..:: audio-music dot info ::..


Main Page      The Desert Island      Copyright Notice
 Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz


R.E.M.: Collapse into Now

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Warner Bros. Records
Released: 2011.03.07
Time:
 41:05
Category: Alternative Rock
Producer(s): Jacknife Lee & R.E.M.
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.remhq.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


X-Axis

[1] Discoverer (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:31
[2] All the Best (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 2:48
[3] Überlin (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 4:15
[4] Oh My Heart (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe/S.McCaughey) – 3:21
[5] It Happened Today (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:49
[6] Every Day Is Yours to Win (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:26


Y-Axis

[7] Mine Smell Like Honey (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:13
[8] Walk It Back (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:24
[9] Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 2:45
[10] That Someone Is You (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 1:44
[11] Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe) - 3:03
[12] Blue (P.Buck/M.Mills/M.Stipe/P.Smith) – 5:46

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Peter Buck - Guitar, Bass Guitar, Mandolin, Production
Mike Mills - Bass Guitar, Guitar, Backing Vocals, Keyboards, Production
Michael Stipe - Lead Vocals, Production, Packaging

Jacknife Lee - Producer, Mixing, Keyboards, Guitar
Scott Mccaughey - Guitar, Keyboards, Backing Vocals, Accordion
Bill Rieflin - Drums, Bouzouki, Keyboards, Guitar

Shamarr Allen - Trumpet on [1,4,5]
Joel Gibb - Vocals on [4]
Lenny Kaye - Guitar Solo on [9,12]
Leroy Jones - Trumpet on [1,4,5]
Kirk M. Joseph, Sr. - Sousaphone on [1,4,5]
Peaches - Vocals  on [9]
Patti Smith - Vocals on [12]
Eddie Vedder - Vocals on [5]

Bonerama Horns:
Greg Hicks - Trombone
Craig Klein - Trombone
Mark Mullins - Trombone & Horn Arrangements

Sam Bell - Engineer & Mix Engineer
Tom Mcfall - Engineer
Tucker Martine - Engineer
David Hefti - Assistant Engineer
Kyle Lamy - Assistant Engineer
John Netti - Assistant Engineer
Stephen Marcussen - Mastering
Chris Bilheimer - Packaging
Anton Corbijn - Photography
DeWitt Burton - Technical Assistance
Bob Whittaker - Technical Assistance
Bertis Downs - Advisor
William Moesta - Assistant
Marc Muller - Assistant

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


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.

Matt LeMay - March 9, 2011
© 2015 Pitchfork Media Inc.



For anyone wondering what Michael Stipe wants after all these years, Stipe has chosen R.E.M.'s 15th album as the place to run down his wish list. "I want Whitman proud!" he declares in the superb finale, "Blue." "I want Patti Lee proud," meaning old friend Patti Smith, who's there in the studio making gorgeously guttural noises. "I want my brothers proud," probably meaning Peter Buck and Mike Mills, who cut loose with a country-feedback guitar groove. "I want my sisters proud! I want me! I want it all! I want sensational, irresistible! This is my time, and I am thrilled to be alive!" And he sounds it.

Smith suggested the title Collapse Into Now, which could be an answer to her heartbreaking memoir from last year, Just Kids. Except instead of scruffy young bohemians hustling to make it, it's a portrait of full-grown artists who reached the top long ago but decided to stick together and ride out the decades. You can hear a lot of shared history in the music, but you can also hear conflict, confusion, doubt — exactly the kind of recipe that R.E.M. thrive on. Just kids? That was the easy part.

Collapse Into Now is the first truly messy album R.E.M. have made in 10 years, since their underrated 2001 gem, Reveal. Their recent albums have focused on one musical approach at a time: 2004's Around the Sun was all slow-motion torpor, and 2008's excellent Accelerate went for spiky rockers. But Collapse Into Now touches on all their favorite tricks: punk raves, stately ballads, piano, accordion and the most mandolin they've put in one place since "Losing My Religion."

Guitar god Buck shines on Collapse, whether he's going for psychedelic buzz ("Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I") or power-chord thump ("Mine Smell Like Honey"). Multi-instrumentalist Mills adds his always-essential voice; "All the Best" shows why his backup vocals are as key to R.E.M. as Michael Anthony's are to Van Halen. Eddie Vedder guests on "It Happened Today," and though it's not clear who the hell invited Peaches, she sounds fine beside Lenny Kaye's guitar on "Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter."

Stipe isn't as emotionally expressive as he was on Accelerate and Reveal — you wish he'd get into a mood now and then, even if it's just one of his surly spells. He's best when he decides to stop trying so hard — as in the two-minute goof "That Someone Is You," where the band rocks out as Stipe rhymes "Sharon Stone Casino," "Scarface Al Pacino" and "'74 Torino."

It's been 30 years since these Georgia boys released their debut indie single, "Radio Free Europe"/"Sitting Still," which basically invented everything halfway interesting that guitar bands have done ever since. They long ago passed the point where they're beloved just for continuing to exist. But on Collapse Into Now, they sound like they'd rather be a band than a legend, which must be why they keep pushing on. Who knows if Whitman or Patti Smith is proud — but R.E.M. should be.

Rob Sheffield - February 23, 2011
RollingStone.com



“Hey now, take your pills,” Michael Stipe sings pensively on “Überlin.” “Hey now, make your breakfast.” If the cadence of those lines and the melody of that song remind listeners of R.E.M.’s 1992 single “Drive,” the resemblance is certainly intentional. The band’s 15th album, Collapse Into Now, is littered with references to their mighty back catalog: “Alligator Aviator Autopilot” crashlands into “Wake-Up Bomb,” and closer “Blue” churns the same amelodic dirge as “Country Feedback,” completely with Stipe’s delivery straddling talking blues and poetry slam. On “Oh My Heart,” he sings, “The storm didn’t kill me, the government changed,” updating the lyrics of “Houston” from the Bush to the Obama administration.

This is not an act cannibalizing itself for easy radio play or to remind fans of past glories. Rather, R.E.M. are simply engaging with the past and collapsing it into now, as a means of acknowledging that their songs derive from a single collective perspective, one that has aged but hasn’t really changed. Thirty years into a career, the trio view themselves as a band with a still-developing narrative arc rather than alt-rock vets smiling through oldies and charging their graying fans exorbitant ticket prices. Why ignore the 14-album monster in the corner, especially if this self-referentiality allows them to age gracefully without growing old?

Such close communion with their past allowed R.E.M. to sound rejuvenated on 2008’s Accelerate, which became their de facto comeback for no other reason than it didn’t suck as hard as Around the Sun. But it was no return to form, mainly because the band have no form to return to, no specific aesthetic to reclaim. Their catalog is not only enormous, but also impressively diverse, ranging from collegiate folk rock of their IRS Records albums to lusty glam rock of Monster to quiet ambient of Up. On Collapse, the band recognize the futility of trying to recapture those past glories and take an approach similar to New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which sampled past sounds and never settled on any one as “official.” Collapse shuffles through all of R.E.M.’s past lives; it’s a greatest hits without a hit, a career retrospective with all new material.

Again, the band chose to work with producer Jacknife Lee, who gave Accelerate its supercharged, just-shy-of-Monster roar. He sounds like he’s arming the band for the loudness wars, which means that everything on Collapse has been collapsed and compressed into what might be described as a fence of sound, not a wall. Their engagement with older material occasionally invites unfavorable comparisons: Compared to “Country Feedback,” which wrapped listeners up in an old quilt and told them ghost stories, “Blue” sounds too slick to sell Stipe’s lyrics about the wreckage of the 20th century. Even with Patti Smith’s eloquently brooding vocals, the song’s gravity sounds painted on—less an affectation than an approximation. Despite their loyalty to Lee, fans may find themselves wondering what someone like Tucker Martine could do with the mandolins and accordion of “Oh My Heart” or what David Barbe could do with the strummed ruminations of “It Happened Today.”

That is, to some extent, Stipe’s own fault. Over the last decade, his songwriting has grown increasingly demonstrative. Life-affirming has become his default mode, and it doesn’t always suit him. Once he used to mumble his lyrics, as if meaning was something listeners inferred rather than something he enforced, but especially on Collapse, Stipe wants to make sure you get every single word. His songs have become declarative statements rather than inquisitions or ponderings, which makes “That Someone Is You” and “Every Day Is Yours to Win” little more than musical pep talks. There’s little mystery to these songs—nothing unknown or unresolved or open-ended, which is precisely what keeps so many fans going back to their older material. We listen to “So. Central Rain” and “The One I Love” and “Drive” to try to make sense of them, and Stipe seems to sing them as if he is doing the same. On Collapse, the sense is pre-made before you even hear the songs.

And yet, the album has moments of such promise that it’s easy to overlook its shortcomings. Peter Buck’s chiming guitars lends “Discoverer” its heraldic immediacy, pulling you forcefully into the album, and Stipe disconnects his vocals from the song’s meter to convey a jittery excitement. With its lulling chorus, “Oh My Heart” strikes the right balance between bitter and sweet, and “All the Best” delivers the short sharp shock of the band’s most brazen rockers. A poignant soul ballad, “Walk It Back” wraps its syncopated theme around Stipe’s vocals, suggesting a tragically insoluble predicament and tangled regrets.

Ultimately, there is something strangely courageous about this album and R.E.M.’s determination to avoid nostalgia act status, even amid so many reissues (which may coincide with the death of the CD form than with their creative abatement). If they’ve stumbled in the past, the band are no longer ignoring their confusion, but embracing it and making it part of their mythology. They don’t know what comes next, but like us, they’re always curious to hear the next R.E.M. album.

Stephen M. Deusner - March 7, 2011
© 2015 Paste Magazine



REM's creative decline in the last decade coincided with the loss of drummer Bill Berry and their apparent need to make more keyboardy and acoustic albums, rather than the elemental rock that made them such a 1980s/90s force. However, Collapse Into Now continues the return to form of 2008's Accelerate by rewinding to their old classics to relocate their mojo. The sublime Uberlin sounds a bit like Drive; magisterial opener Discoverer vaguely echoes Disturbance at the Heron House – and so on. Michael Stipe is even enjoying making wilfully enigmatic lyrics again ("I feel like an alligator coming up the escalator", anybody?) and there are some outstanding songs in the sincere, Katrina-aftermath ballad Oh My Heart and plangent Walk It Back. Collapse Into Now isn't groundbreaking, but feeling comfortable in their old skin has produced REM's best effort in years.

Dave Simpson - 3 March 2011
© 2015 Guardian News and Media



Righting themselves via their long-awaited return to rock Accelerate, R.E.M. regrouped and rediscovered their core strengths as a band, strengths they build upon on its 2011 sequel, Collapse into Now. Cautiously moving forward from Accelerate’s Life's Rich Pageant blueprint, R.E.M. steer themselves toward the pastoral, acoustic moments of Out of Time and Automatic for the People without quite leaving behind the tight, punchy rockers that fueled Accelerate’s race to the end zone. This broadening of the palette is as deliberate as Accelerate’s reduction of R.E.M. to ringing Rickenbackers, and while it occasionally feels as if the bandmembers sifted through their past to find appropriate blueprints for new songs, there is merit to their madness. R.E.M. embrace their past to the extent that they disdain the modern, reveling in their comfortable middle age even if they sometimes slip into geezerhood, with Michael Stipe spending more than one song wondering about kids these days. He’s not griping; he’s merely accepting his age, which is kind of what R.E.M. do as a band here, too. Over a tight 41 minutes, they touch upon all the hallmarks from when Bill Berry still anchored the band, perhaps easing up on the jangle but devoting plenty of space to rough-hewn acoustics and mandolin, rushing rock & roll, and wide-open, eerie mood pieces that sound like rewrites of “E-Bow the Letter.” Any slight element of recycling is offset by craft so skilled it almost seems casual. This may impart a lack of urgency to Collapse into Now but it also means that it delivers R.E.M. sounding like R.E.M., something that has been in short supply since the departure of Berry.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



Collapse into Now is the fifteenth and final studio album by the American alternative rock band R.E.M., released on March 7, 2011, on Warner Bros. Produced by Jacknife Lee, who has previously worked with the band on Accelerate (2008), the album was preceded by the singles, "Mine Smell Like Honey", "Überlin" and "Oh My Heart". Regarding the album's title, vocalist Michael Stipe noted, "It's the final thing I sing, the last song on the record before the record goes into a coda and reprises the first song. In my head, it's like I'm addressing a nine-year-old and I'm saying, 'I come from a faraway place called the 20th century. And these are the values and these are the mistakes we've made and these are the triumphs. These are the things that we held in the highest esteem. These are the things to learn from." As of September 2011, the album had sold 142,000 copies in the United States. At the time of the band's breakup, bassist Mike Mills noted that the album's lyrical content contained "indications" that the band were planning to split. It was the only album of material never performed live by the band.

Collapse into Now received mostly positive reviews. The album currently holds a 71/100 on Metacritic, with a user score of 7.9.

Pitchfork's Matt LeMay stated that "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. . . 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."

Josh Modell of Spin wrote that "(h)ere . . . they discover the glow of middle age, warmly acknowledging the past – hello again, Peter Buck's mandolin—while realizing that the present can feel just as comforting... Collapse mostly sounds like a familiar friend—reliable in all the best ways, but still capable of quietly insinuating surprises.

Wikipedia.org
 

 L y r i c s


Currently no Lyrics available!

 M P 3   S a m p l e s


Currently no Samples available!