REM are no stranger to NOT touring, having not gone out on a regular basis since the “Green” LP and what was that, 1989? It must be because they titled the first track “pop song ’89”. I remember the wife and I going up to Massachusetts to see the “Monster” tour in 1994, having paid a ticket broker 150 bucks for two really good seats. Great show, but we spent an hour afterwards looking for the car in the dark.
The first time REM stopped touring was because they had been on a permanent cycle of album/tour, album/tour pretty much since the inception of the band. That’s roughly six years of constant hard work making a name for yourself. Despite what Pete Buck said recently about touring not selling records, I have to think that he’s all wet here. If you do it right, you can still conquer the world musically going town by town. You just have to have good songs and the where-with-all to sacrifice your health and well being for the sake of the music.
However, a band like REM has long gone past the point of earning new fans by performing live, so perhaps in the specific case of his band, Buck’s comments may be spot on. The only ticket buyers out there for them would be the long time fans. Even some of those, (like myself) may think twice before going, having already seen them so many times as well as being wary of the newer material.
They have a new record out this week that was streaming free over the internet last week and it sounds like it’s pretty good. Only problem is that they have put out 3 or 4 records out prior to this one that were either not very good or not popular enough to generate the necessary buzz that would bring about a successful return to the road. The band has pretty much (by choice, I’m assuming) elected to stay on the outskirts of the of the record business since they signed that huge deal with Warner Bros. and delivered the mega-hits “Out Of Time”, and “Automatic For The People”.
Those albums were the type of gazillion sellers that would yield an inevitable backlash, but I’ve got to say that REM somehow managed to avoid that happening to them as well, at least as a band. Perhaps it was the departure of drummer Bill Berry, or the conscious decision to experiment more on successive albums like “Up” and “Reveal”, but the band never fell victim to becoming a punch line as much as people just stopped caring. The music business was evolving without them, and rather than try to adapt along with it, the band seemed to be fairly comfortable with letting it happen, rather than dig their nails in the dirt and compromise their approach in the process.
Even though 2008’s “Accelerate” did little to reestablish them in the eyes of record buyers, long time fans that did check the record out applauded the stripped down-back to basics approach. Only problem was (for me anyway) that although the record sounded more powerful than any REM record did in recent memory, this noisy, bombastic effort did nothing to conjure up the feeling of what made them a great band in the first place.
“Collapse Into Now” appears to have rectified that complaint in spades. Pete Buck’s guitar parts do more shimmering and less exploding, with the emphasis more on melody and tone. The vocal blend between Mike Mills and Michael Stipe, which even during the best of times would on occasion sound more than a little forced, rings honest and true this time around, particularly on the gorgeous “UBerlin”.
Whether or not we ever see REM perform live in concert again appears to hinge at least partially on the fortunes of this latest effort. If the sales numbers are promising and enough of the band’s once thriving fanbase can be re-enlisted, we may yet see a triumphant return to the stage upon release of the next album.
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