Up to speed: REM's new album is among their best

After a long and dreary time in the doldrums, REM have at last rediscovered their verve and are having fun again. This batch of new songs recalls the best of their vast ouput

REM: ACCELERATE ****

WARNERS, £11.99

NO BAND can sustain a winning streak indefinitely, though REM enjoyed a sustained run of excellence throughout the 1980s and early 90s before the water-treading set in. It would be too neat to correlate the departure of drummer Bill Berry and the start of their descent into banality – surely there was never a less likely time for the remaining founding members to succumb to complacency – but the rot set in at some point, and REM have been coasting or floundering for the best part of a decade, culminating in their thoroughly dull and out-of-touch last album Around The Sun.

Frontman Michael Stipe attributes their creative slide to a lack of communication between himself, guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills. Well, that's sure to happen at some point in the course of a 30-year musical marriage. The good news is that the trio have clearly rediscovered the joys of animated conversation in time to make their 14th album their most invigorated in years.

With Accelerate, REM are flexing muscles they haven't used for a long time. On this evidence, their self-administered kick up the backside has involved going back into their musical past and reconnecting with what made them a vital breath of fresh air in the first place. So Buck's mighty, textured guitar sound is back with a biting vengeance, Stipe is no longer inspecting his navel and Mills – well, Mike Mills has always been cool.

They come out of the starting blocks sounding serious about that album title. Living Well Is The Best Revenge has more thrust than they have delivered in what feels like aeons and marks a return to those urgent harmonies which clamour over Stipe's shoulders, as he takes great pleasure in delivering an eloquent putdown of a lyric: "all your sad and lost apostles hum my name and flare their nostrils … but I'm not one to sit and spin".

Turns out he's only getting warmed up. "Nature abhors a vacuum, but what's between your ears?" he taunts on the presumably Bush-baiting Man-Sized Wreath, a scathing lament for the failure to learn lessons, which slots neatly into this album's sense of simmering outrage at the way things have turned out.

With the single Supernatural Superserious, REM have delivered another of their upbeat, hummable, passable radio earworms, though there are darker undercurrents at work in this sympathetic take on the eternal upheaval of the teenage condition. Only three tracks in and Stipe has just uttered his second "wow" of the album.

Hollow Man is their biggest blast from the past yet, with a positively Byrdsian guitar break which harks back to their early days as psychedelic college rockers. The title track, meanwhile, is one of their serviceable mid-paced rockers, but the music doesn't complement the anguish or the sense of chaos communicated by the lyrics.

These days it seems that every album by a big American act has to have its Hurricane Katrina moment and Houston is REM's. This haunting ballad, punctuated by bursts of funereal organ, has just enough time to envelop the listener in its mournful blanket before it's over – an example of the ruthless, possibly over-compensatory economy of this album, which clocks in at a mere 35 minutes in total.

Musically, things take an earnest Bon Jovi turn on Until The Day Is Done, although Buck's singing guitar tone comes to the rescue. It is a shame that the backing is a little trite, because the lyric ("an addled republic, a bitter refund, the business-first flat-earthers licking their wounds") is one of the most eloquent, stinging indictments of the Bush colonial era yet penned.

The diversity continues with Sing For The Submarine, a fascinating dread waltz with controlled yet blistering guitar and oblique lyrics which would not sound out of place on a Muse album. It's good to know that REM still have the capacity to weird out their audience.

Then it's full throttle towards the punky endgame. There is more fighting talk from Stipe on the jabbering hotwire thrash of Horse To Water, as his thoughts come tumbling out like a marginally less frantic It's The End Of The World As We Know It.

They almost foul it up with the goofy closing track, I'm Gonna DJ, which takes a leaf out of Primal Scream's tired book of classic rock'n'roll clichés and adds the contrived hookline "death is pretty final, I'm collecting vinyl". But let's not bitch; they're having fun again. And when they're not having fun, they're fired up. Suddenly that T in The Park headline slot is looking very tasty indeed.