AROUND The Sun is, apparently, REM's way of expressing dismay at President Bush's Iraqi debacle. However, unlike Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle's post 9/11 statements of raging discontent, Michael Stipe's elegiac sentiments of regret and remorse don't batter you about the head.

"It's quiet now," he sings in the album's first line, and it is quiet at the end too, and all points in between on REM's 13th studio set, their first since the renascent Reveal in 2001 and their least fulfilling since 1994's Monster.

Where their participation in the pro-Kerry Vote For Change concerts is the most direct political statement of their 24-year career, Around The Sun is far foggier, much like the blurred sleeve photo. Stipe's arch lyrics have always been labyrinthine, impressionistic, mysterious, and they speak as ever of being disorientated, displaced or out of step. "Now I am floating, I feel released," he pronounces on The Worst Joke Ever, only to conclude "You see there's this feeling I've heard this one before."

Indeed we have, on better REM albums, or should that read more energetic REM albums. The senior statesmen of Athens, Georgia, sound enervated, not so much grumpy old men as tired, subdued and baffled. This is an album of "sinking feelings", "a town going wrong" and "a rope trick starting to look stale". Stipe can do no more than "Make It All Okay", and in Final Straw he places his faith in those amorphous favourites of the pop world, forgiveness and love.

More problematic is the paucity of memorable songs: only the stately Leaving New York, Electron Blue, Final Straw and Boy In The Well pass muster. Sonic creativity on hold, old-folk REM offer a redundant Q-Tip rap on The Outsiders as their one fashion statement. Sunset, not sunrise.

REM play Sheffield Hallam FM Arena on February 21 2005; Hull KC Stadium, July 5.

Updated: 09:56 Thursday, October 14, 2004