Ack Phhht!

When R.E.M. made a comeback bid in 2008 with Accelerate, its aggressiveness and off-the-cuff  feel were jarring after a decade of overly thought out (and largely ignored) experimental pop albums.  I was excited to hear the band rock again — often with surprising venom — and hoped that it was a sign of things to come;  as I wrote at the time:  “if the band could find a way to retain the urgency and excitement of this record, while adding some of the polish of their “mature” albums, they could have some really great albums in their future.”

So I was pretty excited back in December when Stereogum posted “Discoverer”, the lead track from the band’s new album Collapse Into Now.  A chunky, riff-driven rocker, it replaced the ragged, live-in-the-studio vibe of Accelerate with a polished swagger reminiscent of the band’s mid-90′s work.  Subsequently “leaked” tracks indicated that the band was going for an eclectic effort this time out — while “Mine Smell Like Honey” was another fast song, a stomping fuzzy garage rocker highlighted by Mike Mills’ backing vocals (too bad about the title, though),  “Oh My Heart” was a gentle, mandolin-driven ballad, and “Uberlin” was a mid-tempo acoustic number echoing 1993′s “Drive”, but replacing that song’s exhausted tone with a more hopeful vibe.   Now the whole album is streaming off the Rolling Stone site, and having been listening to it non-stop for the past week, I can honestly say I’m thrilled — it sounds great, and is indeed all over the place stylistically.

This eclecticism comes as a relief, at least to me, as I’ve long felt that one of the big weaknesses of R.E.M.’s records since the 90′s was that they usually felt like the band made a decision about what the album would sound like (the noisy album, the somber folk album, the chilly electronic album), and then worked up a batch of songs following that limited sonic palette.  It’s not that the resulting albums were necessarily bad — Monster, the “noisy” album, is actually a pretty solid collection of songs under all that din, while the “folksy” Automatic for the People is often reckoned their best album (though it’s not my favorite) — but it often made the albums dull listens, as each song bled into the next, and sometimes the band seemed to be losing their identity in an endless series of genre exercises.  (Tellingly, my favorite R.E.M. record of the last twenty years is 1995′s New Adventures in Hi Fi, which was the exception to the rule, the one album of the period that saw the band trying a bit of everything.)

Collapse isn’t a perfect album, but it’s pretty darn good.  There’s nothing here that’s bad, boring, or embarrassing.  Even the weakest track, the rather slight “Walk It Back”, isn’t bad at all, and serves a purpose by providing a break between “Mine Smells Like Honey” and the thumping “Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter”.  Michael Stipe is in good voice, and Peter Buck somehow comes up with yet another pile of cool-as-fuck monster guitar riffs.  The lyrics are occasionally silly (not to beat a dead horse, but “Mine Smell Like Honey”?  really?!?), but for every dud, there’s two or three good lines, and as always, Stipe’s compassion for the lost and confused shine.  Only time will tell if Collapse will ultimately stands up with the highlights of the band’s catalog, but right now, it sounds like exactly the sort of album the band should be making — the type of album that they should’ve been making for the past fifteen (if not twenty) years.

There has been speculation that, given that this album closes out the band’s Warner Brothers contract, and their decision not to tour in support of it, perhaps the band is planning to call it a day, or at least go on the back burner in favor of individual projects.  Lord, I hope not.  While some have argued that Collapse Into Now is really just an exercise in nostalgia, R.E.M. covering themselves, to me it sounds like the band re-establishing their identity and proving that they have more to say, after a decade adrift.  It would be a shame if they packed it in now.