R.E.M. - Perfect Circle

COLLAPSE INTO NOW (2011)

DISCOVERER

After “Rem Live At The Olympia”, a double album with 39 tracks documenting the five Dublin shows from 2007, it's time for the final act. Even if nobody knows it yet. Maybe not even Michael Stipe, who in the meantime delights the tabloids by revealing new details about his sexuality: “I had sex with women until I fell in love with my current boyfriend, who I've now been with for a long time… I hate calling myself bisexual, it's a term I loathe because it's just a label… I'm a queer artist”.

Unlike the records that immediately preceded it, “Collapse Into Now” doesn't spring from a single strong, central idea. It's not a return to concise rock (“Accelerate”), nor a collection of radiant ballads (“Around The Sun”), nor even a new experimental foray into electronic territory (“Up”). If anything, the one dominant element is the evocation of a more pastoral atmosphere, with acoustic instruments once again taking center stage, as in the days of “Out Of Time”, while the hand of Irish producer Jacknife Lee is felt above all in the dark, dense quality of the sound. Otherwise, “Collapse Into Now” (never was a title more prophetic, given how things turned out) stands mostly as a summa of R.E.M.'s repertoire, dipping here and there into their best periods, but never really committing, and as a result struggling to find an identity of its own.

The common denominator is a professional, polished song-craft that too often gets trapped in routine. A case in point is the opening “Discoverer”, chosen as the single, despite its attempt to fire off bursts of rock adrenaline within a new tale of romantic wreckage and irreversible mistakes.

Hey baby

This is not a challenge

It just means that I don’t love you as much as I always said I did

I was wrong

I have been laughable wrong

Sandpaper, paper maché stock, cobweb […]

Well, I didn’t have to be afraid

I didn’t have to feel so stupid

I can see myself

I can feel…

With just the slightest bit of finesse

I might have made a little less mess

But it was what it was

Let’s all get on with it now

Another tale of a couple falling apart, then, but told with unusual lightness, as if wanting to leave regrets and guilt behind (“it was what it was”). No doubt Michael Stipe, the man who once refused to utter the word “love” in his songs, has told deeper stories than this. But maybe lightness is exactly what he needs right now. A lightness that always goes hand in hand with the curiosity of someone who's never content unless they're discovering something new (“Discoverer”).

Released as a free, legal download in late 2010, it was accompanied by a video directed by Stipe himself together with his sister Lynda.

ÜBERLIN

With the initial frenzy quickly evaporated, it's time for fresh acoustic musings, perhaps buoyed by a faint flicker of hazy electronics in the background. A nocturnal ballad, dreamy and dazed. Essentially the band's dedication to the city where the album was partly recorded, Berlin.

“ÜBerlin” brings R.E.M. back to the melodic pleasures of the Nineties, with a nostalgic sound steeped in fatalistic spleen, amid mandolins, guitars and brush-played drums. It may not be enough to resurrect the magic of the “Out Of Time” or “Automatic For The People” days, but it at least lets a glimmer of that lost intensity resurface, with Stipe singing, in the softest of voices, a new tale that's mysterious and introspective.

Hey now

Take your pills

And

Hey now

Make your breakfast

Hey now

Comb your hair and off to work

Crash land

No illusions

No collision

No intrusion

My imagination run away

It almost seems like a story of everyday routine, if not for that runaway imagination, as if it were the prelude to a daydream, to a new desire to escape a suffocating reality. And so fantasy takes over, foreshadowing nighttime chases and starry flights. Before day comes and the spell is broken.

I know, I know, I know what I am chasing

I know, I know, I know that this is changing me

I am flying on a star into a meteor tonight

I am flying on a star, a star, a star

I will make it through the day

And then the day becomes the night

I will make it through the night

It's the difficulty of letting go: that repeated "I know", as if trying to convince oneself of being able to make it, of knowing where one is going and how, by the very nature of the journey, one is changing. A necessity, that of transformation, reiterated also in the following two verses, where the gaze widens into a striking nocturnal view of the Berlin metropolis, after an underground passage on its subway, the U-Bahn.

Ah hey now

Take the U-Bahn

Five stops, change the station

Hey now

Don’t forget: the change will save you

Hey now

Count a thousand million people

That’s astounding

Chasing through the city with their stars so bright

A fine portrait, then, of a starry Berlin, a wonderful and elusive city, all to be chased after ("I'm chasing through Berlin"). And also, without a shadow of a doubt, the best track on the album.

OH MY HEART

Another classic Reminesque ballad, the kind the band almost never gets wrong. Complete with mandolin, accordion and an evocative horn intro. Nostalgic southern aromas linger, along with echoes of Celtic folk and even gospel touches in the solemn epic sweep of the chorus, sung in unison.

“A very quiet and very meditative song, dedicated to New Orleans, about New Orleans,” is how Stipe described it, also recounting its curious genesis in the studio: “Jacknife is a great producer, because he saw we were struggling with a song that was too quiet. We were really far apart from each other in the room, and it was hard not just because we could barely hear one another physically, but because we felt practically scattered. He had us move into the middle of the room, and right away, of course, the song worked.”

And it does work, indeed, even if it brings to mind, all too explicitly, the old Houston. A probably conscious echo (“Hear the song, rearranged”). What changes, instead, is the political context surrounding a battered New Orleans.

Storm didn’t kill me

The government changed

Hear the answer call

Hear the song rearranged

Hear the trees, the ghosts and the buildings sing

With the wisdom to reconcile this thing

It’s sweet and it’s sad and it’s true

How it doesn’t look bitter on you

Oh my heart

Compared to the virulent invective of "Houston", the tone here has decidedly softened, settling into the melancholy of those spectral trees singing in the ghost town, ravaged by the hurricane. Yet behind this sense of peace and apparent calm lies a feeling of irreparable tragedy. Always, however, with the hope of a moral reconstruction, grounded in a heartfelt, deep empathy with the city and its inhabitants.

The kids have a new take

A new take on faith

Pick up the pieces

Get carried away

I came home to city half erased

I came home to face what we faced

This place needs me here to start

This place is the beat of my heart

Starting over like this is only possible if sincere, human solidarity replaces empty promises and facade declarations. More than a political anthem, then, this is a moved elegy to a beloved, suffering city, trying to piece back together its social and human fabric, even before its economic one.

MINE SMELL LIKE HONEY

“Me In Honey” was the sweet farewell to “Out Of Time”. “Mine Smell Like Honey” now seems almost like a playful upending of that song, riding a breezy rock'n'roll gait that harks back to the days of “Reckoning”. A track with real drive, in which Buck dusts off the guitar vein of his best days, backing Stipe's usual flawless delivery. The lyrics, on the other hand, are a fresh riddle, where the word mine can work as a noun (as in a coal mine) or, more likely, as a possessive pronoun, hinting at something personal.

I would dare you, but I know I don’t need to

You’re going to do just what you want to

You’re going to take the leading chair at the fairground

You’re going to sing the praises of your fruit

A confession of powerlessness, perhaps, faced with someone who holds all the power to do as they please. A bitter, recriminating tone, followed by an even more cryptic exhortation.

Dig a hole, dig it deeper, deeper!

Climb a mountain, climb it steeper, steeper!

Dig a hole, dig it deeper, deeper!

Track a trail of honey through it all

Regarding the meaning of the track, also chosen as a single, the wildest interpretations have been offered – from sexual metaphors to apocalyptic ecological allusions – but to this day its true meaning remains shrouded in mystery. Probably just what its author intended. Though some have read the title as a kind of reply to Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", as if wanting to dilute the rage of adolescence into the sweetness (the honey) of maturity.

The video, on the other hand, is a fun tribute to the great silent cinema of Buster Keaton, with poor Stipe sent tumbling down a staircase without ever touching the ground.

ALLIGATOR AVIATOR AUTOPILOT ANTIMATTER

A kind of divertissement. A wild, super-fast splinter of a track that sounds like an outtake from the frenetic "Accelerate" sessions. With the surprise of a potentially quite risky duet with Peaches, the Canadian queen of electroclash. In the end, the vocal pairing works, even better than the more heavily hyped but rather disappointing one with Eddie Vedder on "It Happened Today". And "Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter" sounds like an acid-tinged version of "Me In Honey" with Kate Pierson. But what really makes the song is its wall of punk-rock guitars, bolstered by the excellent Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Band.

The lyrics, meanwhile, are a fresh, playful exercise in nonsense.

I feel like an alligator

Climbing up the escalator

Climbing up the escalator

I feel strong

I feel like an aviator pilot

Thinks you wouldn't buy it

I'm feeling violent

Beat your bleeding eye in

Hey, hey, alligator, you've got a lot to learn

I have, have got a lot to learn

A kind of comic "mental-song", then, often built on opposites and assonances ("I am not an agitator/ I feel like an agitator/ Climbing up the escalator").

Stipe keeps playing with words, but at times you get the sense he's run out of his best tricks, even on the nonsense front.

BLUE

The circle closes. It all began with Patti Smith and that blessed basket of cherries. And with Patti Smith it all ends. Because "Blue" is, to this day, the final track of R.E.M.'s final album. A perfect arc that inevitably closes with the colors of sadness and melancholy. Although perhaps, at the time, no one had foreseen it. Not even a Stipe unusually relegated to a supporting role, who, unlike 15 years earlier, leaves the leading part to the high priestess of rock: Smith's aching voice intones enigmatic lines over Buck's overdriven guitar feedback, accompanied by the singer's indecipherable whispers.

Once again the key lies in suggestion, in dramatic atmospheres, but the resemblance to "E-Bow The Letter" makes a comparison inevitable, one that it can only lose.

Subway

Almost 4AM

Halloween night

Had enough to drink to make my own party

All my fellow writers in half costume, half asleep

Half silly, gone to seed

Stipe's distorted opening spoken-word passage sets a nocturnal, decadent scene where there's no more room for fun, as suggested by the first verse too, with its reference to a circus that's pulled up its stakes ("Yellow circus left the stakes"). But the song's emotional climax comes in its central section, when the duet bursts into a free-flowing river of words and feelings.

I like you, love you, every coast of you

I’ve seen your eddies and tides and hurricanes and cyclones

Low ebb tide and high, full moon

Up close and distant

I read you

Look, the sky, the sea, the ocean, the sun, the moon

Blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue

Naked and blue

Breathing with you. Touch. Change. Shift. Allow air. Window open. Drift. Drift away. Into now

I want Whitman proud. Patti Lee proud. My brothers proud. 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

Living. Blessed. I understand

A stream of consciousness in which everything flows together. Feelings, suspended desires, dreams, existential musings poised between sadness and optimism, hope and defeat. And over the course of this exploration of the psyche, the album title itself gets a nod ("Collapse Into Now") along with a tribute to Smith herself ("Patti Lee proud"). The latter takes center stage in the following verse, underscored by the entrance of a sinister, dissonant piano.

Cinderella boy

You've lost your shoe

Cinderella boy

Your coach awaits

A sun makes shadows

All over your face

As you sit

Naked and blue

Into me

The circle is closed, and so is the album, which ends with a reprise of the riff from the opening track, "Discoverer". But above all, R.E.M.'s more-than-thirty-year adventure has come to an end. For some time, the sacred fire that had animated the band for so many years had gone out. Their great passion, their formidable instinct, had dissolved into mere work routine, carried out with care and diligence, but no longer with any spark, and no longer even with those healthy quarrels that, at crucial moments in the band's history, had strengthened and reinvigorated them, opening up new horizons.

In light of this, the failure of "Collapse Into Now" can only be a minor detail for Stipe and co. The Athens hit-machine has reached the finish line. Just like the old Dodge van that had carried them toward glory.

On September 21, 2011, the following statement appeared on the band's official website:

To our fans and friends: as R.E.M., 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 has ever been touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening.

A spare, essential statement, in keeping with their style. A dignified exit, without fanfare, which is perhaps precisely why it was deeply respected, even by the most heartbroken fans. Individual comments from the three musicians followed.

Michael Stipe: "A wise man once said the most important thing about a party is knowing when it's time to leave. We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we all move on. And that's fine. We wanted to do it right, to do it our way. We have to thank our fans and our friends for helping us all keep it interesting, and reminding us of how important our band was to us. We hope everyone who has ever loved a song of ours will pause for a moment and again think about how much music mattered to us all. Thank you for 31 years."

Mike Mills: "During our last tour and while we were making our last album, we kept asking ourselves what we would do next. We've always been a band in the truest sense of the word. Brothers who love and respect each other. And we made this decision together, by mutual agreement, without lawyers or discord. It was the right time."

Peter Buck: "One of the best things about being in this band is the fact that our songs meant as much to our fans as they did to us, and were always more important than just entertainment. Our band was built for the alternative nation, and we chose not to abandon that idea. Being part of our fans' lives has been an incredible gift. Thank you."

Buck then thanks Bill Berry, the elephant in the room whose farewell is inevitably absent from the site's message board. And he leaves one last, poignant memory: "Mike, Michael, Bill, Bertis (Downs, the band's manager, ed.) have been great friends, and I know I'll see them in the future. Just as I'll see everyone who followed and supported us over the years, from record stores to the clubs of our early days, watching a bunch of nineteen-year-olds try to change the world." Almost the end of an era.

But before the closing credits, there's still time for one last gift: a double compilation featuring three unreleased tracks, recorded after the "Collapse Into Now" sessions.

APPENDIX: PART LIES, PART HEART, PART TRUTH, PART GARBAGE 1982-2011 (2011)

WE ALL GO BACK TO WHERE WE BELONG

An abyss of melancholy, with unusual horns straight out of Burt Bacharach and a no less surprising, moved Stipe, singing in a voice nearly cracked with emotion over lyrics that allusively hint at the band's end. This singular farewell truly hits home, as if the indecipherable, unapproachable Michael had finally dropped the mask and was confessing backstage.

I dreamed what what you were offering

Imagine lying next to me

You should, and your reputation talks

I will write our story in my mind

Write about our dreams and triumphs

This might be my “Innocence Lost”

I can taste the ocean on your skin

That is where it all began

I dreamed that we were elephants

Out of sight, clouds of dust

And woke up thinking we were free

Oh oh oh

I can taste the ocean on your skin

That is where it all began

We all go back to where we belong…

A poignant swan song, elegant in its step and sweetly retro. It will also be accompanied by a beautiful black-and-white video, made by Stipe and director Dominic DeJoseph: alongside the original, two further versions will be released, featuring poet John Giorno and a wonderful Kirsten Dunst, actress and fan of the band.

“We All Go Back To Where We Belong” will be the single chosen to herald the band's definitive anthology, “Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011”.

Among the 40 tracks on the tracklist, two other, less significant, previously unreleased songs will also feature: “A Month Of Saturdays”, born, according to Mills, as a sort of tribute to Pylon, and “Hallelujah”, a classic Rem-style ballad, with the bass looping back on itself and strings underpinning Stipe's wordless chant.

Then, officially, the curtain will fall on the saga of the Georgians. The perfect circle closes here. But who doesn't dream of seeing them together again, at least once on stage, rekindling the spell? Rock history will have the answers. For now, we'll be content to hold on tight to these thirty-one years of songs, this imaginary cartography of sounds and words, etched onto the map of the heart.

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14/05/2026