely to Mr. Stipe, who comes out front to emote loud and clear. He sings in the voice of a full-grown mammal who's smart enough to realize that love is scary stuff and brave enough to hunger for it anyway, even though he's seen the end of the world as he knows it so many times it's not a joke anymore. It must be strange for R.E.M., as it is for the rest of us, that the rock world of 2001 looks so much like the one that they were rebelling against twenty years ago; once again, the radio is full of interchangeable metal gomers who never met a rule they didn't obey, and once again R.E.M. are totally out of step with the times. And judging by the ceaselessly astonishing beauty of Reveal, that's exactly where they want to be.

Rob Sheffield - May 1, 2001
RollingStone.com



Reveal is the twelfth studio album by the American alternative rock band R.E.M., released in 2001 on Warner Bros. After having adjusted to former drummer Bill Berry's departure and releasing Up to mixed response in 1998, R.E.M. released the more upbeat Reveal, co-produced with long-time collaborator Patrick McCarthy.

In 2002, R.E.M. allowed each track of the album to be remixed by different producers and members of the music industry. The resulting remix album, r.e.m.IX, was available as a free download from R.E.M.'s official website. In 2005, Warner Bros. Records issued an expanded two-disc edition of Reveal which includes a CD and a DVD, as well as the original CD booklet with expanded liner notes.

Initial critical response to Reveal was positive ("Probably because it's more melodic than the one before," remarked Peter Buck). At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has received an average score of 76, based on 20 reviews. Q Magazine gave high praise to the album, awarded it the full 5 stars, and listed it as one of the best 50 albums of 2001.

With early comparisons to Automatic for the People, the critical reaction to Reveal was warmer than the notices which greeted Up in 1998, particularly in the UK where it reached #1 with healthy sales. In the United States, Reveal peaked at #6 (with 10 weeks on the Billboard 200) and was certified Gold (500,000 units). The album was also certified Gold in Canada (50,000 units) in 2001, and Gold in Germany (150,000 units).

Wikipedia.org
 

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