REMtrospective, 9: Out of Time
September 5th, 2008 by Curt Holman in Listening Stack
Title: Out of Time
Released on: March 11, 1991
Favorite tracks: “Radio Song,” “Losing My Religion,” “Low,” “Country Feedback”
Out of Time represents a peak for REM. It’s one of their most commercially successful of their albums, with “Losing My Religion” being their biggest hit single and possibly their “most famous” song. It turned the band from a popular college/alternative act to a popular mainstream band.
And Out of Time took REM to the big-time without compromising their artistic integrity, unless you count the ever-increasing intelligibility of Stipe’s singing to be a compromise. It’s like the listening audience finally “got” REM – or maybe REM and the audience met each other halfway. Because the band’s sound definitely changed. Looking back at Chronic Town, Murmur and Reckoning, it’s amazing how different the band sounds. The philosophy of songwriting, the prominence of the vocals, Buck’s once-trademark guitar style – all have gone through a transition. But it’s a “the same, only different” kind of transformation: I recognize the songs as “REM songs” (which is not something I’d say for Automatic for the People).
It’s interesting to compare them in this regard to U2, college-rock contemporaries turned arena rock acts. U2’s sound has evolved too, and they’ve dabbled in different directions, but they’ve remained in a narrower continuum than REM ever did.
Does “Losing My Religion” qualify as one of the most unlikely hit singles of all time? The Wikipedia entry has this quote: “According to Peter Buck, when Warner Bros. heard the album that was to take them to the top, they were dumbfounded: “You think the one with the lead mandolin should be the first single?!””
I was going to call the song “cerebral,” but that’s not really true: it’s highly emotional – to me, it captures a feeling of loss (such as love-relationship), the moment when you do something wrong and can’t take it back, as well as the moment when the loss sinks in: “I thought that I heard you laughing / I thought that I heard you sing I think I thought I saw you try / But that was just a dream…” It could be about a spiritual/religious loss, too, I suppose, but I don’t know who the “you” in the song would be if that were the case. At any rate, I think it has that Rorschach-blot quality in which different listeners can recognize different emotions in it, with similar intensity, even though the “meaning” is a bit elliptical. Probably no other REM song has succeeded at that so well on such a scale.
After the album came out, I heard that “Losing My Religion” is a Southern-ism for losing one’s temper. I don’t doubt it – but I don’t think I ever heard it before, either. Did anyone else ever hear this before the song came out?
“Losing My Religion” exemplifies one of the album’s most notable strengths. The early albums struck me as being all about urgency – they’re arresting from the get-go. The Out of Time songs strike me as having more dramatic intensity. The serious ones build and build and build and crest and reach crescendos, particularly “Low” and “Country Feedback,” they lyrics of which manage to be both raw and oblique. “Low” sounds almost angry, in a creepy-cool way, while “Country Feedback” is a great, anguished-sounding tune that seems to be a kind of companion to “Losing My Religion.” I don’t think of the early REM songs as building tension the way Out of Time’s do.
“Radio Song” contains nearly a comic opposition between the 1960s/hippie-ish intro and interludes, and the funky verses that culminates with KRS-One’s rapping outro. Plus, there’s some deceptive tension in some of them. “Near Wild Heaven’s” lyrics are a little more grim than the song’s peppiness seems to convey: “There’s a feeling that’s gone / Something has gone wrong / And I don’t know how much longer I can take it.” Which might explain why the song’s called “Near Wild Heaven,” instead of “Hanging Out Smack-Dab in the Middle of Wild Heaven.” I noticed that the “Pa Pa-Pa Pa” back-up vocal is very similar to a similar back-up in The Velvet Underground’s “Who Loves The Sun?” drawing that REM/V.U. connection even further. The “happy” songs here (and also some of the ones on Green) remind me a little of Donovan and even more of The Mamas and the Papas.
Incidentally, I love addition of Kate Pierson of the B-52s (REM’s contemporaries from Athens) to the vocal mix – I love how the soaring quality of her voice sort of elevates Stipe’s own singing, and adds this mounting, joyous quality. Maybe she adds the “drama” to the happy songs, “Shiny Happy People” and “Me in Honey.” But Stipe does his own cool resounding chorus thing in “Belong,” the verses of which remind me of the beat-poetry quality of the lyrics of Patti Smith, who recites the words in some of her songs, rather than sing them. (Stipe and Smith are big mutual admirers.) “Half a World Away” has that cool, rolling, wave-like quality – I can imagine The Pogues doing an interesting cover of it.
To me, “Losing My Religion” and Out of Time represents something of a midpoint of REM’s career, too (looking back from 2008, at least). They’d been together for 11 years (dating their formation to 1980), which is one year longer than The Beatles, who made an even more complex musical evolution from 1960-1970. It’s possibly the most successful album of what I’d call their “middle period” (basically from signing with Warner Bros. through the departure of Bill Berry).
Where would they go from the top?
Incidentally, here’s REM performing “Furry Happy Monsters” on “Sesame Street.” I love the Kate Pierson muppet — but where’s Bill Berry? Maybe he’s just sitting down playing drums below the frame:
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