Brief thoughts on R.E.M.

Collapse into Now is a pretty satisfying record, better than Accelerate, which was enjoyable but less substantive-seeming. A good way to go out. I saw them on the Accelerate tour at the Hollywood Bowl and if they’d aged into irrelevance, it didn’t show. 

My favorite R.E.M. albums are Reckoning, which is still a clinic on how to write perfect power-pop choruses, and Automatic for the People, which is still a clinic on how to grow up. I spent a couple months in 2008 examining the rest of the discography and they have plenty of great albums, but these are the ones that stuck with me. 

After all this time, I’m still not sure they have any more good songs than the Smiths do, but that’s O.K.