R.E.M.
Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage
R.E.M.’s first three releases—the “Radio Free Europe / Sitting Still” single, the Chronic Town EP, and then their debut album—released in three consecutive years between 1981-83, like a series of more and more complex gunshots, lay the foundation of so much indie rock to follow. To wit, they are missing in Michael Azerrad’s seminal Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 such that he had to explain why he didn’t include them in the introduction.
Sonically, R.E.M. took the Byrds’ jangly guitars and applied it to the drum patterns of late-70s post-punk, and they perfected this sound called ‘jangle pop’ before the Smiths put out their first album. They were also a democratic band with no member more important than one another; whereas some rock bands’ rhythm sections exist to serve the singer (see: the Smiths where Morrissey dominates the mix), Michael Stipe’s vocals were no more the focal point than Peter Buck’s guitar or Bill Berry’s drums, and the term ‘backing vocals’ was a disservice to the emotional and physical counterpoint that bassist Mike Mills added to their songs.
At least, this was true until their contract with I.R.S. expired and the band did what every other successful indie band did in the late-80s: they signed a major record label and became a version of themselves that was more commercially profitable at the expense of good music. To wit, there are no good albums from there on out. People stump for Out of Time and Automatic for the People, but both are hits in search of albums. Michael Stipe started hamming it up and became an overbearing frontman akin to Bono; not even U2 in 1992 would have written something as bone-headed or slow or dry as “Everybody Hurts,” which makes me physically yearn for “One.” Peter Buck gave up learning guitar early on, resorting to becoming an Em/Am-chord machine; Buck himself once said, “You can’t really say anything bad about E minor, A minor, D, and G – I mean, they’re just good chords.” Yeah, they’re good chords! They’re the first ones anyone learns to play on guitar, but then eventually people learn that barre chords are good chords too. The relatively light sonic experiments that the band tested out during the 80s—“pianos and organs and accordions and banjos and what-not,” Mills once said about Lifes Rich Pageant—are reduced to mandolin.
But their discography up until that point should be considered among the best runs of the 1980s, rivalled only by Prince. Here’s a guide:
There’s a despair on debut album Murmur, lurking just beneath the surface. The lyrics here aren’t inherently sad by themselves, but channeled through Stipe’s cared singing, they become so much more. The line “Did we miss anything?”, angered that we have indeed missed so much, is turned into a snarl in the last instance, “Did we miss anythaaaanahh!”; “Sitting Still” follows “Catapult” with even more anger, “You could get away from me / GET AWAY FROM ME!” Stipe snaps suddenly such that the chorus that arrives later feels different. Ballad “Perfect Circle” feels like a series of disconnected images and phrases—“Eleven shadows way out of place”—that maps out a sadness as Stipe details social anxiety (“Shoulders high in the room”) and retreat (“Standing too soon”). The latter is really brought to life by producer Mitch Easter who takes what would otherwise be a simple piano line and turns it into a stranger sound by harmonizing it with an out-of-tune upright piano. Elsewhere, the metallic clangs on “Radio Free Europe” are generated from a vibraphone. It’s a post-punk album through and through: the opening 12 seconds of “Laughing” would befit Pylon’s Chomp that same year, an underrated band also from Athens. Elsewhere, Peter Buck’s guitar on “9-9” is all angular lines that outdoes Gang of Four in that regard, while Bill Berry’s drum hits on “Radio Free Europe” are a hook on their own (1! - 3! 4!).
Sophomore album Reckoning was intended to be a water-thematic double album and I’m glad they ditched both fronts—although remnants about water remain: “Harborcoat”; “swallowing the ocean”; “rivers of suggestion”; “water tower’s watch”—because what’s left is an album with no narrative. It’s purely about music, which makes it harder to approach. Murmur gets more attention, because it arrived first, but Reckoning is a near-perfect collection of ten songs. Truly, about as perfect as it gets! And one of the differences between this and Murmur is that these are actually songs, with Stipe singing a lot more clearly from here on our, resulting in the clearly-belted hooks of “So. Central Rain” and “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville.” You won’t need a lyric sheet to help you navigate other hooks, but that only leads to further ambiguities; for example, “Jefferson, I think we’re lost,” is an in-joke to manager-tour bus driver Jefferson Holt, sure, but it’s also a harrowing line about the very real political climate that R.E.M. no doubt felt at the time.
The increased focus on songs does yield some underwhelming cuts: “Time After Time (Ann-Elise)” has the hard task of following up the opening four songs, and it doesn’t deliver beyond the interplay between Buck and Bill Berry on bongos; “Camera” strikes for the emotional resonance of “Perfect Circle” but spends almost twice as long not achieving it (it’ll be the first song that I always outright skip on the R.E.M. catalog). But the other songs are impossibly great, with producer Mitch Easter adding a shimmer to Peter Buck’s guitar that makes these songs feel watery in contrast to Murmur’s earthy-atmospheric tone; Mike Mills’ backing vocals on “So. Central Rain” (at the 1:50 mark) feel like he’s falling out of a dream in slow-motion, while the pounding piano in the song’s climax represents Michael Stipe’s emotional, well, reckoning. Michael Stipe is the rare sort of singer that can sing you a line like “There’s a splinter in your eye that reads react” and then follow it up by spelling out the last word, and somehow extract meaning from it all. (I’ll be wearing a harborcoat in my shady lane as I’m living out my range life.) “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville” is the saddest song from that decade not made by the Replacements because the big cities keep churning, and you keep churning in them, and friends and lovers will leave and they don’t come back. The conversation’s dimmed. The trees will bend. The cities wash away.
Fables of the Reconstruction is a return to the rural atmosphere of Murmur, decidedly less song-centric and more groove-centric; less to do about rain and more to do about hiking around after the rain. With the funk-guitar and Memphis horns of “Can’t Get There From Here,” it’s also the only R.E.M. album to sound like it was made by a rock band from the South, despite the fact that it was recorded in England. There’s a gloomy aura over the whole album, recorded shortly after Ronald Reagan was re-elected president; but it’s also fatigued, and ultimately not as special as the albums that flank it. “Maps and Legends” has a half-decent hook but no other draw; “Green Grow the Rushes” feels like a Reckoning b-side with a guitar line suspiciously similar to something Peter Buck already put to tape a year ago (he started recycling ideas so soon); “Old Man Kensey” is only notable because it’s a sad character creation by way of Ray Davies (“Old man Kensey / Wants to be a goalie / First, he's got to learn to count”), otherwise leaning hard on Mike Mills.
But the album is supported by two of the best songs that R.E.M. ever wrote. “Driver 8” has their most bracing riff (Peter Buck will re-write it for “The One I Love”). R.E.M.’s early music is full of questions and answers, and that’s seen here: Buck ‘answers’ that riff with two measures in a higher register because even if the song is one of political fatigue, it is not completely devoid of hope, echoed in sentiment by Michael Stipe’s choruses, “We can reach our destination” which is followed by “But we’re still a ways away,” sung in more of a whisper. During those choruses, Mike Mills adds backing vocals that are a drunken lag behind Stipe which add to the sadness, like he’s ready to give up at any point in time, but his friend keeps pushing him along. And don’t discount the words, with the observations bringing up dread even as they remark on the country’s progress: “The walls are built up, stone by stone / The fields divided one by one”; “The power lines have floaters so the airplanes won’t get snagged.” In another song, the evocation of “sky-blue bells ringing” might be a positive, but in Stipe’s hands and in this context, that the only thing the children can hear are these bells? Nothing but despair. Opener “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” is the other big one, a cracked-charcoal creepy song for the band and a masterpiece of tension and release in a chorus that they don’t fully play out until the second instance so that it feels like the sun peaking out between clouds, only for a moment. And the album closes with breezy “Wendell Gee,” more proof after “Rockville” that they would’ve been the best alt-country band in another universe.
Lifes Rich Pageant is fire and thrust, their heaviest set of songs that are also their mostly overtly political; opener “Begin the Begin” trades Man Ray name-drops for Myles Standish and Martin Luther, while the following “These Days” makes a mantra out of its chorused “We are concern, we are hope despite the times” (note: not we are concerned in the past tense, but we are concern, noun and now). “Fall on Me”’s clean jangle is their most overtly Byrds’ song, except the Byrds never sang about “weights and pulleys,” or “a progress we have found”; they never wrote about a sky that could be bought and sold and one that could fall because the Byrds never dreamt of one that depressing. The first four songs are basically perfect, and as such, the album feels like it’s front-loaded—nicely separated with a mostly instrumental “Underneath the Bunker” letting you know it’s almost time to get up and flip the record—but the second side has “The Flowers of Guatemala” that starts the rich tradition of indie bands mining the third Velvet Underground album instead of the first one (Yo La Tengo released their first album that same year and would basically do that su ccessfully for 37 more years and counting), and the album closes with an incredible take on Clique’s “Superman” that ends the album on a positive note. “I am, I am Superman / and I can do anything” in this context? Invigorating! Their third-best album, and “I Believe” is perhaps their best deep-deep cut (as in one that’s not on their first two albums).
Document is a good EP—the first seven songs, basically—padded out with experiments in the second side that don’t come off; “Lightnin’ Hopkins” is their most overtly post-punk song but also Michael Stipe’s first annoying vocal performance, although Peter Buck does test out the dulcimer on “King of Birds” which will eventually lead him to the mandolin, which is where he settled for the rest of his life. The draws are the three singles released from the album, including the fun-frantic “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” and “Driver 8”-rewrite “The One I Love.” Elsewhere, “Exhuming McCarthy” has an excellent interplay between Buck and Mills while “Strange” is a heartland rock take of Wire’s longest song on Pink Flag. The hook—“There’s something strange going on tonight”—feels optimistic in this take even if the next line is “There’s something going on that’s not quite right.” It’s here where I’ll mention R.E.M. often tributed their heroes: they covered fellow Athens post-punkers Pylon, and the Velvet Underground as rarities compiled on Dead Letter Office, and likely inspired Nirvana to do the same just a few years later (one of the more interesting parts about Nirvana was the humility).
Alas, Stipe’s repeated pleas of “Listen to me” at the end of “Welcome to the Occupation” basically highlights how much the band had changed since their early days, where once upon a time, they told audiences to “listen harder.” It’s like they realized sledgehammers are more effective than subtlety, and as a result, the mystery of their early sound is now all but gone. To reiterate again: there are no good albums from here on out.
Major label debut Green feels over-stuffed with backing vocals, wind chimes, wah-wah guitar solos (where once they refused to put any guitar solos on their albums), whatever, and the highlights are far more groove-based than song-based. Though “Orange Crush” is based on herbicide Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War, the album is not otherwise any more political than Fables of the Reconstruction, and so to hear Michael Stipe polling audiences on “Pop Song 89”—“Should we talk about the weather / Should we talk about the government?”—feels like a cop-out; don’t ask, just do it, dude. Out of Time does have one great song in “Losing My Religion,” but an entire third of it is bad: the opener is a hip-hop-funk-rock hybrid that Stipe assures was “taking the piss of everyone” but doesn’t have the decency of being listenable product; “Low” is a 5-minute dirge that almost scraps together a melody for its chorus but chooses at the last second not to bother; “Endgame” is a pleasant waft that feels like filler. Automatic for the People has the best post-I.R.S. R.E.M. songs in “Man in the Moon” (“Here’s a truck stop instead of St. Peter’s”) and “Nightswimming” (a touching ballad that feels like “Perfect Circle”’s sequel), but the album sags in the middle. “Ignoreland” mixes techniques from “Sidewinder” (compare “defense-defense-defense-defense” to the “sub-sub-sub-substantial”) and “Man on the Moon” (“Yeah-yeah-yeah” choruses) while predicting Monster on its way, and “Find the River” feels superfluous after “Nightswimming.” Opener “Drive” has a good guitar line, but the repeated “baby”’s are so beneath the Stipe of just five years ago; the choruses of “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” smushes so many syllables together that it became a running joke for R.E.M. fans.
Monster gets louder, befitting the post-Nevermind era, but it’s stuck in mid-tempo. The first few measures of “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” are just begging for the guitar to go into overdrive—some real kick some journalist’s ass volume—but it just opts to flatline for 4 minutes; Thurston Moore guests on “Crush With Eyeliner” in one of those musical Where’s Waldo? bits (see also: Mike Mills on the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Soma”), which feels like the exact same chords, tempo, and volume as “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth.” Some people go to bat for New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and to be sure, it has some very good songs, the most out of any major label R.E.M. album, namely “New Test Leper,” “Electrolite,” and “E-Bow the Letter,” the latter which makes use of Patti Smith as a texture instead of the boring voice she became. But the rest of the album is more Monster mid-tempo (and why wouldn’t they sound like that when they were recorded live during the Monster tour); “Leave” is a failure of an electronic-rock crossover attempt, and it’s placed as the 7-minute centerpiece.
Up is R.E.M.’s first album as a three-piece; Bill Berry suffered a cerebral aneurysm on-stage, and after recovering, left the music industry to become a farmer, and ultimately saving some dignity as the rest of the band flailed about without him (only returning when the tour money was good). Whereas Berry often helped lay the foundation of new songs with Peter Buck, the band now have to figure out how to write their songs anew. Replacing Berry are some session musicians, but notably an embrace of drum machines, hence the trip-hop drums of “Walk Unafraid,” aligning Up with what the Smashing Pumpkins were doing without Jimmy Chamberlain on Adore that same year. “Airportman”—whose title evokes Brian Eno’s Music for Airports—is a daring opener for the band, a twinkly piece of ambient music with a strangely intrusive bass part, but then it’s followed up with “Lotus,” the worst song R.E.M. put out at this point, where Stipe sings “Haven’t you no-tussssed / Oh, I ate the lotus” as obnoxiously as possible. (Truth be told, I never made it past the first chorus.) There are too many droning songs in search of a melody, an actual hummable, tangible thing (the last three songs are 15 minutes that go on for 30), with only “At My Most Beautiful” standing out with its Brian Wilson layering (although those ‘do-do-do’’s sound ridiculous here). Radiohead fans will appreciate Up for inspiring Radiohead to change their own sound for Kid A by similarly ditching rock, but I also wonder—given the precedent established by David Bowie and U2 before R.E.M.—if Radiohead would have gotten there on their own anyway. (There are a few Radiohead-R.E.M. connections: the cover of The Bends looks like the cover of the “Nightswimming” single; Michael Stipe based the lyrics “Disappear” on “How to Disappear Completely” which Thom Yorke based on a conversation Stipe had with Yorke; the lyrics of “A Wolf at the Door” reference falling skies, etc.)
Personally, I hate what Up represents: R.E.M. were a democratic band, and after the departure of one of its founding members, they should have made the democratic decision to call it a day, where we would not bothered receiving Reveal or Around the Sun, the band’s flat-out worst albums. There is something corny about the way Stipe sings “Humming / all the way from Reno,” practically punctuating each line with an exclamation mark, and there’s yet another rap-rock crossover on Around the Sun that just doesn’t come off. “I’ll Take the Rain” is dramatic as the title implies, but it’s the best song across these two albums.
With the band themselves disappointed in Around the Sun (Peter Buck: “just wasn't really listenable,” although Stipe is fond of “Electron Blue” for whatever reason), Accelerate is a conscious attempt at proving that there’s still blood pumping in their veins. It’s their loudest and fastest record. It’s also not very good. “Living Well is the Best Revenge” has a guitar line reminiscent of Document that the band essentially repeat on acoustic on “Until the Day is Done”; “Sing for the Submarine” references a bunch of songs from across their discography but runs 5 minutes on an album where most of the songs never breach 3 minutes. Closer “I’m Gonna DJ” is emblematic of the album as a whole: sure, it bristles with confidence, but does it mean anything to anyone when Michael Stipe yells “I’m gonna DJ at the end of the wurrrrld!” (No.) Final album Collapse Into Now softens up, but it’s a feeble-fuck nostalgia-fest: opener “Discoverer”’s ringing guitar line —> “Living Well is the Best Revenge”; “Überlin”’s melody —> “Drive”; “Blue”’s Patti Smith feature —> “E-Bow the Letter.” “Walk It Back” is a very simple but—for the first time in eons—uncontrived ballad, as is the band’s non-album final song, “We All Go Back to Where We Belong,” released as their farewell single (and reason to buy one just one more best of compilation).
Their songs got more laboured and slower as the years toiled on, which is why some people say that the best thing they ever did was the Chronic Town EP that preceded any of their albums. Me, I’d say third after their first two albums, but I appreciate the sentiment. “Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)” has one of my favourite moments in their discography, at the 0:58 mark where Mike Mills harmonizes with Michael Stipe with a really droning bass vocal. “Wolves, Lower” is their scariest song; the bridge is the sounds of a plane suddenly nosediving followed by a scream that’s pure terror, while “1,000,000” is their most straight-up punk song. And “Gardening at Night” is their most psychedelic song, using what sounds like a guitar manipulated into a sitar to give it a George Harrison Beatles’ song circa 1966 feel. The few snatches of lyrics there that are instantly decipherable are profoundly devastating: “They said it couldn’t be arranged” and “Gardening at night just didn’t grow.” This EP and their first few albums are all gray colours hiding a grayer reality. “Did we miss anything?”
Chronic Town - A Murmur - A+ Reckoning - A+ Fables of the Reconstruction - A- Lifes Rich Pageant - A Document - B+ Green - B Out of Time - B- Automatic for the People - B Monster - C New Adventures in Hi-Fi - B Up - C Reveal - D Around the Sun - D Accelerate - B- Collapse Into Now - B-