Speeding

R.E.M. recaptures its momentum with the new CD 'Accelerate'

R.E.M., fronted by Michael Stipe (above), performing at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, earlier this month. (Rahav segev for the boston globe)

AUSTIN, Texas - They say you can't get from A to Z without stumbling through the entire alphabet. R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe takes this metaphor for life, and most everything else having to do with life, to heart. He is stretched out in the backyard of Stubb's Bar-B-Q, pondering a quarter century of R.E.M. music.

The band has just finished sound check and in a few hours will perform for the first time at the South by Southwest music festival, a bastion of the alternative rock scene R.E.M. pioneered. The singer wants to soak up some rays, and if that means sharing a hammock with a reporter, so be it.

For this conversation's purpose, A is R.E.M.'s superb first album, "Murmur," and Z is "Accelerate," the band's surprising rush of a new one. There have been 12 studio recordings in between. R.E.M.'s last record, 2004's "Around the Sun," is lodged somewhere in the alphabetical wasteland. Let's call it X, the unfriendliest and least-used letter. The previous two albums occupy nearby territory.

It's been a difficult decade for R.E.M., creatively and personally, and everyone knows it. Peter Buck, the band's guitarist, who sat down to talk earlier in a dressing room, says that if any of them had been thinking rationally they would have scrapped "Around the Sun" and started over again. Stipe begs to differ.

"We'd lost focus. We'd stopped communicating on a deep level, and there comes a point where we can't duck and hide, nor do we want to," says Stipe. "The interesting part of the story is that we could not have made this record had we not made the record before it and the record before that."

The songs on R.E.M.'s last few albums were thought, and then rethought, and deliberately constructed using dozens of takes and copious overdubs recorded during many months holed up in recording studios. "Accelerate," which has been streaming online at iLike.com since Monday and will be released on Tuesday, was made in three three-week bursts. It's raw and fast - 11 songs careen by in 34 minutes - and shot through with the sort of urgency that defines American life today, and rock bands on the brink.

Buck says, "If they had wanted to book six months in the Bahamas, I would have said 'I'm done.' And I would have missed it horribly. I just didn't want to end up with something that didn't reflect me as a person and us as a band."

R.E.M. needed to locate its mojo, which had been slipping further away on each album since drummer Bill Berry retired in 1997 and the remaining three began to rely more on craft than chemistry. It wasn't just Buck - whose preference for working fast had taken a back seat to Stipe's and bassist Mike Mills's more obsessive inclinations - lobbying for a change.

"After Bill left, we couldn't say we were a groovy rock band and just go on making groovy rock songs," says Mills on the phone from a London hotel last week. "We hit a rough patch and it scared us. We all realized we were in danger of losing something that mattered very much."

So Stipe, who lives in Athens and New York; Buck, a Seattle resident; and Mills, who divides his time between Los Angeles and Athens, sat down to establish a few new rules before recording "Accelerate." They would book short sessions and work swiftly, doing no more than three takes of each song. They would arrive prepared.

Stipe - according to Buck a notorious procrastinator who typically writes his lyrics at the last possible moment - had a record seven finished songs under his belt early on in the process. They set out to sound like a band again, and to that end R.E.M. arranged to test-drive the new material onstage during a week of shows at Dublin's Olympia Theatre before going into the studio.

Last but not least, on the recommendation of their good friend the Edge from U2, they hired Garret "Jacknife" Lee to produce the album. Lee worked on U2's "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb," but most of his experience is with young groups like Bloc Party, the Hives, and Snow Patrol.

"I tried to get them to stop the editor inside," says Lee. "Over-consideration generally leads to a less exciting sound because you start eliminating spontaneity and start concentrating on your last idea instead of the germ of the idea. When things are moving quickly, you have to rely on your instincts."

"Living Well Is the Best Revenge," the album's opening track, peels out of the gate with all cylinders firing: charging, ramshackle guitars and lean bass lines and Stipe sounding positively ravenous, which he was.

"It was 9:20 and we had a 9:45 dinner reservation and I said, 'Let's run through "Living Well" once to get mike levels,' and we did it, boom," recalls Buck, whose perpetually jiggling foot is emblematic of his work style. "When we came back the next day ready to record the song, Garret said, 'I don't think you need to. Listen to it. It's pretty realistic.' "

Realistic is an interesting choice of words to describe a perfect take, but it's apropos. Cold, hard reality fuels "Accelerate." The prospect of losing your audience (or worse, your identity) and the onset of middle age have conspired to take down lesser bands, but for R.E.M. the mortifying facts of life combined into one of those fiery, butt-kicking cocktails.

Stipe's words are variously topical (Hurricane Katrina, corrupt politicians); personal ("Supernatural Superserious," the anthemic first single, is about a teenage seance gone horribly wrong and how it haunts the author into adulthood); and cosmically giddy. "Death is pretty final/ I'm collecting vinyl/ I'm gonna DJ at the end of the world!" Stipe hollers on "I'm Gonna DJ," conjuring a certain stream-of-consciousness rant - in fact, a whole slew of joyous, vehement songs - from 20 years ago.

Stipe doesn't hesitate when asked why R.E.M. has found its spark again at this particular moment in time.

"I think this came from my reaching 48 years of age and realizing, 'Wow. I'm staring down the grill of something the likes of which I have not imagined.' And that's my mortality, and the mortality of . . . . boy, I can't go there. I'm sorry. Let's not go there."

Stipe has to collect himself before continuing. He may be thinking about his mother and father, of whom he speaks with great affection, or his boyfriend, whom Stipe describes as his first real love. Strange as it is to watch the media-savvy rock star come a little unglued, these are exactly the big, barely containable emotions that make "Accelerate" such a compelling listen.

And a familiar one. That's not to say that the songs sound like throwbacks, but the album's embrace of bustling melodies feels like the return of a long-lost friend, and the defiance and immediacy that color the album in such bold hues evoke a young band's palette. It's as if the rush of youth has resurfaced in mid-life and inspired a parallel intensity.

"When I was 15, I wanted to make a mark because I thought, 'We're going to die soon,' and everyone thought I was insane," says Buck, a tireless musician who tours with Robyn Hitchcock and in various outfits with two longtime R.E.M. sidemen, drummer Bill Rieflin and guitarist Scott McCaughey. "Now being in my 50s all those things make sense. We make a record every two or three years. How many do I have left?"

And how many bands like R.E.M. are left - serious, seasoned musical believers who (like their pals in U2) are convinced that the music is of greater consequence than the individuals who make it?

"They continue to be a band people want to listen to because people still expect them to do interesting things," says bassist Aaron Dessner of the National, which along with Modest Mouse is opening for R.E.M. on the US leg of a five-and-a-half month tour that stops at the Tweeter Center June 13. "So many bands have come to seem dated, and R.E.M. still seems relevant."

In so many ways "Accelerate" is a perfect title for the new album - for its pedal-to-the-metal tunes, certainly, and also because on the heels of a few meandering side trips, R.E.M. is barreling down the highway, one eye on the rear-view mirror and the other trained on the inevitable destination.

"It's really cheesy to say, but I think we recognize, not in a woo woo way, that this is our life's work and what we do as R.E.M. is bigger than the sum of its parts," says Stipe. "You can put up with a lot of [expletive] to see those dreams realized and to do the work you think is more valuable than your feelings on a Monday or a Tuesday."

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.