At first glance the careers of R.E.M. and Tom Waits, who both release new albums today, would seem to have little in common. In the 1980s R.E.M. set the stage for the crossover success of alternative rock; in the 1990s, they occupied that stage with albums like “Out of Time” and “Automatic For the People”; today, they’ve mostly ceded that stage to others. Waits, on the other hand, has always been a beloved cult phenomenon, but an acquired taste. If anything, he’s seemed to court obscurity. Having established a successful formula as a whiskey stained, down-on-his-luck lounge singer in the 1970s – covered by the likes of the Eagles and Rod Stewart – Waits pushed his music in a percussion heavy, theatrical direction that confounded many existing fans.

But time has brought these artists closer together. The question that greets the new R.E.M. album, “Around the Sun,” is whether it will return the band to its former artistic and commercial heights. (I’ll save you the suspense: It won’t.) But the band says it no longer models its career on fellow-pop-travelers like U2 – who always seem to find a way to the top of the charts – but on … you guessed it, Tom Waits.

I take this to mean that they’re pursuing a path of longevity and artistic freedom, with a little more room for oddity and error than pop music allows. The difference is that while Waits continues to find fresh possibilities in his seemingly limited musical direction, R.E.M.’s formula – once so full of possibilities – has grown suddenly stale.

R.E.M.’s sound has been remarkably consistent over its 25-year career, characterized by Peter Buck’s jangly guitar and Michael Stipe’s singular voice and pastiche lyrics. Its new album is another pass through this familiar orbit. Most of the songs echo earlier work, and as with echoes, they’re fainter than the originals. “Leaving New York,” the album’s first single, is full of easy melodies and minor-key sadness. Some of the band’s best songs – “Daysleeper” and “Try Not To Breath” leap to mind – have utilized this same approach, managing to be both somber and soaring. But “Leaving New York” never quite achieves the same emotional range.

The same goes for “The Outsiders,” a song that features a tepid rap cameo by A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip. Both parties know how to make this work. Q-Tip made a charmingly loopy appearance on Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart,” and R.E.M.’s 1991 “Radio Song” featured a boisterous KRS-One. Unfortunately, “The Outsiders” pales next to both.

Waits’s new album, “Real Gone,” is also familiar in many ways, continuing his love affair with folk language and junkyard percussion. Here he follows his clangorous muse into a world of shady corners and shadier characters. The lyrics are somewhere between the surrealist language of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” and the delusional mutterings of a senile old swamp rat: “black joke and the bean soup / big sky and the Ford Coupe / old maid and the dry bones / Red Rover and the Skinny Bones Jones,” is a representative sample.

The best songs have the driving rhythm of work songs. “Don’t Go Into That Barn” ends with a call-and-response exchange between a murderous rum runner and his conspirator that sounds like an old Negro field holler: “Did you cover your tracks? / Yessir / Did you bring your knife? / Yessir.” For the chorus to “Hoist That Rag,” Waits invents another character: a gruff pirate ship captain barking commands. It’s prettified only slightly by Marc Ribot’s floating Polynesian guitar line.

“Dead and Lovely,” another standout, is a haunting, old-style pop song that should be wafting out of a jukebox on an episode of “Twin Peaks.” The chorus sounds like the handiwork of outsider artist Daniel Johnston: “now she’s dead / forever dead and lovely now.” This is no coincidence, as Waits contributed a song – a roaring mess of a cover called “King Kong” – to the recent Daniel Johnston tribute album. He was the only one to outweird Johnston.

There’s plenty here that’s irredeemably weird here, as well. “Circus” is a nightmarish tale told by a drunken carny to terrified children lured away from their parents. “Clang Boom Steam” and “Chick A Boom” are onomatopoeic beat-boxing train wrecks – the kind of missteps Waits fans have grown accustomed to overlooking.

Both albums include songs that appeared previously on the Mc-Sweeney’s/MoveOn.org political compilation, “Future Soundtrack of America.” R.E.M.’s is a reworking of “Final Straw,” which the band wrote (and released online) in the rush to war in Iraq. It, too, seems rushed and ill thought-out.

R.E.M. has treated politics successfully in the past – as vague anxiety (“You Are The Everything”) or metaphor (“World Leader Pretend”). But Stipe’s strength as a lyricist, his dizzily abstruse imagery, is at odds with direct political statement. There’s little punch to lines like, “If hatred makes a play on me tomorrow / and forgiveness take a backseat to revenge / there’s a hurt down deep that has not been corrected / there’s a voice in me that says you will not win.”

Waits’s political song, “Day After Tomorrow,” has nothing to do with the climate-change disaster movie of the same name, but deals with the most unnatural of disasters: human warfare. It’s the only song on “Real Gone” that reverts to his pre-“Swordfishtrombones” style. Over a misty guitar, Waits relates the story of a 20-year-old soldier who believes in little and understands less: “I just do what I’ve been told / We’re just the gravel on the road / and only the lucky ones come home / on the day after tomorrow.”