SuPOLLnatural, SuPOLLserious: REM's "Accelerate"

Reference threads:

REM - Accelerate
finish this sentence: "Accelerate is the best R.E.M. album since..."

I'm convinced, btw, that "Mr. Richards" is a Bush song...this may be the consensus reading for all I know but it just strikes me that way. Really nice to see Stipe bringing his more nuanced character-study voice to political material after the "spleen-venting" of Ignoreland - here he demolishes this Richards by showing him to be left-behind, intellectually lazy, clueless - and yet there's a kind of sad patience, nudging him to "pay attention, pay attention." The triumph is that this guy is now irrelevant, the "camp moved on"...we're hoping he'll get the message at some point but only trying to communicate with him out of some spirit of charitable friendliness...

My other goofy reading I'd like to contribute: "Supernatural Superserious," while it works as an "Everybody Hurts" or "Imitation of Life" song of encouragement to the insecure, is also REM's "Rubber Ring," noting bitterly that the with-it and hip want to forget the moments of insecurity in which they received these these previous songs:

Nobody cares, no one remembers and nobody cares
How you cried and you cried...

Too soon to render a binding historical judgment?

No. It's overrated. I loved this band once.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

No one remembers and nobody cares, indeed. :(

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

...well, OK then.

Big deadline this Thursday but after that I'll launch the final two polls back to back.

I gave this one a decent shot, but yeah, it was the final nail in the coffin for me. Around the Sun was awful, but it wasn't Accelerate that I thought "Oh. I think this is actually the best they can do at this point." It's nothing to mourn about - very few bands are anything but shadows of their former selves by the time they approach their thirtieth (!!) year, and R.E.M. is no exception.

wasn't until Accelerate, I mean.