Album Review: REM, Collapse Into Now

THE PROFESSORS: Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Michael Stipe - 30 years and 15 albums on. Photo / Supplied

With the three members of REM now all into their fifties, having spent 30 years going from influential left-field flagbearers to tenured professors of college rock, it would be nice to report that they've fixed whatever stopped their Noughties albums being as vital as the ones which got them there.

After all, Collapse Into Now, tellingly, contains strong elements of their breakthrough years - 1991's Out of Time, its brooding 1992 follow-up Automatic for the People and 1994's noisy funny encore Monster.

And should there be any jokes on this 20th anniversary of Losing My Religion that this one should be called Out of Breath, it comes frontloaded with a couple of slab-chord supercharged numbers in Discoverer and All The Best.

It then goes familiarly folk-rock pastoral for an extended stretch before doing various other REM trademark things.

And as it does, it's hard not to be caught up in the exultant mood that's apparent on best track It Happened Today, especially as Michael Stipe and Mike Mills' wordless harmonies take the song into a joyful higher orbit above Peter Buck's guitars and a brass section. Oh and a Mr Eddie Vedder is bellowing in there somewhere.

Or to not smile hearing Stipe break out his trusty freeform rhyming dictionary on Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter, a funny fuzzbomb of garage rocker complete with B52s harmonies from Peaches.

As she has before, Stipe's fairy godmother Patti Smith also puts in an appearance on Blue, the closing psychedelic hymn which, curiously doesn't make the lyric sheet and possibly for good reason.

And while we're squinting at the credits, the album is produced by Jackknife Lee who did their previous Accelerate, with drums by founding member Bill Berry's long-time hard-hitting replacement Bill Rieflin and the playing of the band's resident Swiss Army knife Scott McCaughey.

But all that help doesn't stop Collapse Into Now from sounding like an REM album that thinks all that is required of it is to sound like an upbeat, downbeat and, just in case we hadn't covered that already, mid-tempo REM album.

Even its echoes of past eras can come across as self-cribbing. On Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I it may be that Stipe figured it was high time for a sequel to the Montgomery Clift-referencing Monty Got a Raw Deal from Automatic.

The folk-pop Uberlin sounds like one of too many songs-they've-written-before (in this case Drive meets some very ordinary chorus chords) or haven't quite finished in time, especially in Stipe's lyric department.

The Everybody Hurts-paced Every Day Is Yours to Win comes with a very old joke ("if you buy that I've got a bridge for you") as its most memorable line, while Mine Smell Like Honey (no relation to Out of Time's Me In Honey) would seem a better punchline to a fart joke than a repeated chorus.

The shortest song here, the sub two-minute punk-sprint of That Someone Is You also manages to be the most irritating - possibly because it namechecks fellow 80s post-punk outfits New Order and Young Marble Giants while sounding more like They Might Be Giants instead.

But mostly this sounds like REM. Sure it shows flashes of the old magic, but much that is fairly ordinary too.

Stars: 3/5
Verdict: They're back... treading water again.

-TimeOut