Many people have bands or songs that turn time around for them or give some uplift. They matter; they mean something.
The mid-‘80s looked bleak to me: Led Zeppelin and The Who were done, Jimi Hendrix and The Doors long gone and the Stones were coasting.
All around was robotic pop and hair metal – dismal times.
Then I heard a song, Can’t Get There From Here. It was fresh and had attitude, energy, soul. That was my personal REM moment and they opened doors to other ideas like the alternative rock movement.
The genre that REM instituted is strong and thriving but the Athens, GA band have said their final goodbyes 31 years later with Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage.
If you’re a fan, or sitting on the fence or just interested in REM, then this is for you to have your “I get it” moment.
The album isn’t so much a hits package as a career compilation or period-by-period retrospective.
All the highlights are here; nothing is held back because the musicians chose the tracks. It’s still close and the past hasn’t begun to nip at their heels.
Context is everything in a release like this and the band’s stages and development are tracked through different eras with the quality of the material always high, even as it morphs into new directions.
The track listing brings out the excitement factor in older songs. Restlessness is strong and seems to be the key to REM’s combination of longevity and validity.
Despite the group’s shifting soundscape over the decades, Michael Stripe sounds like he emerged with voice intact in the beginning. Radio Free Europe sounds like the same singer, with the same passion and direction as Bad Day recorded 20 years later.
Guitarist Peter Buck, always an acoustic stalwart, is a king of jingle jangle ring on early tracks like So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry). Along the way he also cranked out power rock on What’s The Frequency Kenneth and The One I Love.
The music world needs real bands, and along with Stripe and Buck there were the secret weapons of Mike Mills and Bill Berry: bass and drums respectively. To imagine It’s the End of the World (As We Know It) and Shiny Happy People without Mill’s defining harmony and rolling bass isn’t worth it. Likewise, Berry’s backbeat thump on Finest Worksong, which shifts that track into a refined overdrive.
It seems from this 40-song compilation that stubborn drive and creative spirit combined to make a real, relatable, almost super group. Tangents became reasons for them to keep recording and re-inventing along the way.
There’s so much great music here but a few highlights can be selected anyway: So. Central Rain, Driver 8, (precursor to Americana) Begin the Begin (early REM darkness), Finest Worksong, Pop Song 89 (bone raw rock), Shiny Happy People, Man on the Moon, The Great Beyond (no pretence anthems) and strong career enders, Supernatural Superserious and the acoustic revival spirit of Uberlin.
So long REM, one of the last important real bands.
