Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 31/03/08
Label: Warner Bros

When veteran bands regress to their earlier, younger style of making music they're usually scorned: witness the responses to Supergrass's past glories-revisiting latest. But when everything that band has done in the last decade has been as bland, moribund and elder-statesmanlike as "Up" (1998), "Reveal" (2001) and "Around The Sun" (2004) (the latter recently disowned by Stipe himself in a recent Telegraph interview) backwards is surely the only sensible way forwards.

"Accelerate" - album number14 - sees the Athens Georgia three-piece (after Bill Berry's departure) return to their college radio roots. Full of speed and energy and unpolished surfaces, its similarities to 1986 breakthrough "Life's Rich Pageant" are unmistakeable. At just over half an hour long, it's the product of a punk attitude rediscovered. Points are made quickly. In and out. Bam. The shortest song of all is the Hurricane Katrina referencing "Houston".

Gone are the lugubrious ballads. Gone the sensible bass lines, boring chord changes and perfectly-programmed and immaculate synth fades. Gone the oddly clunky attempts at transcendence. They sound like a band of irrepressibly tykes who've just won a free day in a shabby studio courtesy of a battle of the bands contest. Someone's reminded them it's just rock'n'roll. That someone being Garret 'Jacknife' Lee, producer of choice for a raft of young Brit indie bands who fall just the right side of corporate - Bloc Party and Editors amongst them.

His balls-out approach is consistent - with just a few slips. Shouty, noisy opening cut "Living Well Is The Best Revenge" rolls about like a choppy sea, all "Lambs to slaughter" and "The future is ours". "Man-Sized Wreath' - it's lyrics ("Turn on the TV, what do I see? / A pageantry of empty gestures, all lined up for me") apparently inspired by George Bush's cringe-makingly stage-managed appearance at last year's Martin Luther King day commemorations - doesn't quite pick up the sweaty baton.

But before you have time to complain, it's swiftly brushed aside by the insidiously engaging, happy-sad "Supernatural Superserious" which might have fallen off the back of "Green"'s lorry. In accordance with the convention that title tracks must always be a bit "meh", "Accelerate" pushes along with urgency but a lack of bite - like background music to a bar scene in an indie thriller. "Horse To Water", however, has the machine-gun fast delivery of "It's The End Of The World…" and a cart-wheeling chorus redolent of old times.

Galloping to the finish line is the breezily fantastic and deeply grooved "I'm Gonna DJ", which sees Stipe in full-on jokey/ironical mood backed by "Whoo-hoo!"s. Which all makes for the dreaded 'return to form. And they must know it. In the closing lines of "Hollow Man", there's what might be interpreted as a quiet thank you to fans who've kept the faith: "You had placed your trust in me, I went upside down / I emptied out the room in 30 seconds flat, I can't believe you held your ground".

    by Anna Britten