When Michael Stipe sings, “Let’s show the kids how to do it…” two tracks into Collapse Into Now (in stores and online Tuesday), one can’t help but simply marvel that a band nearly thirty years into record making can still manage to sound so fresh, vital, and generally relevant in a marketplace that has long since forgotten who and what created independent rock ‘n’ roll in the first place. On their second album with producer Jacknife Lee, R.E.M. have retained the sense of urgency that made 2008’s Accelerate such a creative resurgence, while opening up their sound even further—this is easily the most spacious, sonically endearing record they’ve kicked out since the early nineties, and the band (singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, and bassist/keyboardist Mike Mills) seems to know it, gushing over all twelve songs with very fervent sense of joy and youthful exuberance.
Opening track “Discoverer” quickly establishes the album’s wide open, Technicolor optimism with Buck’s ringing electric guitar riffs and Stipe’s bright and hopeful lyrics—so wide-eyed and bushy tailed, in fact, that the singer can’t help but drop a “nah nah nah” mid-verse one. “The slightest bit of finesse might have made a little less mess,” he sings on the crunching pre-chorus, “But it was what it was, let’s all get on with it now.” On the band’s fifth album since founding drummer Bill Berry's departure, R.E.M. finally seem to be getting on with it just fine— “All The Best” is an uptempo, jangly fuzz rocker with a classicist college rock melody. Buck’s mandolin makes a welcome return on “Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I” and “Oh My Heart”, the later an unofficial sequel to Accelerate’s “Houston” that features a New Orleans horn section and some of Stipe’s most heartfelt lyrics in ages. “I came home to a city half erased,” he moans, evoking the sighing, collective desperation of the American South.
The plucky acoustic guitar strumming of “Überlin” and “It Happened Today” (the latter featuring Eddie Vedder on its fist in the air, anthemic vocal coda) give the album some room to breathe, but the band really shines on the overdriven, Monster meets Lifes Rich Pageant rockers: “Mine Smell Like Honey” is a classic piece of carpe diem buoyancy set to the fiery power chord gospel of Peter Buck’s Rickenbacker. On the almost obscenely fun “Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter”, Stipe returns to his time-honored, Document-era nonsensical wordplay with a little help from guest vocalist Peaches, who plays the Kate Pierson role well enough. While the sprightly feel good rock of “That Someone Is You” is painfully brief and “Walk It Back” threatens to completely ruin the album’s momentum with its snore-worthy folksy piano plodding, the impressionist pastiche of album closer “Blue” ties everything together with a big sound collage bow. Featuring the welcome return of Patti Smith, the song feels like a close cousin to her previous cameo on “E-Bow The Letter”: that weathered voice hovers like a ghost through the dense layers of hanging feedback and reverberating piano chords.
Collapse Into Now will do little for anyone who tuned out around 1988 (or anyone born after ’88, for that matter), but it demonstrates beautifully that R.E.M. remain one of the most indelibly earnest forces of rock music we have left. While U2 are off building elaborate stage setups in some distant country we’ve never been, R.E.M. continue to write organic, heartfelt American alternative rock as expertly and beautifully as ever.
Sum-ology: It’s no Automatic For The People, but R.E.M.’s fifteenth (!!!) studio album is a lush and spacious reminder of why they’re still the greatest alternative rock band in history.
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@Erasurehead
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