Evangelicals Now
<< July 2001 >>

Reveal

REVEAL
R.E.M.
Warner Bros. 2001

'Living standards have improved beyond recognition. So have leisure opportunities... For a few hundred quid we can holiday at the utmost ends of the earth. We should be having a whale of a time. But mostly we aren't.' (The Times August 28 2000.) A year later Reveal, the latest album from American rock band R.E.M., dramatises these thoughts.

Musically it is upbeat. The band crescendo eagerly into the penultimate chorus of Imitation of Life before the verse is quite finished; the brass warbles contentedly through Beachball. But lyrically it is an album for those content to take the rain, convinced that summer is no longer an option; it is an album for those who have 'missed the big reveal' and whose picture of life is becoming incoherent like a colour photo melting into its constituent colours.

But there is a secret out there, some knowledge that will enable us to live daringly in the present, but this revelation seems available only in snatches leaving us still floundering but yet more frustrated. 'I've been high / I've climbed so high / but life sometimes / it washes over me' (I've Been High). It's a wistful song where clear, gentle drumming mixes easily with soothing keyboard sounds and twangy guitars. As the bass chimes in we hear the confession that 'what I really want is / just to live my life on high'. But faced with this unachievable goal we must simply stagger onward trying to 'make my make-believe believe in me'.

Dissatisfaction with the present and desire to escape from it were prominent themes of Radiohead's Kid A and U2's All You Can't Leave Behind recently, and they recur here. This yearning quest after reality, a meaning for life, permeates the album. It comes with the disjointed She Just Wants to Be, a song about a person whose 'world got smaller' when she realised that 'now is greater than all of the past'. It is seen in the broken, staccato rhythms of Disappear, whose theme is the search for 'a calm I haven't come to yet'. Past achievements count for nothing when you have kept hold of no permanent reason for living.

So there is no surprise that R.E.M. look enviously at those who are able to live confidently and attempt great things. To a thumping drum beat and singing guitars and violins they tell us of people who 'want the greatest thing / ... / you've got it all, you've got it sized' in the words of the hit single Imitation of Life. And later in the song to a stripped-down guitar accompaniment imagine what it must be like to face 'this lightning storm / this tidal wave / this avalanche, I'm not afraid.'

Christian, will you be this person? Will you stand tall in a world short of heroes? Will we live with utter conviction of our eternal destiny and security and so be more than conquerors through all of life's troubles and apparent perversity? This album is a cry from the heart to see more of such people. Live triumphantly! Challenge the whole world!

Simon Wheeler