The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @savemeaseat_usa for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!
Before going through the torturous recording process and glorious release of Achtung Baby, U2’s Bono told a crowd at the end of the Lovetown tour that the band had to “go away and dream it all up again.” R.E.M., it turned out, were doing the same. Looking back on both, Out of Time doesn’t seem as drastic a reinvention on its face. Many of the seeds can be seen planted on Green. Beautiful ballads like “You Are The Everything” and “Hairshirt” were there; so was straight bubblegum pop like “Stand.” And yet, those tracks played more like a counterbalance to the harder-edged “Turn You Inside-Out,” “Orange Crush,” and “Pop Song ’89” which had rocked arenas. And the band was tired of rocking, not to mention just plain tired. So they made 2 huge decisions that would shape their new album:
1) They were done with those arenas and would not be touring for the foreseeable future (it ended up being not until after 1995’s Monster)
2) Peter Buck wanted to focus on other instruments and leave electric guitar to the side, more of a flavor than the basis of songs.
They didn’t make a string band album, or go full Nebraska (aka a “reverse Bob Dylan”) but they resolved to try all kinds of things now that they didn’t have to reach the cheap seats. They traded instruments, paid homage to influences they’d only hinted at earlier, and did their best to shatter the trademark minor-key electric riff nugget “R.E.M. sound.” The results were bigger and better than they could have hoped.
Out of Time (named because they literally couldn’t think of a name in time) hits funk, spoken word poetry, full-on MOR pop, and twisted Western ballads just to name a few. R.E.M. pushed each new sound to the limit and landed just about all of them. “Radio Song” takes its lumps from the serious crowd, but if you just pick it up and put it on there’s no denying it bounces and jams in a more fun way than they’d ever put on wax before while nodding to the kind of nagging earworms that throw us all off balance. It also features an unplanned verse from KRS-One that was my introduction to the man (THANKS, R.E.M.!). Meanwhile, “Belong” features spoken verses and a wordless chorus yet creates a gorgeous melody and a captivating picture of devotion. “Near Wild Heaven” is an amazing Beach Boys facsimile, while “Half A World Away” may be R.E.M.s most purely beautiful piece of music full stop. The other side of the coin brings you to “Country Feedback,” as gnarly in its worldview as it is in its noise, and “Me In Honey” which ends the album on pure desperation. All of them memorable and more effective for the chances they take.
Then there are the hits. Most people will still swear by “Losing My Religion” no matter how many times they’ve heard it, because it has just enough trademark Stipe mystery to mean whatever feels the most real to you. Buck’s conversion to acoustic instruments allowed him to create a fantastic hook and warm template for those words and unleash a song and video that absolutely dominated the world without picking up an amp. “Shiny Happy People,” meanwhile, catches far more flack but to me is still the band creating exactly what they were going for. They’ve described it as a big, dumb, stupid pop song. That it is, and there are plenty that are stupider and plenty that are worse. Take that for whatever it does for you. In the context of this album, it provides a lightener amidst melancholy moments and keeps things on track. And that is key as R.E.M. produced an album of music that’s all over the place yet still works as one big set.
They’d start to focus in more on certain sounds for the next few years, but Out Of Time’s big tent still feels just as welcoming to all as it did the day it dropped.
