I Know What I am Chasing, I Know that this Is Changing Me

For those of us whose formative years happened during the nineties, Automatic for the People was a seminal album by R.E.M. Released just nineteen short months after Out of Time, which pushed the band into the mainstream after being college rock gods for the previous decade, Automatic for the People hit a major chord with their newfound melodic sound and Michael Stipe’s impassioned lyrics. But in the nineteen years since the release, they have yet to release an album up to that standard which makes you wonder how much drummer Bill Berry, who left the band two albums later when he suffered an aneurysm during the Monster tour, had to do with the greatness of those nineties albums. But at this point I would be happy if the band released an album as good as Monster.

That has not to say the remaining three hasn’t scrapped together a few great songs in their drummer’s absent, but they never have seemed to fill a full album of them. Their fifth post Berry album (fifteenth overall) is their best work since Monster. Collapse Into Now mixes songs that have the energy of their eighties college rock days and melodic songs from the nineties, though definitely leaning more towards the former.

Album opener Discoverer can make any middle-aged remember back to college when they were in some sweaty bar seeing the band for the first time as you shout along with the chorus with one fist in the air. The band prominently breaks out a mandolin for the first time since Losing My Religion for Oh My Heart, the band’s catchiest songs since At My Most Beautiful. While Überlin sounds like a perfect blend of the band’s first two decades. And the boys brings back Patti Smith to close out the album with Blue and the spoken word is reminiscent of their last hook out on E-Bow the Letter.

Song to Download – Oh My Heart

Collapse into Now gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.