R.E.M. will rock you softly

If Out of Time is happily disgruntled in Athens, Ga., then Around the Sun is a settled kind of melancholy in New York City. The album works well as a whole, but overall there just seems to be a lack of color. \nIt's classic R.E.M. in the sense that it's a dark, thoughtful album with occasional flashes of light. R.E.M. lives in a drizzly gray world, but the sun peeks through the clouds every now and then. But it's also definitely "new R.E.M." along the lines of 1998's Up. It also has overtones of 1992's Automatic for the People. It's Automatic a little older and a little less raw. The effect is less emotive. Automatic is life-wracking angst, Around is day-in-day-out unpleasantness. If Automatic involves losing one's religion, Around involves Starbucks running out of 2 percent milk for your latte. R.E.M. has gone through several concrete stages in its career, and of the new one (the "post-Bill Berry's departure" stage), this album is just OK. It's not definitive, it's not terrible, it's just nice and quiet and OK. \nThe standout track "Leaving New York" deserves a 400-word review all for itself. The lead song isn't quite situated in the upper echelon of R.E.M.'s oeuvre with the likes of "Losing My Religion" and "Everybody Hurts," but it's a beautiful song nevertheless. Lyrically, it's rather simple; musically, it's clean. "It's easier to leave than to be left behind," Stipe sings. We all know this, but it's still nice to hear it sometimes. \nThe album also features rapper Q-Tip on the third track, "The Outsiders." Whose idea was this? Guest vocalists have worked out well for R.E.M. in the past (think "Shiny Happy People"), but this addition was so aurally jarring I had to stop the CD to figure out what was going on. The beauty of R.E.M. stems from the quality of Stipe's voice -- it borders on legendary. Even new R.E.M. is good because of his voice. To a listener accustomed to the flow of his voice, entrenched in the CD, Q-Tip is a nasty curveball. \nHigh point and low point aside, the other songs are all comfortably similar. They all seem to kind of meld together in a nice little R.E.M. pie. \nBut as a whole, the album just feels like background music. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because it's good background music, but it will probably only be truly loved by longtime fans. It just feels terribly, horribly, unmercifully overproduced. I'd love to hear them bust out, but I'm not sure the band has the teeth to do that anymore. The R.E.M. that made Around would never use a sitar, and they'd never sing about anything that wouldn't be OK to hear at a rainy-night dinner party.