REM - 'Hollow Man'
Once upon a time there was a band called REM. Named after the Rapid Eye Movement period of sleep, when you dream, they were an obtuse and obscure band liked by members of Nirvana. Then they decided to write some amazing pop songs and got very famous with interesting, emotionally stark material like 'Losing My Religion' and 'Everybody Hurts'. They were the cynical edge of relatively radio-friendly rock, which isn't to say they were some clever marketing ploy but that they were clearly rather bitter about everything, in a way that everyone can relate to at least some of the time. Then it all sort of went a bit wrong.
The steady decline of REM's song quality in the last ten years is fairly obvious to anyone who's heard their singles. Where they used to be edgy they're now dadrock and whilst there's nothing per se wrong with sounding nice, there is a point at which REM singles have ceased to be anything other than REM singles; they're a song, sung by Michael Stipe, in a reasonably melancholy fashion, with some weird lyrics but otherwise quite pleasant to listen to. They sound, functionally, like REM singles but they have no merit outside of this qualification.
This one actually surprised me, since it doesn't sound totally like Mr Stipe at the start of it, his voice seeming deeper and stronger than I generally think of it being but within thirty seconds it's become an REM single and part of me just feels really irked about the whole thing. Like when an arty film about someone making cereal becomes nothing more than that and thus is boring and irrelevant, since everyone knows how people put rice puffs in a bowl and pour milk on them, when a second ago the film was saying something about modern life.
The beauty of REM's music comes in this kind of poignancy but 'Hollow Man' fails to achieve it. It's the day when watching rain pound onto a bus window doesn't make you philosophically melancholy, it just makes you think about the fact you're going to be really drenched by the time you get home; the strip that just annoys you in its attempt at starkness; the extended tearful look into the camera that just takes it all too far and makes you stop believing in the film.
Poignant mundanity, when done right, can be beautiful and possibly, possibly there are people who still feel it from this song but even the video looks like the opening credits to some dodgy US teen drama about very rich people being a bit angsty in ridiculous scenarios.
The instrumental part is bog-standard REM (only seemingly constructed by a team of robots attempting to synthesise the noise of an REM song and not quite understanding music) the lyrics border on the annoyingly melodramatic, there's not really anything here to love. It's alright, really, as a nothing song and there shouldn't really be anything immensely offensive about it except that there is. It's like some kind of crushed dream, where you imagined something beautiful and bohemian and soulful but actually it turns out you need to go to the supermarket and the dog's barking or something.
Disillusionment can be a beautiful thing in music but not the thing that causes such a state, which is what this is; it's not even a burning dream, it's the sort of soggy aftermath of resignation and the switching off one's brain. Which is poignant, indeed but not like this, some kind of dystopian announcement that we shall all be miserable in a sort of noncommital, low-level manner. Not a sandwich I am going to eat.
Download: Out now
CD Released: June 2nd
(Hazel Robinson)
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