I had always been the sort of R.E.M. fan that recognized (and enjoyed) all of their radio friendly singles - from ’Radio Free Europe’ to ’Electrolite’ - but owned only a few albums and, in all honesty, never gave a chance to anything that hadn’t already been deemed popular. So when ’Up’ was released, I didn’t exactly rush to the record store to buy it, and when the first single - ’Daysleeper’ - got only minimal airtime on radio stations, the record all but disappeared from my vision. It was in fact a sudden, unexpected whim that led me to ’Up’ - a desire for something new and beautiful in my collection, a buying spree that stretched me all sorts of ways in pursuit of an album that could meet this desire, and, ultimately, a sort of internal realization that R.E.M. was who I had been looking for all along. With that came my acquisition of ’Up’, and the only looking back I have done since that time has been on the annals of R.E.M.’s career, to each and every album that has contributed to make the band the best of our generation.
That being said, I can unhesitatingly profess ’Up’ to be the most beautiful, mature and horribly underrated album of our time. Every track on the album resonates with a sound that is unmistakably R.E.M., yet never do things become old, stale, or repetitive. The album as a whole is hard to classify: the music is not rock or pop, not easy listening or ’alternative’; it comes closest in texture to the classic ’Automatic for the People’, yet the noticeable (but not at all distracting) electronic elements of ’Up’ are a complete divergence from the acoustic sound of ’Automatic’. It would be a shock to see ’Up’ spawn any successful singles - not because the songs on the album aren’t worthy of radio play, but because the radio isn’t worthy of any of the songs on the album. Whereas the musical world today seems to be divided into listener-specific genres and a constant array of bands that sound as though they are imitating and repeating each other, ’Up’ is an album that is unique and unclassifiable, one that crosses all genres - or perhaps creates a new genre to which only it can belong.
’Up’, too, is an album of moments. Michael Stipe is, lyrically and vocally, at his best, Peter Buck and Mike Mills show themselves to be creative geniuses, and the result is a record that is littered with lines and verses and melodies and compositions that delight the ears. ’Diminished’, for example, employs a transition that is a sort of Hawaiinish guitar twang; the repeated refrain of ’You’re In The Air’ (’’I’m what you found / I’m upside down / You’re everywhere / You’re in the air / And I am breathing you’’) beautifully melts into itself in a manner that never fails to bring tears to my eyes; and the final track, ’Falls to Climb’, ends in a roaring crescendo that is the perfect ending to a perfect album, with Stipe proclaiming ’I am free...’.
Though ’Up’ has been critically lauded, that it has not been given recognition as one of the greatest records of the century astounds me. I believe it was Michael Stipe himself who said something akin to ’...if this album had been released by a band nobody had ever heard of before, people would be running around in the streets, naked, in celebration of it’. Perhaps that would be a bit excessive, but, in my eyes, ’Up’ comes about as close to achieving perfection as any album before it. After almost 20 years of making music, R.E.M. has come up with their greatest masterpiece to date.If you have some spare cash splash out on this.