Review: 'R.E.M.: A Perfect Circle'

By early 1989 R.E.M. had thoroughly broken out of mere college radio-stardom and achieved the more mainstream variety, having scored two genuine top-ten hits on Billboard's Hot 100 chart. That same year, Tony Fletcher published Remarks, the kind of slim, photo-heavy biography that tended to follow an artist's ascent at the time. Over the years, Remarks swelled and shed names, coming closer to the serious, in-depth biography called R.E.M.: A Perfect Circle published in 2013. R.E.M. had officially broken up two years earlier, and Fletcher vowed that milestone was a good excuse to call it quits with further updates. 

So Omnibus' new reprint finds Perfect Circle in the very same state it was in thirteen years ago, not that there has been absolutely no Athens action since 2011. R.E.M. reunited to play "Losing My Religion" when they were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2024 and jammed with Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy on "Pretty Persuasion" during a surprise appearance at Athens' 40 Watt Club a year later. Nevertheless, the guys have committed to never fully reuniting again, so aside from a couple of footnotes about these dainty reunions or info on whatever extra-R.E.M. activity they've gotten up to over the past decade, there wasn't much Fletcher could have added.

It's still good to have Perfect Circle back in print. The author does a good job of tracing R.E.M. from their days playing college parties in Athens on through their nineties mega-success and approaches their music intelligently. Possibly because he'd only personally interviewed Peter Buck, Fletcher tends to depict the band members a bit too tightly in line with their "enigmatic" reputation. He provides a somewhat simplistic definition of each man (Buck, the rocker; Michael Stipe, the artist; Mike Mills, the musician; Bill Berry, the businessman), but none emerge fully from the shadows, which is what you want when bathing in the mystery of Murmur or Up but probably not what you want when reading a biography. Even in his interviews, Buck keeps matters professional, not personal. It's still a worthwhile addition to any college rock library.