- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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New Musical Express (NME)The first REM album to really disappoint. [2 Oct 2004, p.60]
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BlenderR.E.M.'s recent albums have increasingly resembled singer-songwriter records. Around The Sun is much the best of the last three... because the tunes are better. [Nov 2004, p.140]
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Another slow, meandering CD.
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Under The RadarThe less a-political songs fall far short of REM's extremely high standards. [#8, p.111]
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Its sporadic pockets of accessibility aside, it's difficult to listen to Around the Sun without hearing it as a holding pattern, or worse, a piece of product released simply to keep the R.E.M. brand out among the public.
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Sound[s] less like the work of an actual band than a sterile concoction created by scientists in white lab coats.
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Its chief problem is that every word, every note, and every instrument sounds dry, sapped of most of their personality.
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The good news is things pick up, eventually. The bad news is the album ends just as it starts getting interesting.
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The band's writing stagnates, rendering the majority of the album in a rote midtempo formula that Stipe's increasingly trite lyrics can't always save.
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However different the early and mid-period records are, they all sounded daring, fresh, and inspired in their own ways. Compare that to the lifeless "High Speed Train" which plods along in perfectly measured time for the longest five minutes I've ever experienced with the band.
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In eliminating both the mystery of its early years and the restless spirit of more recent times, R.E.M. leaves just exactly what R.E.M.-haters probably felt the band made all along: midtempo, largely hookless adult rock.
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Q MagazineRelentlessly, frustratingly slow. [Nov 2004, p.108]
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Where the two remaining musicians in the band appear to have gone astray, Michael Stipe sounds positively lost, never to be found again.
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R.E.M. have never seemed as directionless.
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MojoThe first out-and-out dull R.E.M. album. [Oct 2004, p.97]
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 74 out of 112
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Mixed: 24 out of 112
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Negative: 14 out of 112
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Aug 30, 2012
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Apr 5, 2012
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Feb 23, 2022