R.E.M.: Out Of Time
Reviewed as part of Addison Godel's Desert Island Collection
Out Of Time has never been my favorite R.E.M. record. It's too full of curious missteps (more on those later) and, as a collection of well-written songs, it's powerful, but not as powerful as Life's Rich Pageant or Automatic For The People. But as a listening experience it contains something very precious and unforgettable that sets it firmly apart in my ears: an atmosphere, a place, a time. Moreso than any other album they ever made, Out Of Time really sounds like the rural Georgia that the band all once called home.
It's
a very difficult thing to describe in words. Going to school in R.E.M.'s
Athens, twenty years after the band formed and ten years after they cut this
record, I can still sense the echoes of the world they knew. I've taken
many a drive down the old highways that radiate from that town, explored old
country houses and churches, wandered rusty-ruined railroad meadows. There
is an aching beauty to these places, a mixture of pastoral gentleness and
something ancient and fragile - the echoes of delicate tragedies seem to rise
from the Earth in old Southern places. Out of Time brings these
images to life in the framework of a collection of simple tunes - love songs,
lamentations. The chorus of "Near Wild Heaven" perhaps suggests
it best; it's superficially a love song ("Take my hand..."), evoking
the beauty and quiet grandeur of weedy, rootsy landscapes ("...in this near
wild heaven.."), but touching on the untouchability of true bliss
("...not near enough!"). The last is expressed with a pure,
sublime cry. It's about as perfectly memorable as music gets.
The album swells with countless images linking profound, universal emotions with basic and believable images that could only have grown out of the culture and the pace of R.E.M.'s side of the south. Joy is "put in the ground where the flowers grow - gold and silver shine!" Impending doom is a folded newspaper, a silenced radio on Sunday morning. Lost love is the "saddest dusk I've ever seen," observed from "the lonely deep-sit hollow." And the swirl of mixed emotions created by impending fatherhood? "A fly in the honey - baby's got a baby with me."
I mentioned missteps. The most severe is the first track, "Radio Song," which opens prettily but devolves into a surprisingly dated bombastic light-rock number, complete with tepid guest rapping (!) from KRS-One. The track might have been passable elsewhere, but it's utterly out of place here. Similarly, the next song, the album's tremendous hit, "Losing My Religion," is admitedly magnificent but seems too driven, too direct. On the other end of the spectrum, the next track, "Low" is too subdued - it works sometimes, but on the whole it's devoid of momentum. These three songs, opening the record as they do, never quite lock into a convincing sequence - it definitely hurts the album, but it's not a fatal wound. This is R.E.M., after all; they can get away with a few goofs, even consecutive ones, because the songs are so deeply strong, even when they are misplaced.
All of this description still feels a little hollow to me. I think to understand this album the way I do, you have to experience the way I've had the joy of doing in recent years - wait until Spring, drive down a country highway, and just let the music fly away along the road. It's a beautiful experience.