R.E.M.

R.E.M.'s first real misstep -- some tunes sound like pale retreads of their previous records, while others grope blindly toward something else without actually making it. Although the disc boasts a number of great songs, including "Driver 8" and "Can't Get There From Here," the band doesn't seem as sure of itself or the material as it once did.

One time, Jack Kerouac asked William Burroughs to read and react to something he'd
written. Burroughs did so, and said he liked what he read. But that wasn't enough for
Kerouac, who pressed: What do you specifically like about it? Burroughs replied that he
didn't know what he liked about it, specifically. He just liked it, that's all. Fables of the
Reconstruction, the fourth record by R.E.M., invites similarly non-specific praise... More >

If you had any doubts, new producer Joe Boyd clinches it: their formal frame of reference is folk-rock, nothing less, and nothing more. Because they're Southerners, they've always defeated folk-rock's crippling stasis: they have a good beat, and you can boogie to them. But as formalists they valorize the past by definition, and if their latest title means anything it's that they're slipping inexorably into the vague comforts of regret, mythos, and nostalgia. Trading energy for ever richer textures, their impressionism sacrifices its paradoxical edginess: it's doleful, slower, solidly grounded but harder to boogie to nevertheless. (Grade - B+)