0.0.2 - Is it better to burn out, than to fade away?
When you're looking for a band with an extensive back catalogue to fill a few slots in your ridiculous music listening project, you're really looking for a few traits; obviously they've got to be relatively old school (there's no 10 album deep Sabrina Carpenter body of work for me to dig into), but also prolific enough to have pumped out a bunch of studio albums under the same name and general band composition, and finally and most importantly, they have to have a relentless ignorance of when their best days are behind them, and keep rolling on producing music despite long having lost any cultural impact or without having much more to say.
For me, R.E.M. exist as the poster child for this concept. This is a band who, in the 1990's, produced at least one album (but maybe as many as three depending on your memory of the time/generosity in awarding them greater status than maybe they really had) that every music fan knew; based on the sales numbers for Automatic For The People, certainly the majority of the western world owned a copy of it at some point. But R.E.M. weren't a flash in the pan, they were a critically beloved, slightly underground alternative college rock band dating back to the early 1980's, with Murmur and Reckoning (which we will get to later on this year for sure) appearing in multiple critics end of year lists with glowing praise.
You can make a very reasonable case that between 1983 and 1994, Michael Stipe and his merry men produced nine albums that were all at least good-to-great with a couple of firm musical classics scattered amongst them. A fine career, a legacy that puts you in conversation with an elite collection of bands with that level of consistency and production that's hard to match.
R.E.M.'s last studio album, however, was released in 2011.
There's a highly grey-area discussion you can have about where the run of good albums ends. If you are an R.E.M. fan, you'll have some kind of feelings about 1996's New Adventures In Hi-Fi (took me a while to come around to it but it's trying something new, I know and like as many songs off this album as I do Monster, I think it counts), 1998's Up (Actually has a pretty good distribution of some of the best late-era R.E.M. songs with At My Most Beautiful, Lotus, You're In The Air, Walk Unafraid and Daysleeper, if NAIHF counts in the good-to-great, this one definitely does), and 2001's Reveal (one notable song and a bunch of songs I can't summon to mind even looking at the tracklist, this is where the line is drawn).
That line captures studio albums nine to eleven of R.E.M.'s discography. Albums twelve through fourteen are what I listened to today, and my entire listening experience was dominated by the question as to why these albums exist. I thought about a lyrical couplet from Florence & The Machine's Morning Elvis, where she sings:-
After every tour, I swear I'll quit
It's over boys, now this is it
But the call it always comes
And it sounds like children, begging to be born
and I think about Michael Stipe, cursed with inspiration, sending 3am scratched out demos of songs to Peter Buck and Mikey Mills and saying "let's get some studio time booked, I think there's something here".
I can't imagine the incentive is financial, though what tenuous grasp I had on what money successful musicians make and how they make it has been thoroughly destroyed by the rise of the streaming platforms and the nature of record label/musician/writer financial contracts. Automatic went four times platinum in the US, seven times in the UK, and sold 18 million copies world wide back in an era where record sales were the driver for financial success for bands. So unless they each MC Hammered their share of the profits, this isn't a band putting out music to keep the bills paid.
It could be contractual, of course. You sign a five-abum deal and you want five albums to put out; does that account for the content of Accelerate and Collapse Into Now sounding like a collection of off-cuts and B-sides from earlier, more successful albums? Or is this a band really trying to take a swing at what made them successful a decade before, but without the heart or appeal or energy, and when the musical landscape has moved past them?
Accelerate got a live tour associated with it, the last one R.E.M. ever did. Collapse did not, and was primarily a Michael Stipe solo album with the other members all in semi-retirement at that point. Neither is a particularly inspiring listen, but neither are openly bad either - if you liked the sounds in Monster, or Out of Time or Automatic For The People, there's still the bones of that here, just lesser, and emptier.
Around The Sun was the surprise for me. It won't shock you to learn that even though I tend to listen to the R.E.M. back catalogue every year to some extent or another, these three albums don't feature in this revisitation. I like it significantly more than I remember liking Reveal, and there's some songs on there which genuinely feel like they belong and could stand alongside the best tracks from R.E.M.s golden period; Leaving New York, the opener, is particularly great - a final creative hurrah for a band which had already given so much, on an album that might serve as the final true R.E.M. album.
Had this and Reveal come out in the opposite order, you could definitively say that the last 3 albums of R.E.M.'s career are their worst; but Around The Sun really deserves a pass into the 'good-to-great' discussion about where they truly lost their way.
