AU REVIOUR R.E.M.

R.E.M. bow out with a two-CD career retrospective

By Matt Ashare

November 16, 2011

The Burg

R.E.M., Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011 (Warner Bros.)

R.E.M. dropped two bombshells this year. Back in March, the enigmatic big little band who put Athens, Georgia, on the musical map when they emerged three decades ago, released Collapse Into Now, their 15th album in 31 years, and one that may very well stand as one of the best in their long and storied career. Then, in late September, singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Pete Buck, and bassist Mike Mills posted this on the R.E.M. website: "As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening."

       I suppose we could have seen — or heard — the break-up coming. Not once, but twice, Stipe barks the line, "It's just like me to overstay my welcome, man," on the defiant "All the Best," the second track and one of the stand-outs on Collapse Into Now. And, the song's undulating chorus, bolstered by some vintage Buck arpeggios, finds Stipe proclaiming, "Let's sing and rhyme/Let's give it one more time/Let's show the kids how to do it/Fine, fine, fine."

       Then again, R.E.M. have seemed on the verge of collapse, or perhaps merely disintegration, a number of times since 1997, when original drummer Bill Berry quit, leaving his three former compatriots to drift through downers like 1998's Up and 2001's amorphous Reveal. But by 2008, with the release of the revved-up and aptly titled Accelerate, R.E.M. appeared to be back on solid ground, playing with purpose and a renewed sense of urgency. That sense of purpose clearly carried over to Collapse Into Now, an album that plays to so many of the band's strengths, from the soaring powerchord rock ("Discoverer"), to mandolin-laced melancholy ("Überlin"), to strum-and-drone ambience ("Blue").

       Not bad for a swan song. And, yet, there's more. As we approach a year that started with Buck guesting on The King Is Dead, the Decemberists' big breakthrough album, we've finally got something along the lines of a definitive R.E.M. retrospective, the career-spanning, two-CD Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011. I say "finally" because, while there have been over half a dozen previous compilations, the band's catalog – and, in a sense, their career itself — had, until now, been split between the five albums and one EP released by the semi-independent label IRS in the ’80s, and everything that came after the band signed to Warner Bros. in 1988, the year the radio-friendly Green came out.

       Part Lies. . . — a 40-track, chronological trip from the beginning to the end that includes three previously unreleased tracks recorded after Collapse Into Now — may not come as a revelation to hardcore R.EM. fans. But, in its own way, it is revealing. R.E.M. have been credited time and time again with laying the groundwork for and even inventing what's come to be known as "indie-rock." But you get a visceral sense of what that really means when you go back and listen to their earliest recordings. The lush rush of "Gardening at Night" (from the band's debut EP Chronic Town) and soft surge of "Radio Free Europe" (from their first album, Murmur) surely inspired imitators. But what made R.E.M. so unique in the early ’80s had as much to do with their stance as with their sound. They didn't just cut against prevailing trends in realm of commercial pop; they also didn't conform to the loud, fast rules of the punk/hardcore underground.

       In that sense — by making music that was both "different" and accessible — they pursued a third path to success on their own terms. That may not seem particularly radical now, with bands like the Arcade Fire and the Decemberists making a go of it in whatever’s left of a “mainstream.” But it was essentially unheard of when R.E.M. began their gradual ascent with odd little songs like the slightly twangy “So. Central Rain” and the yearning “Fall On Me.”

       Even after R.E.M. had established themselves as an arena-ready act with singles like the upbeat “Stand” and the dewy “Everybody Hurts,” they retained their eccentricity, penning the Andy Kaufman ode “Man on the Moon” and turning an odd incident involving Dan Rather into the hook for the chart-topping “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” The under two-minutes of the quirky “A Month of Saturdays,” one of the three new tracks here, and the Collapse Into Now rocker “Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter” are a timely reminder, in the wake of the break-up, that, if nothing else, R.E.M. never settled for normal. That’s the story Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011 tells. And, it is a compelling one.