R.E.M. - upcoming album 'Collapse Into Now' / General Discussion

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Another new song: "Oh My Heart"

NPR Music: New Music, Songs and Music News : NPR

We're still roughly two months from the release of R.E.M.'s 15th studio album, Collapse Into Now. But today, we've got a premiere of this song, "Oh My Heart."

Fans of R.E.M. here at NPR Music think Collapse Into Now is the band's best-sounding record since 1998's Up. Players on the album include Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Joel Gibb, Peaches and Eddie Vedder.

NPR Music asked Michael Stipe to tell us a bit about this new song, and here's what he has to say:
"It's a very quiet and very meditative song dedicated to New Orleans -- about New Orleans. Jacknife [Lee] is great as a producer, because he saw that we were struggling with what is a very quiet song. We were standing really far away from each other in the room, and it was hard not only to actually physically hear each other, but it felt dispersed. He brought us into the middle, and instantly, of course, the song worked."
Click to expand...
 
Man, I've been away from the computer all day. So both Oh My Heart and Mine Smell Like Honey are out there? Damn, we will have heard 1/3rd of the record a full two months before its release date. I ain't complaining, though. Off to find those tracks.

EDIT: Mine Smell Like Honey hasn't been released yet.
 
Hmmm, Oh My Heart is definitely a clear sequel to the song Houston off of Accelerate. Lots of similarities. And then there's the direct lyrical reference:

From "Houston": If the storm doesn't kill me, the government will
From "Oh My Heart": The storm didn't kill me, the government changed

Definitely kindred songs.
 
We can certainly debate the positives and negatives of listening to a leak pre-release, but I can't see the value in hearing various songs out of order in a piecemeal fashion like that. It's the exact opposite of the album experience.

I did that once before ATYCLC came out, and I'm not doing it again.
 
GirlsAloudFan said:
Hmmm, Oh My Heart is definitely a clear sequel to the song Houston off of Accelerate. Lots of similarities. And then there's the direct lyrical reference:

From "Houston": If the storm doesn't kill me, the government will
From "Oh My Heart": The storm didn't kill me, the government changed

Definitely kindred songs.
Click to expand...

Nice catch, I just listened to it once (won't listen again since I don't want to derail the album experience. I've already got It Happened Today and Discoverer and been listening to them a lot, so I better stop now. :wink:) and stumbled upon this line on the song and got to think "I'm sure I've heard this somewhere before." This explains.

lazarus said:
We can certainly debate the positives and negatives of listening to a leak pre-release
Click to expand...

Is it just me, or while it's impossible for an album not to leak these days, it also became quite uncommon to see anything leaking more than two weeks before official release? (And two weeks is becoming rare too.)
 
Almost immediately after the song started I recalled reading a comment from Stipe saying there was a song that was a follow-up to Houston, and I thought, "this must be that song", then the storm/government showed up just for firm confirmation.

Attractive little ditty, and I like all of what we've heard so far, but I don't know if I'm ready to believe this album is a big revelation. It's unlikely that it is, I just want further improvement from Accelerate.

And yeah, already having 3 songs prior to being able to hear the whole thing in context is too much this soon!
 
The "album experience" certainly isn't the only way albums are listened to, nor should be be. I don't see the problem listening to tracks like this.
 
If you're talking about disposable pop music, maybe. But if artists are arranging their songs in a particular order for various reasons, that is how they SHOULD be heard, and how I want to hear them.

Would you like to watch scenes from an upcoming film in random order? While they aren't as self-contained as songs on an album, the band members are directors of their long-playing work and if they are actual artists (like Radiohead, Shuttlecock, R.E.E.M., etc.) then their choices in this regard are worth respecting.

:shrug:
 
yeah, i agree with laz as well.

also, i can't think of any album by any band in the past where i've checked out leaked tracks before release day and it hasn't been somehow detrimental in the end. if i have any inkling as to which songs 1) i immediately enjoy, 2) don't particularly like right away, i'm not going to sit down and listen to the album as a whole in the order it's supposed to be, ever. or i might someday, especially if it's a very solid album. but the chances of that are pretty slim, and i miss out on stuff when that happens.
 
Worth respecting sure, and it depends on the album, as something far more symphonic and structural of course coheres most strongly as a unified piece. However I think your film comparison is just short of absurd, and given how enthusiastic most of this forum (and most music fans in general) are about playing around with alternate tracklistings and creating playlists and soundtracks and the like... I think it's more than clear the primary "unit" of most musical artists (not exclusive to "disposable pop music") is the song. Songs which so happen to be most commonly packages in LPs, which yes, is certainly a creative art unto itself, and the best of which display a cohesive sense of thematic unity. But hearing a song divorced from its album (or performed in concert?) which is likely how it was conceived in the first place is hardly some sort of artistic injustice, though I respect the long-form and your own listening preferences of course.
 
In other words, I think if you're just compelled to make an analogy to film, the most appropriate parallel to a shot/sequence/scene would be a line, a measure, or a verse (etc) of a song.
 
After listeting to three tracks, I got the impression that the new album is gonna be very reminiscent from Out Of Time.
"Oh My Heart" and "It Happened Today" imediatelly reminded of new versions of "Half The World Away" and "Texarkana" respectively, due to the (maybe too) strong similarities.
"Discoverer" has some Out Of Time (as well as Monster - the bassline and the second guitar), but it feels mostly as a New Adventures In Hi-Fi outtake.

I enjoyed the 3 songs, better than 60% of Accelerate, but they're too obviously reminiscent from the past works.
 
One of the big local record stores in Seattle (Easy Street) tweeted that Peter Buck had given them a sneak peek of the album the other day. No follow-up with details, but they did say "REM's gorgeous new album" in the Tweet.
 
hmmm just heard a few of the songs- can't say that any of them sounded that good- or that bad- sort of middling REM- with echoes of past glories, but not as good.

I don't think it will be another disaster like Around the sun though- along with Radiohead's OK Computer is the most boring album I've ever heard
 
You might be able to call Amnesiac boring, but OK Computer?? Even as one of the few who isn't always drunk on the RH Kool Aid, I can't fathom how OK Computer could be boring.
 
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