Saturday Night Video: R.E.M. Sendoff

I’m sure you’ve heard the news by now that R.E.M. announced a split this week…

R.E.M. always felt like a utility to me, my whole life they were just there – something you could count on – putting out a new record every two or three years.  I bought every one of them.  Even their worst albums had some redeeming qualities to them and frankly there weren’t that many misses in general.

My big R.E.M. era was the 1990’s.  We were just forgetting about the horrors of the hair metal moment and learning to appreciate rock that was a bit more artful…and that’s when that video for it’s the end of the world just swallowed me whole; you have to understand, I was that kid with the hair in my eyes and the skateboard just banging against the walls by myself.

Obviously Out of Time and Automatic for the People and Monster were massive albums, some of those songs just never left the radio for months and months on end.  The band’s ability to garner airplay became somewhat diminished by the time Reveal came out at the turn of the millennium but I stayed with them and continued the journey.

And recently Barry introduced me to Life’s Rich Pageant and Murmer, two albums that I had simply missed in the course of my youthful pursuit of every single Hip Hop cassette tape ever released 🙂

Anyway, they’ve disbanded for now.  I doubt it will last.  In the meantime, they put out a great album this past spring called Collapse Into Now.  Not a lot of you bought it but I like it a lot.

Here are a few official videos from Collapse…

The first is my fave track of the record, Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter, it’s a strange burst that sounds like it would’ve been perfectly at home on that late 80’s gem Green:

Next is UBerlin:

Last one I’ll throw up is Oh My Heart:

Thanks for the great music guys, I’ll be first in line for the reunion.