R.E.M. Finds Its Religion ... and Says a Prayer

AUSTIN, Texas — Every year, striving rock acts and feisty independent record labels unite with indefatigable fans and drink-cadging critics to converge on this college town for the South by Southwest music festival. The event has mushroomed into a showcase for a gazillion variations on the next big thing, becoming such a media magnet that your average semi-obscure bar band may clock five or six gigs on any given day.

So it was in Austin, of course, that Dark Meat — a 17-piece Mardi Gras party of a stomping, free-rock ensemble — celebrated its recent signing to Vice Records with a chaotic blowout. The outfit shared a bill with a half-dozen other groups from Athens, Ga., all representative of that other Southern college burg's unique place in rock history: On this day at SXSW, the original "scene" town — which, 30 years ago, spawned a funky little dance combo called the B-52s and, shortly thereafter, a flurry of quirky, DIY-minded bands with names like Love Tractor, Pylon, Oh-OK, and R.E.M — was as vital as ever.

In those 30 years, the scene, as such, has shifted from one buzz city to the next: Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, Omaha, and, right now, Brooklyn have each enjoyed their season as a focal point for the pop zeitgeist. But the contemporary concept of geography as a kind of indie-rock destiny began in Athens as the 1980s dawned.

South by Southwest, which wrapped up last week, was a strong reminder of this concept. Even as Dark Meat (enthusiastic, a bit gimmicky) was winding down its set, the members of R.E.M., each hovering around 50 now, were getting ready for a gig a few blocks away. As an opening act, R.E.M. had tabbed another young group from Athens, the excellent Dead Confederate, which melds Pink Floyd dreaminess with Lynyrd Skynyrd blues.

It's unlikely R.E.M. would call it a comeback, but the trio obviously felt a need to reassert its willingness to rock, and to do so in the same amiably scruffy, beer-sodden environs that first launched the group to critical and, eventually, commercial prominence in the 1980s. Much like its old neighbors, the B-52s (whose "Funplex," the group's first album of new material since 1992, comes out today), R.E.M. has a new album to promote, and Austin proved an ideal platform to signal the band's return to foursquare, guitar-based rock. "Accelerate," which hits shelves next Tuesday, finds R.E.M. sounding like R.E.M. again — or, at least, sounding like the R.E.M. of its late-1980s breakout period, when albums such as "Life's Rich Pageant" and "Green" took the quartet out of college bars and into arenas.

The band's SXSW show at Stubb's Bar-B-Que, as many heard on a streaming feed from the National Public Radio Web site (npr.org), conveyed a certain wisdom on which groups of R.E.M.'s vintage can bank. There's no need to reinvent a trademark sound. Just stick with what always worked. "Accelerate" is the first studio album from vocalist Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, and bassist Mike Mills since 2004's dismal "Around the Sun." And it's the first R.E.M. album since the departure of the band's original drummer, Bill Berry, in 1997, that isn't tricked out with keyboards, electronic noodling, and artificially sweetened popcraft — all of which seemed to be poor substitutes for the beat that Mr. Berry took with him.

Not surprisingly, the band's record sales have been in a tailspin since its heady days of early-'90s glory, when songs such as "Losing My Religion" and "Man on the Moon" secured global mass-market affection, yet refined the band's idiosyncrasies into compassionate art. Watching R.E.M. meander toward nostalgia-dom in the past few years called to mind something that Thurston Moore, the guitarist for Sonic Youth — the New York art-rock act whose more pointedly outré career has paralleled R.E.M.'s — recently said. Mr. Moore suggested that had his band broken up years ago and then reunited, they might have ensured a bigger payday and been more popular than ever. In retrospect, it's easy to imagine R.E.M. calling it quits on New Year's Eve 1999, which once was rumored to happen, deciding that without Mr. Berry, they really were "a three-legged dog," as Mr. Stipe had quipped, and should seek new horizons.

That didn't happen, though for many fans and critics it might as well have. Sitting by while peers such as Bono save the world and protégés such as Radiohead reinvent the wheel can't feel too good. So the urgency and sheer volume of "Accelerate," and of R.E.M.'s strident and jangle-happy Austin showcase, feel genuine. It's just too bad the songs aren't better. Mr. Stipe, who once kept listeners scratching their heads to decipher lyrics that felt like surrealist poetry, has long since adopted a declamatory style that too often underscores how banal his lines really are. New tracks such as "Living Well Is the Best Revenge" and "Horse to Water" suggest the singer has never met a cliché he didn't purloin, even if the beautifully aggressive mesh of Mr. Buck's guitar with the rhythm section captures the youthful buoyancy of R.E.M. in its prime.

"Supernatural Superserious," the album's first single, is even more regrettable, as Mr. Stipe sings about "the humiliation of the teenage nation." Huh? Leave it to Hannah Montana.

The bumper-sticker sentiments aren't new to R.E.M., and in some cases, the band's impassioned punch fuses with Mr. Stipe's fiery testimony in ways that you don't want to resist, especially when Mr. Mills lends his choirboy's countertenor to echo the main vocal lines. As R.E.M. efforts go, "Accelerate" is the band's best work this decade, but once you peel back the layers of guitar, it's not nearly as emotionally affecting as the disquieting murmurs of 1999's underrated "Up," whose ambient pop tinkering dressed up heartfelt ambiguities in the wake of Mr. Berry's departure.

At his best, Mr. Stipe negotiates uneasy truces between the particular and the universal ("That's me in the corner / That's me in the spotlight") and narrates what it feels like to be caught between them. "Accelerate" tries so eagerly to deliver on its promise that it zooms right past what made R.E.M. truly great.