Collapse Into Now

It might be presumptuous of me, but Peter Buck has always struck me as the kind of guy I could have a beer with and talk for hours about music and whatever else. Over the last, say, two decades or so, he's gotten into a habit of touting the latest R.E.M. release as "our best one yet"-- although even he knew to hold his tongue when Around The Sun was released. A few weeks ago, I read an interview with Peter where he talked about driving home after the Nashville sessions, listening to the finished mixes of Collapse Into Now, and thinking to himself: "song for song, this is our best album yet."

Well, it isn't, but Peter's enthusiasm is not entirely without foundation. (In my opinion, anyway.) I didn't care much for Accelerate, and especially disliked Around The Sun, but this album strikes me as the most effortless and fun recording R.E.M. has released in a while, for once largely avoiding the ponderous quality that has begun sneaking into their music around 1998. I instantly enjoyed Discoverer, Uberlin, That Someone Is You, Oh My Heart, and Walk It Back. Heck, I even enjoy the unabashed cheesiness of Every Day Is Yours To Win. So sue me. There's not one song I really dislike, in fact, although the closing number Blue seems like a hasty shotgun marriage between Country Feedback and E-Bow The Letter, and is to my ears not as successful as the band probably thinks it is.

Finally, I briefly want to address the mastering engineer for this project, a vulgar audio criminal who calls himself Stephen Marcussen. Listen to me, dude: when the Loudness Wars are over, and you're put on trial for your atrocities, for your ruthless limiting and for your utter lack of subtlety with dynamics, and when they finally sentence you to the (musical) chair, I will be there to laugh in your face. There's no excuse for an album from a major band to sound like THIS. Go back and listen to Automatic To The People (which you also mastered before the insanity took over) and try to remember what an R.E.M. album is supposed to sound like. (Maybe some of the blame lies with Jacknife Lee for his mixing job, I don't know.) I can only hope that R.E.M. fans find a way to enjoy this recording despite your mastering. Alright, I'm done venting. I'm off to ruin somebody's day now...

3.5 stars
Lets start this review with three basic facts about R.E.M that if accepted will make us all feel much more content and happier.

1. Bill Berry left REM some time ago.
2. The band have already recorded their best albums and with "Murmur" and "Automatic for the people" behind them they will never make better music.
3. Some of their albums since Berry's departure have not been very good and in particular "Around the Sun" could be used for Frisbee practice.

Thus we have REMs 15th album "Collapse into now" which Mike Mills has trailed with the enticing hint that "It makes sense as a whole the same way that Automatic For The People did." And yet it has already been denounced by some critics as a sure sign of a band "stranded between somewhere between pointlessness and real inspiration" (John Harris in Q Mag). So let's ignore the verbal's and judge the songs and see where that takes us. As a starting point after listening to the first four songs it's hard to disagree with Mill's sentiments since they amount to one of the finest opening sets to a REM album in many a long year. The blazing "Discoverer" is a truly excellent rock song full of great chunking Peter Buck chords and with Stipe spitting out the opening lines "Hey baby/This is not a challenge/It just means that I don't love you as much as I always said I did". Next up is the ferocious attack of "All the best" with its great centerpiece line "lets show the kids how to do it fine"; it is followed by "Uberlin" which does echo "Drive" and taps into that instantly recognizable classic REM sound harking back to the "Reckoning" era sound and is a lovely lament and a great Stipe vocal. The New Orleans floods and Hurricane Katrina provide the backdrop to the superb single "Oh my heart" a waltz like song which henceforth should be made the recovering cities unofficial national anthem.

So a good start which is followed by a more variable mid section. The melodic "It happened today" with Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder providing backing vocals is fine if a bit repetitive. "Everyday is yours to win" and "Walk it back" are again old style REM ballads and the beauty of latter in particular grows on every listen. Its from here however that faults begin to emerge the most obvious being that you become increasingly aware of the appalling Jacknife Lee production that is so "in your face" with every instrument pumped up to Spinal Tap Volume 11 it often destroys any hint of subtlety or nuance. In addition there are couple of songs here which Buck should have insisted that Stipe keep them for an album of B Sides of rarities not least the rather silly duet with Peaches "Alligator, Avaitor, Autopliot, Antimatter" and the REM by numbers approach set out in "Mine smell like honey". Stipe also needs to end his never-ending quest to find the distant relative of the "End of the world as we know it and I feel fine" and "That someone is you" again falls into this category.

REM do have a track record of leaving their best songs until last and who can forget the brilliant trio of Man on the moon, Nightswimming and Find the river on "Automatic" While "Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I" and "Blue" are not in that league but they are a strong conclusion to the album. The first is one of those aching ballads which Stipe nails proving that on his day he remains a great songwriter and it is one of his best songs since "I'll take the rain" "Blue' alternatively is hewn from the same rock which carved out "Country Feedback" the penultimate song on "Out of Time". The latter is one of my favourite REM songs and like it "Blue" has one of those spoken Stipe lyrics over distorted guitar with Stipe's enlisting again the help of his great friend Patti Smith to provide a charismatic vocal accompaniment. The song fades out by reprising the riffs of opener "Discoverer", not before Stipe however announces, "that this is my time and I am thrilled to be alive". On the evidence of the bulk of this album it's a sentiment that can be endorsed by all good music fans.

The one thing that mystifies me the most about comments like "R.E.M. are returning to form" is the implication that they LOST their form in the first place. Sure, the post-Berry albums have not been anywhere near as strong as their earlier work. No disputing that. But the worst album they've put out has been Around the Sun, which was definitely uneven and mediocre but still had a few flashes of brilliance (most particularly "Final Straw," which was a full-on political slam on par with any track from their mid-80s discography). The same can be said of Reveal or Up. The cohesiveness of Murmur or Automatic for the People might not have been there, but there were still some very fine songs produced during that period. If the past ten years have been R.E.M. at their worst, then that's actually a mark in their favor, because their worst is still better than most if not all of their peers have been able to put together.

Which brings us to Collapse Into Now. I am not going to waste anybody's time trying to compare it to Automatic or Murmur or anything else. You draw your own conclusions. What I will say is that this album has that cohesion that their recent albums (even Accelerate, which was on the whole a very strong outing) have lacked. The tracks flow together. All of the various stylistic masks the band has worn as they've tried to find their way artistically since Bill Berry's departure coalesce in a natural, unforced way (more than once I've read reviews that say it sounds like a greatest hits album, and that is not an unfair assessment). Peter Buck alternates from full-out feedback-driven rockers to the softer, janglier style that defined R.E.M. in their prime, occasionally throwing in a few chords off a mandolin for good measure. The vocal interplay between Michael Stipe and Mike Mills is as strong and melodic as it's ever been. And most importantly, the album is strong from beginning to end. The high point on the album for me is "It Happened Today," which explodes into the gorgeous, wordless, ecstatic harmony that Mills and Stipe (joined here by Eddie Vedder) have been masters of for twenty years.

The comparison that I want to make with this album is not with any of R.E.M.'s other works (as I said, you decide for yourself where it sits in the canon), but with the Beatles' Abbey Road. The Beatles, enervated from the interminable and torturous sessions for what would become Let It Be, and genuinely sick of each other, reconvened and, for no other reason than to prove they could do it, knocked one out of the park, producing what was in many ways the most polished work of their career. Listening to Collapse Into Now give me the same sort of feeling that I get from listening to Abbey Road; a band that has come off a rough patch (because whatever your thoughts on R.E.M.'s output since the mid-90s, you can't deny that their continued existence has been questioned more than once), who've had to wonder whether or not it still has what it takes after a legendary career, collect themselves and puts out a masterpiece, for no other reason than to shut everybody the hell up. Given what the Beatles did after Abbey Road, taking the comparison to its logical extreme implies that this is it for R.E.M. That's far from clear, but if it is, it's a hell of a parting shot.

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