This Weekend I’ll Mostly Be Listening to… R.E.M., Murmur

Mysterious. That’s what R.E.M. were this side of the Atlantic when first they appeared. Here was a group from the United States playing a sort of pared down music, staccato percussion, tinny (though occasionally) jangly guitar, basslines that seemed to reference musical developments on both sides of the ocean but a whole lot else too. And in addition to all that mumbled and near indecipherable vocals that reference Radio Free Europe or whatever.  The cover of their first EP Chronic Town, and their first album proper, Murmur, gave little or nothing away. They weren’t rock, so what were they? Given we’re slowly but surely working through post-punk it seems appropriate to mention them. Because in the very early 1980s they were part of that upwelling of post-punk music. And they were conscious of being part of that, while in their own way distinct. On Document they had a cover of Strange by Wire, a song they made entirely their own.

The story starts with Chronic Town. But truth is I didn’t hear that until later and while it makes a perfect companion piece to Murmur that latter album is still a defiant document of its time. It was near perfect. Listen to Radio Free Europe. Very on trend for 1983, political (though in fairness R.E.M. were a political group throughout their  existence, sometimes very very explicitly so) a brilliantly meandering chorus that seemed to take the song in a completely different direction to the verse. There was something positively skeletal about their first album. It’s not that these were musical sketches, just that there was a minimalism there that again spoke of the time it was produced. Other songs I may have slightly overheard over the years though I found them pretty fresh on re-listening for this post (though I’ve always felt conflicted about We Walk – genius or deeply irritating, or both?). Sure, they had a different spin on things. I can still remember the near visceral surprise of how country their second album was, and the lesser but very real surprise of how good it sounded.

Working through the first four albums again it was a revelation to hear just how good they were. Those albums up to Document, are remarkable. The first two or three are arguably the purest, the next two starting to play around with form and point towards their most commercial phase, but even later they always had a knack for crafting interesting sounds and songs. Between Murmur and Reckoning I find it hard to choose though. Don’t go back to Rockville, on the latter is a stunning song. But so are most of the other tracks. Fables of the Reconstruction I know probably least well and it’s a fantastic album on a serious re listen. Life’s Rich Pageant likewise although that I know better. Document is a bit different. There the sound changes. It becomes less complicated and less complex. And I think that’s a pity. From there on out they were in some ways a different band.

Never saw them live, though they were frequent enough visitors to these shores. And I was surprised at how many albums of theirs I had bought over the years – certainly all of them up to New Adventures, though quite a few on tape cassette which meant that they fell off my musical horizon, bar the early ones, later on after tapes were discarded by accident in the late 90s. 

I was always a bit bemused by how successful they became. Their music initially seemed too jagged, too complex for pop. And Stipe’s voice, at times an abrasive thing, somehow managed to work well in that context. But in an odd way they did pop, or their own skewed version of it, well. Their later prominence in some ways overshadows those far from simple earlier albums. It’s remarkable to see where they went in their career. I hadn’t listened to them seriously in years, bar the first couple of albums and New Adventures in Hi-Fi which is a late career high point. In truth I kind of checked out around then and only later listened to their last albums intermittently, in fact I’m pretty sure I never heard their second last one.

In some ways – and I find this genuinely odd, later they didn’t seem to be quite able to break away from their mid-to late period sound. So a lot of the later albums from the late 1990s and 2000s sounded, if not quite retreads, like a band unwilling or unable to put space between them and their previous high points. This isn’t to say they were bad albums, quite the opposite, their last is a fine one, arguably an excellent album from any other group, just that they didn’t seem to move their sound very much forward. Was it that they weren’t that interested in keyboards, beats and so on? So whereas contemporaries such as The Church or whoever were able to explore ambient, downtempo and shoegaze I wonder was there was a certain traditionalism to R.E.M. that locked them closely to a certain sound and more than the sound a certain approach. 

Odd given that both Buck and Stipe were prolific collaborators and producers (a sort of inverse of U2 who have seemed largely uninterested in anything beyond themselves). Perhaps that creativity beyond R.E.M. was enough to sustain them. Which is more than fair enough. Whatever else they seemed like people who genuinely like music, which is no small thing. And one could make a strong argument that they – and in fairness a number of other groups in that period, were responsible for a reassessment of certain tranches of music in the United States – that their post-Byrdsian jangle, their adjacency to country and willingness to use some of its tropes, was important in reconsidering areas of music there that was often dismissed or ignored altogether, bringing something valuable to an entirely new generation of listeners. 

But this was, more or less, where it started. 

And only right to include a few from Reckoning

And here’s some live footage from 1982