With the release this summer of vinyl reissues of R.E.M.'s last four albums, it feels like a good time to give a fresh listen and reassess what is essentially the final third of the band's nearly 30 years of music.
It's certainly the least-respected of the handful of clear eras in the band's history. The best and most beloved by many encompasses the first three LPs — Murmur, Reckoning, and Fables of the Reconstruction. The band emerged with a fully formed sound and refined it over this period. I have friends who claim to have exited the ride at this point, but they missed some amazing music if so.
The next segment, where I jumped aboard as a teenager, is perhaps best described as the populist period. The sound became less esoteric, the vocals more discernible, and while Lifes Rich Pageant was a bit of a retrenchment, repurposing old songs and approximating the sound of the band's raucous pre-Murmur live sets, Document and Green refined that energy, honed the songwriting, and launched the band to the precipice of superstardom.
Thus, we come next to the arena rock period. Out of Time, Automatic for the People, and Monster, despite sounding nothing like one another, are the work of a band making product. That might sound pejorative, but I don't mean it to be. It's just that while the music might have been beautiful, powerful, and moving to various degrees, it was also part of a package meant to sell R.E.M. the brand.
I would divide the remaining albums into two final groups. The first is BBBD/ABBD (before and after Bill Berry's departure). The two albums here are each the most adventurous, and in some ways satisfying album of each side of that divide. New Adventures in Hi-Fi — which on some days is my favorite R.E.M. album — found the band concurrently burned out and wildly creative, writing and recording and album's worth of music at soundchecks and stopovers during the Monster tour. The grind was enough to send drummer Berry to the sidelines, leaving the remaining trio to figure out how to be R.E.M. without its secret weapon. The resulting Up has a little bit of everything, and if you have patience, it can be a remarkably rewarding listen.
Then come the final four. In some ways, each could be its own separate segment, but at their heart, each is a snapshot of a band that doesn't yet know it is finished. Don't misunderstand; each has songs that are among the band's best, and save for one, I enjoy listening to each of them front to back. But without Berry, without fame (as opposed to simply being famous), without new territory they wanted to explore together, they aren't really on par with everything that came before.
Reveal, 2001
Coming off Up with what is clearly more confidence of their ability to operate without Berry, they offered a concept record of sorts, a lush album that built on the textures of Out of Time, but with a retro twist, a dreamy, keyboard-laden pastiche of Jimmy Webb, countrypolitan, and Beach Boys pastiche that somehow benefitted more than it suffered for the carryover of electronic bleeps and bloops and keyboards they explored with Up.
It feels like the beginning of period where Peter Buck became a third wheel in his own band, his vision (and guitar) subsumed by Mike Mills' keyboard leanings and Michael Stipe's increasing fascination with electronica and dance. Songs like "I've Been High" might feature Buck, but his guitar is not the dominant sound it had been for the two previous decades (mandolins notwithstanding).
I realized at some point that what I loved most about R.E.M. were Stipe's vocal melodies, and that element, as much as anything, is what brought me back to Reveal and the other three albums here. Most R.E.M. songs are deceptively simple. It is those melodies, and the way the band augments the arrangements with subtle touches, that give these songs a fullness that continues to grab the ear when the other elements do not. The worst R.E.M. songs are salvaged by Stipe's vocal (though Around the Sun will challenge that contention). "Saturn Return" is a good example. Over a sweet Mills piano figure kitted out with skittering drums, whistles and, eventually, a distant Buck guitar wail, Stipe pulls everything together with a vocal that hovers around the same three or four notes, offering an anchor to the muted chaos underneath. When he stretches here and there, reaching for a high note, it's enough variation to earn your attention. It's a slight song carried by that melody.
"Beat a Drum'' is another built on a similar foundation, with a Mike Mills piano line not unlike that on Up’s "At My Most Beautiful", augmented by some Buck guitar arpeggios and an e-bow line, and a few keyboard sounds that all provide a bed for a swooning Stipe chorus. Musically, there isn't much going on, but in this case, that is a benefit. This isn't Stipe saving something weak; it is the rest of the band getting out of the way. It's a fine line, I know, but the result is probably my favorite song on the album.
"Imitation of Life" is the most R.E.M. sounding song here, something that wouldn't have been out of place on Out of Time or any release since. It's the one most clearly built on a Buck chord progression, and it's no coincidence that it's also the album's most obvious single. In some ways it feels of a piece with “The Great Beyond,” the single from two years prior that anchored the soundtrack for the Andy Kaufmann biopic, “Man on the Moon” and serves as a bridge between Up and Reveal.
This was the point at which I stopped listening to R.E.M. albums so deeply that I knew every nook and cranny of every song. Listening today to Reveal, there are songs that surprise me, not because they do anything unexpected, but because I simply don't remember them. "Disappear"? "Chorus and the Ring"? Nope. No recollection. Despite this, it is the most complete, most musically satisfying of the last four albums.
Around the Sun, 2004
I was going to start with something flip like, "I listened to Around the Sun so you don't need to," and while there is some truth to that sentiment, it's also an album that means so much to me personally that I can't dismiss it.
It is impossible for me to divorce this album from its time. My wife and I had a son born prematurely, and he spent his entire short life in the neonatal intensive care unit at the hospital. Thanks to understanding employers and the fact that we lived minutes away from the hospital, we spent most days in his room, keeping up with the outside world through our laptops. My birthday was a part of that time, and my wife bought me an iPod as a gift. It took a few days before I even opened it, but when I did, one of the first things I loaded was the then-new R.E.M. album, Around the Sun.
One particularly bad night for our son, Will, found us staying overnight at the hospital. There was one recliner in his room, so when we both needed to sleep, I retreated to a parent lounge, essentially a dark room filled with recliners and couches. I settled into a chair and slipped on my headphones. I tried to listen to the album, but nothing beyond the first song really clicked with me. I figured out how to put it on repeat and listened to little else that night or for the next few days. "Leaving New York" had nothing to do with my situation, but Buck's proto-R.E.M. guitar jangle and Stipe's gorgeous vocal on the chorus was like the embrace of an old friend, and it got me through.
Listening today, that song immediately takes me back to that time of great joy and deep heartbreak, and I love it despite the rollercoaster of emotion it conjures. It would be unfair to ask the rest of any album to compete with that sort of connection, but all the more so for a tepid record with few standout tracks. The band has made no bones about not really liking the record, saying it was a case of being sick of their own material by the time they hit the recording studio. Any band that can make Q-Tip sound boring is doing something wrong, and "The Outsiders" does just that.
But it's not alone. In general, the lyrics feel forced, the music is a lifeless midtempo mush, and the performances are slick and uninspired. That makes the few songs with a bit of spark stand out. "Final Straw" and "I Wanted to Be Wrong" are both built on acoustic guitars, something that sets them apart not just on this album, but from much of this final run. The former seems quaint now, a complaint about Bush-era politics, while the latter features an understated Stipe vocal that sits so comfortably in the pocket that it feels like a standard.
Some songs have elements that make you wonder what might have been had the trio recorded right away. "Wonderlust" is a jaunty sixties-influenced pop song that you could imagine a younger R.E.M. turning into a fun B-side, but here it feels like that same band worried about staying in time as they entertain at their high school reunion. "Boy in the Well" has a soaring chorus, but it's a slog to get there and I rarely remember the payoff is worth the investment.
Accelerate, 2008
If Around the Sun felt like a band that had run out of ideas or the energy to search for more, Accelerate feels like that same band scared of what it had discovered about itself and determined to not go out on a low note. It's a welcome about face, and even if it doesn't hold up the way my enthusiasm at the time might have forecast, it is certainly the one of these four I have played the most and the one I return to most often.
For the first time, R.E.M. was an underdog here. This was the longest the band had taken between albums, sating fans in the interim with the double-disc R.E.M. Live, drawn from a world tour during which the band attempted — and occasionally succeeded at — injecting life into the Around the Sun tracks. That live trek, Buck reasserting himself, and a nervous energy borne of needing to prove themselves led to the band's most organically rocking album since 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant. Yes, I know Monster exists, but there was nothing organic about that manufactured (and yes, successful) attempt to justify stadium tours. I love much of Monster, but I'll take Lifes Rich Pageant over it every time.
This is truly back to basics: Guitar, bass and drums, Stipe wailing rather than crooning, Mike Mills singing counterpoint backing vocals… it was the exact move the band needed. And for fans, this playing from behind mentality meant a bounty of blog appearances, interviews and other things that the increasingly inaccessible band had avoided over the previous few years. My favorite is an appearance on La Blogothèque’s “Take Out Show,” which finds Stipe driving around Athens with a couple of French guys with a video camera before convening the band for an acoustic performance in his backyard. The results reminded me of the strange things that would pop up in the band's early days, the music carried not by studio polish but by the interplay of musicians who clearly enjoyed playing with one another, even under less-than-ideal circumstances.
There is a crackling energy to this album from the start, evident from the sting of Buck's opening guitar salvo on “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” with Mills' melodic bassline and high harmonies, and the return of Stipe's frenetic yelp signaling a return to form. Latter-day drummer Bill Rieflin seems to fit better than he had before as well (mostly because there is finally a beat to keep). Yes, R.E.M. remembered it was a rock band, and I was here for it. They were having fun, and if that fun came at with a few pointed sticks to the tender underbelly of Bush-era lies and corruption, it was worth it, proof that sometimes the maxim that bad politics make for the best music is correct.
Not everything roared. We get another obvious single in "Supernatural Superserious," and another stirring ballad in "Until the Day is Done," this one not slathered in synthesizers and clattering percussion, but built instead on three or four guitar lines weaving together to provide a base, while a piano and some strings lend depth.
Do these three- or four-chord rave ups all start to sound the same by a certain point? Perhaps, but with a 35-minute runtime, these 11 songs pass quickly enough that none have time to overstay their welcome. I could do without the closing "I'm Gonna DJ," but even that is a blip salvaged by Buck’s power chords.
It might have been a good way to go out, but the band had one more statement to make.
Collapse Into Now, 2011
I can't help thinking about what R.E.M.'s career might have been like had this album followed Up or Reveal. Rather than casting about for something after either of those LPs, the band would have made a statement: We're still R.E.M., dammit, and this is how it's done.
Instead, it came a full decade and a half after any casual fans who fell off after Monster might have cared. Rather than a restatement of purpose that preceded yet another peak, this came at the end as a summation, an album that touched on nearly every corner of the band's major label career. Did you love Monster? Here is "Discoverer." More of an Automatic for the People person? Try "Uberlin." Out of Time fanatic? "It Happened Today" is for you. Soft spot for Around the Sun? Really? Well, try "Walk It Back." Want one more blast of Accelerate? Crank up "That Someone Is You." Heck, we'll even give you something that sounds just like "E-bow the Letter," complete with a guest appearance by Patti Smith at no charge.
These are all good songs, but they don't feel like part of a cohesive whole, they don’t indicate a path forward. In the decade during which these four albums were issued, the band also released three hits compilations and two live albums. Those are signs of a band running in place, not one itching to head out to explore new territory. A new listener coming to Collapse Into Now could be forgiven for thinking this was yet another compilation culled from several albums they hadn’t bothered to seek out the first time.
I started this with the idea that I would offer a spirited defense of the least-appreciated portion of the band's career. Instead, I realize this all feels more negative than I intended. I suppose that's inevitable. I'm an R.E.M. superfan, but that fandom is not based on these albums, and while each has its moments — some several of them — I'll rarely decide to play one of these before something that came before. I'm glad they exist, but I'm also glad the band stopped when it did. The music Buck, Mills and Stipe are making now — sometimes together, sometimes on their own — is that of people having fun. These aren't millionaires soldiering on because industry depends on the constant churn of the machine, but baseball fans and dance pop fans and blues fans making music because they want to do so.
Despite all that, I still get chills watching them perform for what was the last time while making a promotional video to support the album, tearing into album opener "Discoverer" in a German studio. When I think of latter-day R.E.M., I'll linger not on the missteps, but on moments like this, when the final guitar squall fades, when Mike Mills utters a "Wow" as he looks at his bandmates, when Stipe goes from near tears to a wide smile in the span of a moment.
While these albums would all fall at the bottom of any ranking I might do of R.E.M.’s 15 studio albums (Reveal, Accelerate, Collapse Into Now, and Around the Sun, in descending order), there are many songs I love to be found among the 48 spread across them. As proof I offer “The Final Four,” a playlist that captures some of those highlights, sequenced to approximate an album that might, um, reveal a thing or two about the latter-day work of one of America’s best bands.