(Warner Bros.)
Believing in R.E.M. has always been a seductive practice. A band can fuck up repeatedly for a decade and a half and when they spent the sixteen years beforehand making so much of their integrity and quality control, you can lull yourself into a kind of destructive trust, particularly when the band is always so insistent (as they must be!) that whatever they've done recently is their artistic peak. This must be good, you think, I just don't understand it yet. When R.E.M. disbanded in September, the temptation was obvious; all the people who'd dismissed, ignored, or damned with faint praise their six-month-old fifteenth and final LP were almost predisposed to go scrambling back to hear the songs that would most assuredly be entirely different in shape and tone with this new revelation, that not only did it turn out to be the legendary college rock founders' swansong, it was always designed that way -- an unusual situation, to say the least.
Some of us gave Collapse into Now a less than fair shot in March, especially those of us who thought 2008's Accelerate, touted by the band and some members of the press as a great comeback, was a disaster and a deal-breaker. There is no denying that Collapse is an improvement, a step in the right direction, and it's easy to see how the new narrative thrust gives it a bit more emotional weight than it had before. But the best moment to end R.E.M.'s career, as agreeable as Up and Reveal and even parts of Around the Sun were, was plainly Michael Stipe's coy "I'm outta here" at the end of New Adventures in Hi-Fi in 1996, the last album before drummer and musical backbone Bill Berry's departure from the group.
Such as it is, Collapse into Now suffers from the same bizarre contradiction as all of the post-Berry material: it simultaneously tries too hard and is far too casual. As a performing unit, the band's never faltered; as songwriters, they lost their touch somewhere in the mid-2000s; and as studio maestros, they never recovered from the end of their partnership with Scott Litt, which curiously corresponded precisely with the exit of Berry, which even more curiously happened to coincide neatly with the acrimonious departure of former manager and confidante Jefferson Holt, which just as intriguingly corresponded with the band's infamous $80 million contract renewal with Warner Bros., back in the days when the record label was still under the same umbrella as the movie studio. Can it be that R.E.M. suffered from a Torn Curtain-style disillusion, just one that took over a decade to finally eclipse their energetic stubbornness?
Michael Stipe's vocal melodies and performances have routinely dropped in variance, mystery, and emotion since New Adventures; by this point, his work seems almost rote. His lyrics, much ado about tick tock and click clock, are a shadow of both the head-spinning free association of his '80s work and the sober straightforwardness of Automatic for the People. Even without these hurdles, the songs feel strained; "Discoverer" so desperate for an uplifting chorus it dissolves all pretense that would justify it; "All the Best" a somewhat cloying farewell song, the musical equivalent of Stipe's wave goodbye on the cover; the much-praised "Mine Smell Like Honey" a slice of calculated FM radio that has nothing really to do with R.E.M.; truthfully, I'm unconvinced by most everything except the winningly melancholy "Überlin" and portions of the Frankensteinian "Country Feedback"-"E-Bow the Letter" hybrid "Blue." I don't really mind "It Happened Today" either, though it sounds like it was designed for a band like Pearl Jam to cover, which conveniently enough is what happened.
Still, Collapse into Now is a better finale for R.E.M. than Accelerate by a longshot. At the very least, everything on it is pleasant and offers nostalgic echoes of the band's past triumphs, even if songs like "Every Day Is Yours to Win" and "That Someone Is You" (!!!) are no better than their titles. No matter how much affection you have for this band, and most of us probably have a hell of a lot, the feeling is inescapable that we're not really saying goodbye to a friend anymore, we're paying our respects to someone we once knew very well and haven't felt close to in a long time. In the press, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe have said a lot about the permanence of the band's friendship, how they will walk away with no issues simply because they want to. And maybe people just want to see drama. But these three men have felt so distant from their material for such a good while now, no slur on them, that it almost seems merely ceremonial to call this the end. Truthfully, it doesn't feel like we've been privy to much that's been deep inside them since their glory days -- and maybe that's the reason those were the glory days. But to this wonderful, maverick band I still say: goodbye and best of luck.
[SEE ALSO:]
Eponymous (1981-85)
Chronic Town EP (1982)
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