R.E.M. is one of those bands that I grew up loving but then fell out of favor with sometime around the release of Monster. I still have always loved the classic R.E.M. stuff but had never really been on board with much from that point on until the release of their 2008 album Accelerate, which I thought was a terrific return to form for the band and a real step up and forward from where the band had been in recent years. It was a very strong album that I thoroughly enjoyed. This year, the band released their next album, called Collapse Into Now. The new album builds on a lot of the same sorts of sounds and themes that were present in the last album, but the album here feels a little more forced to me and doesn’t quite seem to flow as smoothly throughout as I had hoped. There are some good moments, both in the rock direction and the more introspective direction, and maybe the variety here is a little better than Accelerate, but for me the energy of this album just doesn’t match up quite as well and it sounds a little flat at times.

This is definitely not an album where the band has tried to orchestrate or construct any singles or pop songs. There are some definitely more melodic directions the band takes with the single “Mine Smells Like Honey” and songs like “Discoverer” and “Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter”, but they aren’t really songs that really hold your attention for that long. They are little short bursts of rock and roll. The band also explores some more diverse musical territory that evokes some of their slower, more measured phases of their past with songs like “Oh My Heart”, “Walk It Back” and “Every Day Is Yours To Win”. For the most part pretty much every song here is solid and there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with them, but just as a whole, none seem to really excel or go above and beyond to really grab your attention.

Although the album isn’t quite spectacular for myself, the band is still showing some great signs of progress and developing into a kind of elder statesmen role in the music role with the material from the last two albums. They show still a youthful exuberance in bringing some of the more rocking songs to the table, but also do those songs as well as the more lumbering songs with a real confidence and presence that shows they have become really comfortable and strong with where they are both musically and personally in the grand scheme of the music scene. While I feel like the last album had more high points and really felt a lot more like a passionate statement from the band that they were back, this is more of a subtlely confident and self-assured effort from the band that doesn’t really take too many left turns and is just a solid album. It doesn’t get too high or too low really, but overall still remains another strong effort from the band.

“Oh My Heart” by R.E.M. from Collapse Into Now