Though they've been playing stadiums for decades, R.E.M. have never really traded in stadium-sized rock. From the release of the "Radio Free Europe" single in 1981 through 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the band's most anthemic songs were always tempered by space, restraint, and nuance; even 1994's so-called "big dumb rock album" Monster was an exercise in skeletal glam and sly, swaggering pastiche. When drummer Bill Berry departed the band in 1997, he took with him the one facet of R.E.M.'s sound that no other band has really sought to emulate: a nervous, lockstep grid that lacked the momentum to power a grandiose rock band, but gave Berry's bandmates ample room to weave together the distinctive tones and melodies that have always been the heart of R.E.M.
Since Berry's departure, R.E.M. has struggled to retain both the consistency and the daringness of their first 10 records. After releasing the plodding Around the Sun, the band attempted a "return to rock" with 2008's Accelerate, barreling through a forceful but generic set and grasping at a raw, aggressive sound that was never really R.E.M.'s to begin with. So, it comes as something of a relief that Collapse Into Now sounds unmistakably like an R.E.M. album. At its best, the album evokes R.E.M.'s best work while capitalizing on the energy conjured during Accelerate. At its worst, it sounds like a career-spanning collection of B-sides.
The most immediately striking moments on Collapse Into Now are those that sound like explicit retreads of previous R.E.M. songs. The minor key acoustic guitar and slapback delay-treated opening "hey" of "Uberlin" is a jarring callback to Automatic for the People opener "Drive", distracting from one of Collapse Into Now's best choruses. "Oh My Heart" has all the trappings of one of R.E.M.'s haunting mid-period acoustic ballads, but repeats itself into drudgery. Album closer "Blue", with its abstract sing-spoken lyrics and Patti Smith-sung backing vocals, plays out like an awkward and lifeless re-imagining of New Adventures in Hi-Fi single "E-Bow the Letter", throwing into stark relief just how unlikely and remarkable some of the band's earlier successes were.
Collapse Into Now also hosts some unlikely successes of its own; in spite of its discouraging title, "Mine Smell Like Honey" overcomes a water-treading verse and ascends to a truly a majestic classic R.E.M. chorus, complete with soaring Mike Mills backing vocals and jangling Peter Buck guitars. "Walk It Back" alone is worth the price of admission here, a gorgeous and enveloping song that takes a step back from the album's dense arrangements and gives Michael Stipe's vocals room to resonate. It's wise, mature and relaxed in a way that's subtly different from anything R.E.M. have done before, and it is quite possibly the best song that the band has recorded in nearly 15 years.
Bits and pieces from every great R.E.M. record are present on Collapse Into Now, but the ease with which the band once combined these elements is now tenuous and hard-fought. Some of Buck and Mills's best melodic ideas simply get drowned out or rushed through, and Stipe often trips over the idiosyncratic vocal phrasings he once commanded so well. A deadpanned "20th Century collapse into now" towards the album's end echoes the line "20th Century, go to sleep" from "Electrolite", the last song on the last truly great R.E.M. album. Fifteen years ago, however, Stipe followed that line with a self-effacing "... really deep." This generous and deeply human complexity was often R.E.M.'s saving grace, even as they pursued counterintuitive and seemingly pretentious directions. This album is host to more such complexity than anything since 1998's Up-- but Collapse Into Now still sounds like the work of a band caught between old habits and new adventures.
