When I featured R.E.M. for our Artists Condensed column I briefly examined the circumstances that led the band to produce their 1998 album Up, the record that alienated a lot of their fans and is generally considered something of a flop. I'm an avid defender of Up and while it certainly isn't the album I would play for someone who had never heard of R.E.M. I still think it holds up considerably well by its own merits. It's certainly a departure from the sound the band cultivated over two decades, which is all the more reason for it exist. Up is an album of its time and a unique work of art from a group that chose to do something special when it was on the brink of falling apart.

As the story goes, R.E.M. barely survived the promotional tour for Monster, what may be their best album overall. Michael Stipe suffered a sudden hernia and drummer Bill Berry collapsed from a brain aneurysm that required a dangerous surgery to fix. Berry stuck around to record New Adventures in Hi-Fi but had been talking about quitting the music business for months after the Monster tour ended. Though the band ultimately decided to carry on without Bill Berry, his absence resulted in a significant shift in R.E.M.'s sound. Up is a weird, jarringly electronic album from a band that, a la Dylan, shocked people just by plugging in their guitars. What began as a decision to experiment with drum loops became a full-on avant garde project.

From the first hazy seconds of "Airportman" it's clear that Up isn't going to fit with the rest of R.E.M.'s catalog. It's all drum machines, keyboards and surreal distortion. The album's one and only true radio single, "Lotus", follows it, but it seems more like a fakeout than a promise to rock for the rest of the album. It sounds like a Doors track with its seedy organ and free-association lyrics. The trippy music video for "Lotus" only deepens the sense of strangeness.

"Suspicion" is what Up really sounds like. Underneath the echo and lyrics that are odd even for Michael Stipe, it's an aural opium den of occasionally sad, occasionally sexy music. Aside from "Lotus" it's never really energetic and it never attempts to be accessible in the strict pop sense. The only track that might fit on any other R.E.M. album is "At My Most Beautiful", a uniquely organic love song that serves as a kind of palate cleanser. Without it, Up would just be too synthetic, yet another similarly natural song would make the album sound schizophrenic.

Tracks 6 through 9 offer a kind of heavy, melancholic block and is probably what turned a lot of listeners off to the album. They're all good songs on their own, especially "Sad Professor", but their combined emotional intensity is sometimes hard to sit through. R.E.M. was never the happiest band on the scene, but they were also never so downright oppressive. These are songs about anger, alienation, addiction and defiance with nothing to pad the space between them. By the time you get to "Why Not Smile" (if you manage to get that far), an elegy to the recently departed actor River Phoenix, it's hard not to turn off the album and go eat a Pixie Stik just to balance things out.

But quitting at this point would be a big mistake. You'd miss "Daysleeper", the finest track on the album. It isn't exactly sunny, but it does capture a sense of esoteric fascination that Michael Stipe does so well and its rhythm section plugs into a tiny bit of triumph that the rest of the album doesn't even try for.

The rest of the album is something of a sleepy return to the surreal haze that opens Up. There's a twee hidden track attached inexplicably to the end of "Diminished", the psychedelic koan that is "Parakeet" (the song I think ought to have ended the album) and "Falls To Climb", a sort of alien church song as the closer.

Up isn't R.E.M.'s best and it's not even my personal favorite, but I think it deserves better than it got. The late 1990's were years of cultural experimentation and R.E.M. was in the middle of their most significant transition as a band. It would have been disingenuous to make an album that sounded like all their other material and doing so would likely have rendered the band irrelevant in a time when it was necessary to embrace new concepts, even if those concepts proved to be limited.