Accelerate

With the rocking tunes, energetic vocals and those smart lyrics, Accelerate is a true return to form for a band that really needed it.

Accelerate will be rightfully championed as the defibrillator that shocked a once-great band back to its senses.

With Accelerate, Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills sound like a band again, albeit now one not afraid to look back a little.

Accelerate is by some considerable distance REM’s best and most cohesive album since Berry left, and crucially echoes a time when they made their best music, if not necessarily their biggest-selling.

Accelerate may not stun on impact like some R.E.M. records, but it's still habit-forming.

Now we have Accelerate; the actualisation of a new found urgency. Gratifyingly short at under 35 minutes, it’s a summation of much that is or was great about R.EM.: wordy proclamations by Stipe, ringing Rickenbacker trills by Buck and lush backing vocals by Mills.

On Accelerate R.E.M. sound like men less than half their age, ripping through 11 songs in a mere 35 minutes that contains great chunks of just about everything that made them the biggest band in world back in the 1990s.

When in doubt, crank the amps. This is the philosophy behind R.E.M.’s new album, Accelerate, their best, and certainly their loudest, in years.

Accelerate hits the ground running, slows down briefly, and ends as furiously as it began. Mapped out that way, its most striking moments end up being the bookends of the first and last two songs, particularly since the album is so short, but even the weakest moments in the middle detract little from the whole.

It's mostly fast and unfussy, convincing and committed.

Accelerate serves notice that R.E.M. intends to stay that way.

It’s simply R.E.M. finally making a concerted effort to sound like themselves, and realizing that’s not such a horrible idea.

Redeemed, revived, irresisitable: it seems R.E.M. were only sleeping after all. [Apr 2008, p.99]

It is the sound of a classic band moving forward, and it is a step in the right direction. [Sping 2008, p.80]

Accelerate puts the 2007 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame group once again firmly behind the wheel of alternative rock, a genre R.E.M. helped invent.

It really does seem that a decade-long period of interbal artistic crisis has been resolved, beautifully, even triumphantly. [Apr 2008, p.98]

Accelerate is the first studio album by that post-Berry stage band, and it is one of the best records R.E.M. have ever made.

Accelerate isn't quite as irresistible as some people might have you believe, but you can't help feeling glad they stuck around to make it.

As comebacks go, that's relatively modest, but the very modesty of Accelerate is what makes it such a successful rebirth as R.E.M. no longer denies what they were or what they are, and, in doing so, they offer a glimpse of what they could be once again.

There’s good rock ’n’ roll here, and it’s vital and raw enough to be memorable. But there’s something calculated too, something demographically researched and meticulously executed in these songs.

If it isn't able to recapture the post-punk energy of "Reckoning," the political fury of "Life's Rich Pageant," or the epic scope of "Automatic for the People," the album, at the very least, finds the band playing to its strengths rather than attempting to explore an increasingly thin artistic mythology. That alone justifies Accelerate's positive buzz, even if the album doesn't quite support the magnitude of it.

Accelerate’s songs are generally well-constructed, almost to the point of being formulaic- eleven alternative pop songs with no excess fat around the edges.

Their 14th studio album is a fierce nostalgia­fest full of cascading jangle, candied power chords, lonesome harmonies, Southern-gothic protest poetry and roundhouse drum bash.

'Sing for the Submarine's' winking nods to old song titles ("electron blue," "gravity's pull," "high-speed train") are painfully self-aware. It's a sharp contrast to the rest of Accelerate, on which R.E.M. stop overthinking things--and start roaring toward the future.

"Accelerate" pushes along with urgency but a lack of bite - like background music to a bar scene in an indie thriller. "Horse To Water", however, has the machine-gun fast delivery of "It's The End Of The World…" and a cart-wheeling chorus redolent of old times.

this is a rock album, R.E.M are back being literate and smart, Stipe is barking out lyrics like it’s 1987… in fact, beef up some songs off "Document" and you could mix the two albums up.

Accelerate's broad strokes, big riffs, and beefy production (the album was reportedly recorded in "just" nine weeks) are admirable, as is the disc's concision, but its success is still more as a step forward than a slam dunk.