R.E.M. today released a 2:46-long trailer for its upcoming, career-spanning best-of — the 40-song ‘Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage: 1982-2011’ — that also offers up the first taste of ‘We All Go Back To Where We Belong,’ one of three new tracks that will appear on the set, which lands Nov. 15.

R.E.M.’s rare 1981 ‘Cassette Set’ demo tape — 400 copies were sent to labels, clubs and journalists — has surfaced online, giving many fans their first taste of producer Mitch Easter’s original mixes of ‘Radio Free Europe,’ ‘Sitting Still’ and ‘White Tornado.’

This week’s headlines on Slicing Up Eyeballs included a lot of big news about The Cure, plus items on The Mission, Erasure, Gary Numan, The Sisters of Mercy, R.E.M., Lou Reed (and Metallica) and The Jesus and Mary Chain, plus a new Bangles contest.

This week’s link round-up includes a podcast featuring vintage tape of John Peel interviewing the Pixies’ Black Francis, news of The Stone Roses’ upcoming biography, an interview with director Peter Care about the making of R.E.M.’s iconic ‘Drive’ video and a Q&A with Gary Numan about his new album ‘Dead Son Rising.’

The now-disbanded R.E.M. today unveiled the tracklist and cover art for its forthcoming, career-spanning best-of — the 40-song ‘Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage: 1982-2011’ — and announced that ‘We All Go Back to Where We Belong,’ one of three new tracks on the set, will be issued as a single next month.

This week’s headlines at Slicing Up Eyeballs — you know, in case you missed anything — included a lot of news about the now-defunct R.E.M., plus items on Public Image Ltd., The Jesus and Mary Chain, This Mortal Coil, Scruffy the Cat and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

The now-defunct R.E.M. will release its first-ever career-spanning greatest-hits collection — ‘Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage: 1982-2011’ — in November, and Rolling Stone reports the set will include “a handful of tracks” recorded earlier this year.

Given yesterday’s news, it seemed to appropriate to dust off and post this episode of my Slicing Up Eyeballs show on Strangeways Radio from March 8, a show devoted entirely to R.E.M. to mark the release of the band’s 15th — and now, it turns out, final — album ‘Collapse Into Now.’

Three days after R.E.M.’s 2008 tour wrapped in Mexico City, the band posted this six-song, 39-minute encore set from that final concert — an appearance Michael Stipe told fans would be ‘our last show for a long time,’ but now stands as the group’s final performance.

R.E.M. — the iconic college-rock band that soared to major-label uperstardom in the late ’80s and early ’90s before suffering the loss of a key original member — announced today that it has ‘decided to call it a day as a band’ after 31 years together.

Much has been made about the loss of album art in the download age, but pop-culture maven Matthew Chojnacki argues that even more endangered are the 7- and 12-inch single sleeves of the 1980s — ephemeral splashes of music history that he’s compiled in the new book ‘Put the Needle on the Record: The 1980s at 45 Revolutions Per Minute.’

For this week’s installment of Vintage Video, we bring you this pristine, 95-minute R.E.M. concert filmed on the ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’ tour on Oct. 2, 1985, for the German TV show ‘Rockpalast.’

The members of R.E.M. have made no secret about how influenced they were by The Feelies’ 1980 debut ‘Crazy Rhythms,’ and in this May clip, we see the reunited band salute their admirers with a high-energy run through ‘Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)’ off 1982′s ‘Chronic Town’ EP.