Where Else Would You Find KRS-ONE and Kate Pierson On The Same Record?
Written: Aug 09 '08 (Updated Aug 09 '08)
Product Rating:
Pros: R.E.M. refine their signature sound for wider appeal while staying true to themselves.
Cons: I don't hate "Shiny Happy People" as much as most, but the song still sucks.
The Bottom Line: It's unmistakably an R.E.M. album, but "Out of Time" widens their sound and focus to create a solid album that's one of the most deserved pop breakthroughs in recent history.
speeddemon531's Full Review: Out of Time by R.E.M.
Athens, Georgia's R.E.M. had already transcended the "alternative"/"college rock" tag that hung over them at the time of Out of Time's 1991 release. The two albums that preceded it, "Document" and "Green", had each spawned Top 10 singles, and the foursome of Stipe, Mills, Buck and Berry had officially graduated from indie band to commercial success, although they weren't on the same level as other bands at the time like U2 and Guns 'n Roses.
Out of Time changed all of that. In an instant, R.E.M. turned from stars into superstars. The album climbed to #1 in it's second week on the charts and earned awards galore, in addition to containing what would ultimately become two of the band's best known (if not best-loved) hits. It manages to have the feel of an album that would break through to a larger audience (string sections! decipherable lyrics!), without losing sight of the things that make R.E.M. R.E.M. (their familiar "jangly rock" sound, plus the fact that you may be able to understand what Stipe is saying, but that doesn't mean that you can actually figure out what he means).
This album's huge hit, Losing My Religion is the one song even people who've never even heard of R.E.M. know from the band. Buck's mandolin playing gives the song kind of a folksy feel, but it's also got a fairly peppy rhythm. It's simultaneously a perfect choice for a pop single and a really odd choice for a pop single. It was catchy and hooky but didn't sound like anything else on the radio at the time.
On the other side of the coin, there's Shiny Happy People, a song so universally loathed by R.E.M. fans that the band left it off of their Greatest Hits album. Featuring one of several guest shots by B-52 Kate Pierson, this song is the audio result of what would happen if The B-52's "Love Shack" met R.E.M.'s 1989 hit "Stand" in a dark alleyway. I don't necessarily hate the song, but it certainly seems like a dumbed-down version of R.E.M.'s normal sound.
It's funny, because I got Out of Time maybe two or three months after it came out (it was part of the first-ever order I got from Columbia House), but there are songs on this album that took me a long time to fully appreciate. The forlorn Country Feedback (which actually has the feel of a country song thanks to some prominent pedal steel guitar) sounds like a break-up song (although you can't be sure due to Stipe's free-associative lyrics), and it's one of R.E.M's most pretty songs-it set the stage for their reflective "Automatic for the People" album the following year. It took seeing the band live three years after this album's release to get me to appreciate this song. This album's other key ballad,Half a World Away, didn't register with me until maybe a year ago. I was watching an episode of "Scrubs" when I heard an R.E.M. song I didn't recognize (you can pick Michael Stipe's voice out of anywhere). After some quick googling, I found out the name of the song and headed off to iTunes to buy it...only to realize that I already had the song on Out of Time. Idiot.
While Stipe had been noted for his fairly obtuse lyricism, he proved that he could be quite direct on tracks like Radio Song. This rollicking indictment of radio circa 1991 (which was still heavy in the Michael Bolton/Wilson Phillips phase) features a cameo from rap legend KRS-ONE, making for one of the more oddball (but effective) rock/rap collaborations in memory.
In addition, there's the interesting Low (which really just seems to be an excuse for Stipe to drop into the lowest part of his singing register). It's got a spooky, mysterious feel to it. The two most direct songs on the albums are the ones where their significantly less elusive bassist Mike Mills takes the lead. Near Wild Heaven manages to pull off the feat of having almost impossibly simple lyrics ("Whenever we hold each other/We hold each other/There's a feeling that's gone/Something has gone wrong") but sounding significantly less nursery-rhyme-like than Shiny Happy People. Hearing Mills' more nasal, high-pitched voice (is it me or does he sound like Kermit the Frog?) makes me wonder what a solo album by the bespectacled instrumentalist would sound like. Texarkana is probably the song that sounds most like "typical" R.E.M. (or at least most like their classics "The One I Love" and "It's The End of the World As We Know It"), but it also boasts some great harmonies from the Mike/Michael team and a pretty string section. This song is perfect for those freewheeling summer weekend drives-at least that's how I picture it.
It's hard to say which 1991 album brought "alternative" (when the term actually meant an "alternative" to your standard cock rock) music in the mainstream-this or Nirvana's "Nevermind". R.E.M. probably gets the short end of the stick because Out of Time's success was something that had been slowly building, while Nirvana seemingly came out of nowhere. Although this album's follow-up, "Automatic for the People" is the one R.E.M. album that every human being should have in their record collection, you won't do so badly with Out of Time, one of the few mega-albums of it's time period that still holds up to repeated listens.
"Out of Time" by R.E.M.
Released 1991 on Warner Brothers Records
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Track Listing: Radio Song/Losing My Religion/Low/Near Wild Heaven/Endgame/Shiny Happy People/Belong/Half a World Away/Texarkana/Country Feedback/Me In Honey
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