If a band records one of my favorite albums at any point in their career, I will defend them no matter how bad their new record may be.
Weezer’s latest album may contain one of the worst songs ever released in the history of recorded music, but, hey, they recorded “The Blue Album” and “Pinkerton,” so I’d still fight with anyone who talks smack about them.
Courtney Love is considered by most to be a total mess (to put it lightly) in real life, but she recorded “Live Through This,” arguably the best album of the grunge era, with her band Hole, so she gets a lifetime pass from me.
Countless other bands have dazzled with early albums only to disgust later with atrociously awful albums that hardcore fans wind up half-heartedly making excuses for.
“This band hasn’t lost its touch, they just decided to go in a different direction this time. Their next album will be better!” they find themselves saying.
Luckily, R.E.M. is a band that no longer requires such a defense.
“Collapse into Now” is solid.
Beginning with 1998’s “Up,” R.E.M. alienated a reasonably large portion of their then huge fan base by moving in a less poppy direction that lasted for three albums until 2005’s legitimately terrible “Around the Sun.”
Even as someone who has liked nearly all of the band’s albums a whole lot, I was delighted to hear that they were returning to actual rock music on their last album, “Accelerate”.
I was even more pleased to hear the sound of “Collapse into Now.”
The new album presents a good middle ground between the fun guitar-driven rock performed on their previous album, “Accelerate,” and the pretty, ballad-heavy “Automatic for the People” (the one with “Everybody Hurts” on it).
The end result is their best album since who knows when.
There are a few songs that manage to drag the record down, though they don’t in any way derail the album.
“Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter” is catchy, but annoyingly so.
It seems like lead singer Michael Stipe had a space on the record to fill, but only an hour to write something to fill it in, so he entered the studio and banged out this obnoxious, repetitive song.
That tune is at least sort of fun, unlike album closer “Blue,” which drags on and on without enough real emotion to justify its melancholia.
Fortunately, the rest of the album (particularly “It Happened Today” and “Oh My Heart”) is excellent and two mediocre tracks won’t stop me from recommending “Collapse into Now” to fans of the band.
