Berry’s departure threw the band’s dynamics off steadiness. They’d way back settled into a well-recognized working rhythm: Buck and Berry workshopped materials within the studio previous to Mills’ arrival, and the trio would then hand over tracks to singer Michael Stipe. Buck had already been looking for new sounds, amassing outdated keyboards and drum machines previous to the beginning of the album classes. As soon as recording was underway, Buck, on bass, began every day laying down tracks with drummer Barrett Martin and multi-instrumentalist Scott McCaughey, whereas Mills added coloration and textures with keyboards. Stipe suffered a large case of author’s block towards the tip of recording, leaving the remainder of the band to tinker with overdubs and mixes as they waited for the vocals. Navigating such shifts can be tough underneath any circumstances, however R.E.M. additionally switched producers from Scott Litt, who had helmed each considered one of their information since 1987’s Doc, to Pat McCarthy, a sympathetic collaborator who helped facilitate Buck’s experiments with electronics, reaching sounds that, whereas not out of step with the choice rock of the late Nineteen Nineties, have been nonetheless new to R.E.M.
R.E.M. pushed their machines to the forefront on “Airportman,” a music that Mills insisted on having as Up’s opening observe—“like a signpost,” he mentioned: “‘This manner lies insanity.’” If Up by no means fairly succumbs to derangement, “Airportman” nonetheless serves as a becoming keynote for an album about being in transit, shifting inexorably from one location to the following. The ahead movement isn’t with out pauses. Up typically digresses, misplaced in its personal atmosphere and introspection. Partway by means of the document, a sequence of hushed, elongated songs skirts the perimeters of a drone for practically 20 minutes, a span so long as a mini-LP. Generally, it appears as if Up was sequenced as a sequence of interlocked EPs: The primary third incorporates the brightest, hookiest materials; the second section ( from “The Apologist” to “Why Not Smile”) is the darkest; and the ultimate stretch splits the distinction between the 2 extremes.
Undercutting that sequencing is the truth that every music sounds each like a starting and an ending. The album’s elliptical move makes it seem that the band retains returning to the beginning line. Succumbing to the period’s propensity for CD bloat didn’t assist issues: The document expands and contracts for over an hour, then abruptly finishes with “Falls to Climb,” an elegiac quantity that performs like neither a conclusion nor an epilogue. The just about arbitrary ending helps Buck’s rivalry that “Up by no means actually did get completed.”
