Canter Bridge

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R.E.M’s fans love the fact that the threesome does not tinker overmuch with their successful recipe. Reveal is vintage R.E.M.: spare orchestration, Michael Stipe’s incessantly cool voice providing virtually the only vocals, stream-of-conscious lyrics that seem to say something deep even when—just maybe—they don’t.

It’s all here.

R.E.M. scores the formula like few others. Over and over, yet without wearing fans like this reviewer.

This 2001 release was all about doubting one’s disbelief, wondering what’s real, reveling in this moment, occasionally looking back with wistfulness before turning to engage the present.

Stipe’s voice is almost tender. Like many singers and songwriters of his generation, he wonders a lot, wonders aloud, wonders for others like him who find more authenticity, more reality, or perhaps more convenience in wondering than in discovering, establishing, believing, even trusting.

Stipe’s words even take on bitterness without his voice once sounding bitter. He coaxes more emotion out of a vocal inventory that is not wide than any singer except, perhaps, Jagger.

This CD’s best piece—arguably one of REM’s greatest—is ‘She Just Wants to Be’. Poignant, provocative, ironic, we learn of the genre’s unnamed woman who once was here with so much promise, but has now taken her magic and her madness far away:

It’s not that the transparency
of her earlier incarnations
now looked back on, weren’t rich
and loaded with beautiful vulnerability
and now she knows

she just wants to be somewhere
she just wants to be

The band assumes its rhythmic, driving mode for this song, which they pull of with exceptional, memorable, tuneful beauty. Yet it got little air time. One wonders what the radio jockeys were listening to.

Stipe and R.E.M. seem resigned to what they know, too careful about the pain to believe with dangerous naivete in something better, something more:

I used to think, as birds take wing,
they sing through life, so why can’t we?
we cling to this, and claim the best
if this is what you’re offering
I’ll take the rain, I’ll take the rain

but now the sun
the winter’s come
I wanted just to say
that if I hold
I’d hoped you’d fold
and open up inside, inside of me

Like so many artistic peers but better than most of them, R.E.M. takes the rain, or would do so if it were still on offer. As they do, they gift the songed narrative of it all to wistful listeners like this one. They bring this tribute to their fans in Reveal, just as they have done in the album’s predecessors and will do—no doubt—in worthy successors just now under design.