Yeah, yeah, I know…I crazy procrastinated on this one.
I have my reasons: after a crazy busy fall—amped up day job, occasional freelance work, and a course where I wrote a 6,600-word paper on Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone”—the last thing I felt like doing over the holidays was writing. Plus, I was struggling with exactly what to say here: I’d already shared my Top 11 (out of order) with The Coast, I’d already written in detail about my number one album back in June and, most importantly, I felt like I’d said much of what I wanted to say about the year in my singles list – I felt like the driving trends of 2011 were better spoken to in songs than albums.
Still, though, I wanted to at least make sure this was documented. I have more ambitious plans for 2011 and blogging – in fact, I hope to complete at least a short essay every week, published on Mondays. I’m pleased with the quality of what I wrote last year, with several pieces that rank among my all-time favourites, but I feel both a desire and a need to write more this year.
But enough on 2012 next week. For now: here’s 2011, the year in albums.
Honourable mentions (in alphabetical order):
Dog Day – Deformer
Drake – Take Care
Feist – Metals
Handsome Furs – Sound Kapital
M83 – Hurry Up We’re Dreaming
One Hundred Dollars - Songs of Man
Real Estate – Days
Shotgun Jimmie – Transistor Sister
Kanye West and Jay-Z – Watch the Throne
Wilco – The Whole Love
20. R.E.M. – Collapse Into Now
Though less immediate and exciting than the band’s 2008 return-to-form-ish Accelerate, Collapse Into Now may be the superior record: an R.E.M. greatest hits without a hit. Did its survey of the band’s varied sounds gain extra heft when it was revealed as its swan song? Sure. But it was already a fitting tribute to one of America’s great bands (perhaps the greatest?).
19. Imaginary Cities – Temporary Resident
Sometimes a mixed bag debut sounds more ‘hit’ than ‘miss’ when the hits stick with you. I can’t endorse every track on the first record from Winnipeg’s Imaginary Cities, but the standounds like “Hummingbird,” “Say You” and the exceptional, stirring “That’s Where It’s At Sam” elevate the surrounding material. A band to watch in the years ahead.
18. The Horrible Crowes – Elsie
Here’s the thing about mood records: sometimes it takes a while for the mood to hit you. There are few songs on Elsie that stand tall against songwriter Brian Fallon’s best Gaslight Anthem material, and as such I initially was lukewarm on the side project. Given time, though, I was won over by its sad pangs and broken longings, and the way Fallon adds a sexual heft that his vision of romance had never emphasized before.
17. Sloan – The Double Cross
The fact that this album ranks in the bottom half of the Sloan discography says far more about the Sloan discography than it does about The Double Cross itself. Only Andrew seems a bit off his game here; everyone else brings A-rate material, and the album’s opening trio—“Follow the Leader,” “The Answer was You” and “Unkind”—ranks among the band’s best ever song segments.
16. Miracle Fortress – Was I the Wave?
Graham Van Pelt was one of those Canadian artists I more admired than enjoyed, until a set during Canadian Music Week previewing Was I The Wave? material floored me. Trading his Beach Boys side for keyboards and drum machines, Wave stays supremely confident in the composition department, but with a far more expansive, enticing sound.
15. Cold Cave – The Great Pan is Dead
In contrast to Miracle Fortress, Cold Cave went the opposite direction: more guitars. What started as an electronica project on the excellent Love Comes Close kept some of that ethos, but became a big heart-on-sleeve gothic Cure tribute with the sound cranked. Excessive, sure, but compellingly so.
14. Radiohead – The King of Limbs
Like Amnesiac compared to Kid A, The King of Limbs is an album burdened by the accomplishments of its predecessor (In Rainbows). The three-year wait between releases added weight that the experimental, groove-oriented Limbs couldn’t carry. Its first half has grown on me a great deal, though, and the second half would have been an acclaimed EP on its own.
13. The Decemberists – The King is Dead
The problem with gimmicks is that they become easy fodder for devotees and detractors alike. The Decemberists were always a better band than their gimmick—sea shanties! colonial tales!—and by stripping all that away to an R.E.M.-meets-Gram-Persons core, The King of Dead sounds like sweet validation for those of us who’ve believed in their talents all along.
12. Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost
While you can still hear some of the Elvis Costello-vibe that defined 2009’s Album, what impressed me so much about Father, Son, Holy Ghost is how each new track sounded like you were turning the corner of a house of music: one minute it sounds like Sabbath, the next like a 1950s girl group, the next like Sonic Youth backed by a choir. Somehow, it all works.
11. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
As much as I enjoyed Fleet Foxes self-titled debut, I never quite understood how such a mild-mannered, pleasant album warranted such praise. Still pleasant but ridiculously more accomplished—in sound, in song, in sensibility—Helplessness Blues feels like Fleet Foxes finally earning the praise they didn’t quite deserve before.
10. Kathryn Calder – Bright and Vivid
“The other girl in the New Pornographers.” That’s a tough label to shake, especially when you ostensibly joined the band because Neko Case couldn’t tour with them all the time. But after stealing a number of great moments over the band’s last two albums, here Calder makes her own grand statement: an incredibly colorful, rhythm-driven, playful pop album that’s a huge leap ahead of her debut.
9. Austra – Feel It Break
Sometimes, all it takes is a single song. I vividly remember my first listen to this one, when the Fever Ray-ish vibes of “Darken Her Horse” got me grooving around my living room. It was a vibe the album didn’t shake, and nor could I, as its mix of cold grooves and bold, brash vocals kept driving under my skin for weeks and weeks.
8. Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for My Halo
It’s a funny coincidence that, the same year R.E.M. broke up, so many records sounded like R.E.M., from The Decemberists, to Real Estate to…um…R.E.M. But the most compelling tribute came from Vile’s Smoke Ring, which fuses folk jangle with broken-voiced Lou Reed vocals. Few records this year were as clever and restrained in their use of noise as a counterbalance to some remarkable melodic work.
7. Bon Iver – Bon Iver
We’re into backlash mode on this one—Grammy nominations and year-end lists tend to bring out detractors—and, admittedly, the dissenters make some valid points: Justin Vernon is a questionable lyricist, the record is a bit sexless, and its soft-rock influences aren’t going to jive with everyone. But its ability to build moments of sonic transcendence out of those elements hasn’t worn on me one bit.
6. EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints
Like Patti Smith, a clear influence here, EMA manages to strike truths that lie in the nebulous netherspace between beauty and ugliness. Her barely-tuneful voice—itself between speech and song—collides with distorted, woozy guitars in a way that’s intensely, almost uncomfortably physical, best embodied by the discomforting “Marked,” a haunting ode to the thin line between love and assault.
5. Colin Stetson – New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
As I grow older, I find myself more and more a sucker for pop’s pleasures, which might explain, to a degree, my affection for Stetson’s second album: it’s like a throwback to the days when I fell for music that made me feel unsettled, disquieted and—at times—even scared. Stetson’s a virtuoso performer, but Judges would be remarkable even if he used overdubs and loops to create its fevered landscapes of dread and destruction.
4. Rich Aucoin – We’re All Dying to Live
I feel like I’ve already said everything I could about this record’s charms, so allow me a quick word on its relationship with Aucoin’s acclaimed live show: I’m actually hoping he’ll ditch the dance party, at some point, and allow the more restrained, contemplated side of his work to shine through. His HPX full-album performance, which allowed songs like “All You Cannot Live Without” and “We’re All Dying to Live” to shine, further emphasized that there’s a lot more soul to this rave than you might think at first light.
3. Destroyer – Kaputt
For my money, Dan Bejar released the most successful and compelling retranslation of 1980s soft rock this year: a woozy, dreamlike pastiche that, finally, sounded like he’d found a perfect companion for his evocative, almost stream-of-consciousness-sounding lyrical sentiments. I expect he’ll go off in a different direction next time, which means this might be the first and last Destroyer album that clicks with me – I’m just glad it happened at least once.
2. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
Every decade or so, Harvey puts aside her more abrasive instincts and ends up with a pop masterwork. Like Stories From the City, Stories from the Sea, the sound of Let England Shake is easy on the ears, which makes its haunting accounts of World War I England even more evocative in comparison. Even moreso than its catchy, efficient song(wo)manship, it’s the existential angst that sticks with you.
1. Fucked Up – David Comes to Life
Overstuffed, bloated and patently ridiculous, David Comes to Life is the year’s best album because, holy shit, it’s powerful: every time that first growl of “Queen of Hearts” or the three-guitar blast of “One More Night” kicks in, it sounds like rock—by all accounts, a dead, declining genre—is suddenly the most vital sound in the universe. The pop charts may be dominated by Pavlovian dance music, but no record this year made me move like this one: it demands that your head bash, your fist pump and your heart skip a beat or two.
Filed under: Music
It felt like beauty and the beat out there.
On the one hand, music has rarely seemed dancier: the rise of dubstep, the electro stranglehold on the charts, a four-on-the-floor fetish the likes of which we haven’t seen since the heydays of disco. On the other, indie “rockers” went soul-searching, digging up stirring ballads by appropriating seemingly “untouchable” pop sounds. Hip hop sounded like it was everywhere and nowhere all at once; rock was mostly nowhere, but for a few valiant warriors bringing the guitar tiffs. There were viral hits and vital misses. We grooved. We bounced. We pumped fists. We listened.
This is the year in song.
Yearly disclaimer:
Blah blah blah one song per artist blah blah blah songs had to be singles or extremely notable tracks blah blah blah songs need to work outside of album context blah blah blah which is why some favourite album moments aren’t here blah blah blah they’ll get their due on my albums list blah.
Six great 2011 singles from 2010 albums that felt too “2010″ to make this list:
Diamond Rings – “It’s Not My Party”
The National – “Conversation 16″
Robyn – “Call Your Girlfriend”
Superchunk – “Crossed Wires”
Titus Andronicus – “No Future Part Three: Escape from No Future”
Kanye West – “All of the Lights”
Ten great 2011 songs that just missed the cut:
Adele – “Rolling in the Deep”
EMA – “Marked”
Girls – “Vomit”
Handsome Furs – “Repatriated”
Nicki Minaj – “Super Bass”
Real Estate – “It’s Real”
Shotgun Jimmie – “Swamp Magic”
Britney Spears ft. Ke$ha and Nicki Minaj – “Till The World Ends” (remix)
The Strokes – “Taken for a Fool”
tUnE-yArDs – “Gangsta”
20. Destroyer – “Kaputt”
Much of Dan Bejar’s revelatory Kaputt sounds strangely familiar, as if its reverberated guitars and smooth horns are pulled from the ether of memories, but never so clearly that they are recognizable. The slow-building title track puts this literally – when Bejar sings “Sound Smashes, Melody Maker, NME / all sounds like a dream to me,” we sort of understand what he means.
19. Kanye West and Jay-Z – “Niggas in Paris”
Reports of Watch the Throne being simply an ode to opulence were greatly exaggerated, but the song that’s become the record’s anthem lives up to that description. Self-consciously ridiculous, “Niggas in Paris” is so much fun that Jay and ‘Ye have taken to playing it several times in a row to close out their show, the crowd getting more amped up each time. The record stands at nine – that shit is very, very cray.
18. Chad VanGaalen – “Sara”
When I interviewed VanGaalen earlier this year, he told me that he thinks it’s funny that everyone considers him a songwriter when much of the stuff he writes and records is more noise and experimental compositions. I’d argue “Sara,” perhaps the year’s best love song, is more than enough evidence to suggest that VanGaalen should give himself just a bit more credit in that department.
17. Lana Del Rey – “Video Games”
Del Rey is a creature of questions. Is she manufactured or authentic? Is she actually interesting or just interesting to pop culture critics? Is “Video Games” distressingly sincere or frustratingly sarcastic? I’m wary of Del Ray rapid pop ascendance mostly because it means that, piece by piece, our questions will be answered, and “Video Games” plays best in its original, unknown form, leaving us wondering everything.
16. Cut Copy – “Need You Now”
I had a soft spot last year for Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now” less because I liked the song and more because I appreciated its sentiment: there’s something powerful in the blunt, needy urgency of those three words. Cut Copy, of course, enhance their power by pairing them with a bouncy, escalating dance number that that, by the time of its final “do do dos,” is about as now as you can get.
15. The Weeknd – “Wicked Games”
What’s compelling about the best moments on The Weeknd’s first two mixtapes— “Wicked Games” being the best of the best—is that in the hands of another R&B artist, they’d be party anthems. Instead, the desperate, hedonistic infidelity of “Wicked Games” is paired with a low, grungy minor-keyed slow jam, playing up the desperate part of the equation and providing no false comfort or justification for its crimes of passion.
14. Radiohead – “Lotus Flower”
There’s been lots of signs over the past decade that Radiohead have become more interested in rhythm textures than melodies, which is the real crux of the pre/post Kid A fanbase split. Like In Rainbows four years ago, “Lotus Flower” is an example of Radiohead supporting both ends of the equation, giving Yorke a beautiful vocal melody to carry while Phil, Colin and Jonny drive its beat ahead, pulse after pulse.
13. Sloan – “Unkind”
Jay’s the strongest popist, Chris is the cleverest and Andrew is the most idiosyncratic. Where does that leave Patrick in Sloan’s matrix? More often than not, he seems to be the guy trying the hardest to write riffy hits, and he misses that mark more than enough to make him my least favourite Sloan member. But when he hits, oh my: “Unkind” is a beast, with that riff over that keyboard intro, with those solos, with those harmonies.
12. The Go! Team – “Buy Nothing Day” (featuring Bethany Cosentino)
Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino could read the phone book and make it sound like summer, so it’s little wonder that The Go! Team recruited her to belt the one standout on their third album, Rolling Blackouts. Her classic pop pipes are a perfect fit with the Spector-gone-cheerleader wall of sound production, and the resulting track was one of the year’s best “spin around your living room” moments.
11. The Kills – “Future Starts Slow”
The Kills didn’t change a lot with their sound on Blood Pressures, but sampling real drums instead of using drum machines gave them a different swagger than before. The slow groove of “Future Starts Slow,” the album’s best song, adds Jamie Hince’s dirty guitar and perfectly blends Hince and Allison Mosshart’s vocals—with the crazy great “blow what’s left of my right mind” lyric—into something that sounds effortlessly confident.
(Songs 10-1, after the fold…)
If ‘album of the year’ acclaims were awarded literally—to the album which most sounds like the here and now—Halifax’s Rich Aucoin would be hogging all the hardware for 2011.
Indeed, unlike much of what gets tagged with the ‘indie rock’ genre these days, We’re All Dying to Live, Aucoin’s thrilling new full-length, really couldn’t have been made in any other era. It could be that its openness to dance and electronica reflects the current sensibilities of the pop and alternative realms, or that the album’s songs form the core of Aucoin’s bombastic, confetti-and-streamers live show that always feels effervescently now.
But interestingly, in many ways, We’re All Dying to Live actually looks back rather than forward. It sort of feels like an amalgam of the past decade, a summary statement of the countless musical forms that found themselves thrown under the parachute of ‘indie rock’ in the 2000s: collective singalong anthems, dance-floor ready electro, twinkling piano-driven interludes and slow-building balladry.
Put another way: it sounds kind of like your hard drive. Sometimes, rather candidly so.
What feels so current about the album isn’t that Aucoin borrows from other artists—-that’s a tale as old as time—but that he’s so transparent about it. Sometimes it’s just a sound homage that seems a bit on the nose, such as how you can hear echoes of The Flaming Lips on the album’s more ballad-y tracks like “All That You Cannot Live Without.” But then Aucoin offers up a song suite about waiting for Superman—also a motif from one of the Lips’ greatest songs—and your ears perk up. You might be reminded of Sufjan Stevens in the way We’re All Dying to Live’s various segments are named, but then you take a look at the record’s artwork and suddenly all you can think of is Illinois. Aucoin offers up a blatant Brian Wilson homage, and then titles the track “Brian Wilson is A.L.I.V.E.”
And then there’s “P.U.S.H.,” which adopts robot-speak with a meter, tone and sensibility that’s completely, 100 per cent Daft Punk’s “Harder Better Faster Stronger.” There’s no way you can hear that song and not think about Daft Punk. Not possible.
Traditionally, these are the sorts of liftings that you don’t get away with, at least with critical types. They’re rockist crimes, the things you do not do if you’re attempting to be taken seriously as an artist. With our understanding of creativity traditionally linked with originality, the worst thing you could do is show your influences so nakedly; at least have the decency to cover them up a little.
But hold up. We’re leaving a decade where arguably the defining emerging ‘genre,’ if one could call it that, was the mashup; where the MP3 meant that we collected, and shuffled through, more music than ever before; where nostalgia collided with the rediscovered past, and the Internet gave us access to smash anything and everything we wanted together. If we once understood the past as something that slowly faded away, today it feels like something so heavily present that it’s impossible to escape from – and perhaps our best recourse is to recontexualize it, to make it our own.
So Aucoin’s eclectic, engaging assortment of influences on We’re All Dying to Live places him right in the centre of all this. Indeed, the fleeting familiarities come so fast—and are so quickly replaced with the next sound or recollection—that it’s the massive sprawl of the whole that resonates the strongest. What I find interesting, though, is that Aucoin’s embrace of the intertextual zeitgeist extends well beyond the record itself.
Consider, for example, Aucoin’s taste for syncing his songs to visual works. His first EP, Personal Publication, was designed to be played alongside the cartoon version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. In his live shows, Aucoin will often start songs by showing YouTube clips—like Double Rainbow guy—before launching into the song itself. And he’s made a full 55-minute film entirely out of public domain films to play alongside We’re All Dying to Live. Then there are the live ‘gimmicks,’ like the call-and-response to help ‘teach’ the audience to sing along; it’s not unlike a grade school music class learning the song line-by-line. And let’s not forget the playground parachute that Aucoin has a tendency to break out and hold a dance party underneath.
Put together, it’s clear that Aucoin isn’t just drawing upon musical memory to connect with his audience: he’s courting our visual memory, our childhood recollections and other elements of our lived experience. His routine, from the music through the aesthetic accompaniment (hello, Indiana Jones font), isn’t trying to create new meanings: it’s reminding us of meanings that already exist within ourselves, creating a patchwork (a rainbow parachute?) that feels familiar from the very first note. No wonder it’s so powerful: it’s as much our experience as his.
All this begs the question: why do we let Aucoin get away with this? Shouldn’t we be treating this sort of manipulation cynically?
We might, if Aucoin was the least bit cynical. But his masterstroke is that this intertextuality is inseparable from the other ‘inter-’ word that dominates We’re All Dying to Live: interdependency. Aucoin goes through great pains to make sure we know that more than 500 different musicians performed on the album. Though Aucoin’s voice is always present, it’s most often accompanied by harmonies or sometimes boisterous choruses by others. And in his live show, Aucoin seems more focused on getting the audience to sing along than on actually delivering the lines himself.
This emphasis on ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ extends to the album’s lyrical themes. Hell, ‘I’ is almost entirely absent: it’s pretty much just a chorus of ‘we’ or ‘us’ throughout the albums 22 segments. Those moments that do focus on individuals are either in the second person—the ‘you’ of “It,” for example—or the third person, like the ‘he’ and ‘she’ of tracks like “Undead” and “Living to Die.” The latter is indicative of Aucoin’s approach to pronouns: the song’s character, addressing his own mortality, moves beyond the individualist perspective to come to two collectivist conclusions: “we’re in this together” and “we’re all dying to live.”
And just as Aucoin generously acknowledges his musical touchpoints by making them so obvious, he’s equally as giving to his guest performers. This was abundantly clear during the Halifax Pop Explosion, when Aucoin delivered the show of the festival—hell, maybe Halifax’s show of the year—by performing We’re All Dying to Live start-to-finish at St. Matthew’s Church, with upwards of 70 or 80 different musicians supporting him. There were four drum kits, a string section, a horn section, and dozens of background vocalists. Aucoin even gave up a good 25 minutes at the start of the show to let some of his friends each play one of their own songs. This was a big shared experience, and though there was one man conducting it from the centre, every effort was made to demonstrate that none of this was possible without the support of a broader community of friends and colleagues.
And it’s in that sense of collectiveness—where the music’s intertextuality meets its interdependency—that Aucoin’s raison d’être reveals itself: coming to terms with, and celebrating, how everyone (and everything) leans on someone (and something) else to get by.
It’s an idea perhaps expressed best in “Undead’s” final line: “We’ll lie but we’ll never die alone.”
I’m lying on my couch as I write this, tossing aside tissues and drowning myself in cough syrup and Netflix. Yep: it’s the Sunday after the Halifax Pop Explosion. And I’m in no condition to write about what just happened these last five days.
I wish I was. I wish I could write about the Rich Aucoin show that will go down as one of the biggest and most wonderful celebrations Halifax has seen in years. I wish I could write about how I was so overtaken by Titus Andronicus’ secret show that I wound up in a mosh pit for the first time in a very, very long time. I wish I could write about hearing so many joyous noises circling through the halls of St. Matt’s church, from Dan Mangan’s growly voice to the blistering chords of The Rural Alberta Advantage. And I wish I could write about Fucked Up bringing the whole week to a close with two sweaty, chaotic, rambunctious spectacles.
And I may well find occasion to tackle a few of these in the future. For now, though, I suspect the best way to document my HPX 2011 experience is in photos. So after the fold, you’ll find 30 photos from 30 different HPX sets featuring 28 different artists.
This is the week that was. And it was pretty amazing.
I can’t recall the first time I heard R.E.M.
Was it encountering “Man on the Moon’s” evocative video on MuchMusic? Perhaps hearing “The One I Love” on the car radio on some random car drive with the family? Was it sometime after “Losing My Religion” became a popular standard? I honestly don’t know.
R.E.M. has always been there, both literally—the band formed in 1980, two years before I came along—and figuratively. The band’s meteoric rise from college radio mainstays to global headliners doesn’t seem as strange nowadays, since others like Radiohead and Arcade Fire have now followed in the footsteps. But R.E.M.’s ascendency laid the groundwork, and the band had already ‘made it’ by the time that I musically came of age. R.E.M. were effervescent, just there, always worthy of blog or media coverage, regardless of the quality of its most recent release.
(Put another way: I only got to know Michael Stipe the Sensitive, Long-Haired Recluse through archival photos and interviews; in my musical lifetime, I’ve known only Michael Stipe the Celebrity.)
Which is why it’s all the more strange that R.E.M. won’t be around anymore.
I suppose the curtain close of a 30-year, hall-of-fame music career should, by rights, be about celebration: after all, the remorses can’t possibly hold a candle to the accomplishments, the triumphs, the victories. And considering that R.E.M.’s late-era material never quite held a candle to the its heyday, it’s not as if there are any lingering regrets that come from a career cut short.
In fact, in the wake of today’s announcement, I expect many to argue that the band would have been wisest to break up when drummer Bill Berry left the group in 1997 following the Monster tour and the New Adventures in Hi-Fi album (still their most underrated record). In a way, I sympathize with that argument—R.E.M. never learned to run as a three-legged dog the same way it did with four legs—but frankly, I love Michael, Mike and Peter all the more because they tried. And to be completely fair, they sometimes succeeded: the two-thirds of Up that works, the record-collection summary of Collapse Into Now, and their most vital post-Berry release, 2008’s Accelerate.
But more importantly: because they tried, they ended up meaning more to me than almost any other band I’ve ever come across.
I’m guessing most R.E.M. fans didn’t start with Up. I did.
“Daysleeper” probably inspired the purchase, the song striking an unexpected nerve with my 16-year-old self. And while I’m more than willing to admit the album’s flaws, there’s still something wonderfully “16 years old” about that record to me. It dabbled in electronics just when I was beginning to discover that music didn’t need to have just bass, drums and guitar. And it was when Stipe’s ‘inspirational lyricism’ had yet to become a total cliche – the way he addressed physicality, angst and self-questioning on that album feels, even now, very teenage, and in a good way.
Had R.E.M. broken up in 1997, I’m sure I would have come across the band’s catalogue at some point; my path towards becoming a music devotee was most likely already set. But that path would have turned out very different if Up hadn’t become part of my life, its sentiments inspiring me to begin diving—and diving deep—into one of America’s most eclectic, enticing rock bands.
Like I would later do for other older artists that now also mean the world to me (Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen), I moved quickly to collect R.E.M.’s back catalogue. Automatic for the People was first on the docket – it had the big hits, after all, but it was the smaller moments that floored me: the contemplative, reflective “Find the River” and the hyper-dramatic “Nightswimming.” Eponymous then gave me the single-disc crash course on the band’s 1980s period and, from there, I devoured whatever I could get. During a road trip to the United States with the family, I found European import CD of the band’s IRS-era albums, each with a slew of bonus tracks. I bought all of them, teenage budgeting be damned.
Between 1997 and 2001, I managed to collect every single major R.E.M. release. Nowadays, this accomplishment is meaningless—point, click, download—but back then, it really meant something to me. It took work to discover R.E.M., and that work was rewarded time and time again.
Early R.E.M. sounded revelatory, coming out of nowhere, fully-formed; has ever a debut seemed as complete as Murmur? The band could have continued to make that album for years and been an underground success story—and some might argue that Reckoning sort of does that—but, instead, R.E.M. grew: deeper into Americana, then towards radio pop and arena rock, a minor detour into glam, and in later years flirting with electronica. Peter Buck learned to rock rather than just jangle, Mike Mills became one of the best backup singers in rock, Bill Berry held down the fort, and Michael Stipe learned to not only sing clearly, but to write truly important, inspiring lyrics.
And somehow, almost all of it worked.
Hell, if they’d only stopped at “Losing My Religion”—certainly not their greatest song, but their closest to a standard—they’ve have achieved that most rare of pop glories: a creation that everyone knows, and that almost everyone enjoys. But their catalogue is riddled with other near-standards: “Man on the Moon,” “The One I Love,” “Radio Free Europe,” “What’s the Frequency Kenneth?”…and then there’s the slightly-hidden gems: “Little America,” “Perfect Circle,” “These Days,” “Country Feedback,” “Living Well is the Best Revenge”…and the albums, the ALBUMS: Automatic, Murmur, Hi-Fi, Lifes Rich Pageant, Document…
There may have been a point where I could have been objective about R.E.M.; I bet if I tried, I still could be today. But the sheer volume of amazing, awe-inspiring pop creations that the band has pulled out of the ether means that, frankly, I don’t ever want to.
Fourteen years after discovering them, R.E.M. still awe me. And I don’t want that to change.
I sometimes explain to people that my rock and roll bucket list consists of bands that I need to see before I die or they die. It’s a tongue-and-cheek remark that usually gets a laugh, but there’s more than a shred of truth to it: like life itself, the shifting state of a band can change suddenly, without warning.
Along these lines, today’s announcement took me by surprise. Sure, R.E.M. didn’t tour for Collapse Into Now, but that’s nothing new; the band didn’t tour Out of Time and Automatic for the People either, and those were its two most popular albums. Plus, Collapse was a rather good album, all things considered – perhaps the ‘best’ post-Berry release, even if Accelerate is more exciting and Up more interesting.
But in hindsight, the signs were there: Collapse’s publicity consisted almost entirely of in-studio performances and a series of Stipe-managed music video projects. The album itself sounded like (as one reviewer astutely put it) a greatest hits without the hits, entertainingly recalling the band’s past work but offering little suggestion of a path forward. And with the band’s members all living in different cities, it’s not as if the unit was quite the united force it once was.
Collapse’s commercial failure may have added to the drive to hang up the jangly guitars once and for all, but judging by the statements from each band member over at REMhq.com, it’s clear that these epiphanies starting coming well before Collapse hit stores. No, this is not the story of a band run off the rails; it’s the story of three men who’ve been together for 30 years and feel that they’ve run out of things to say together. They’ve come to the realization that Bill Berry did 14 years ago: they’re done.
Which is why I’m all the more glad that, in the summer of 2009, I invested the time and money to travel to Toronto to see the band for the first—and now, likely, the only—time on the Accelerate tour. I can’t help when I was born, so I have to live with having never seen the band in its ‘prime.’ But I can say that I saw R.E.M. tour its most exciting post-Berry album, in all its noisy glory, with the energy and enthusiasm of a bunch of 25-year-old kids. They opened with “These Days” from Lifes Rich Pageant, closed with “Man on the Moon” and played plenty of classics in between. Could I have asked for me? Sure. You always can. But it would have been rude of me to do so.
That’s why it’s strange, reading the band members’ statements, to see each of them thank us, the fans. I understand the reason for it: they got to make music for a living because people like me saw something in their work and were inspired enough to invest our pocket change and minor earnings towards their band. But jesus, do they really think that the time and money I’ve spent with R.E.M., in any way, comes close to what they offered in return?
R.E.M. taught me that great music was worth investing in, that skimming the surface is never as satisfying as taking time to dive deep. I learned to let music under my skin, so far that it hits a primal, elemental nerve, that it starts to feel like it’s always been there, that it’s inseparable from the self. R.E.M. were the one band, above perhaps all others, that convinced me music was about more than experience; it was about discovery.
There’s no more R.E.M. discoveries left. At the risk of being cliched, it’s the end of that world as I know it. A few tears, but mostly? I feel fine.
Thanks guys.
