Every R.E.M. album, ranked: "Fables of the Reconstruction"
Your friendly reminder that Iām writing about every R.E.M. album in order ā and that I kinda sorta forgot that this means there wonāt be any good way to follow along since this is a newsletter and not a blog post, meaning thereās no adding to it once itās sent, just wholly new emails. Apologies, but hang in there. And Iāll try to increase the pace a bit, as well.
This record sounds like a hangover.
Itās certainly possible that this is because thatās the state I listened to it in the first 200 times I heard it. But there is something about the sound, the songs, the vibe of the thing that just sounds so downbeat to me, a bad mood set to music.
Iām reading an advance copy of Peter Ames Carlinās excellent new R.E.M. book, āThe Name of This Band is R.E.M.,ā out in November (preorder now!), and he chronicles how, indeed, the making of the album was not an especially happy experience for the band. (Iāll leave the details to Peter.) They broke away from the Mitch Easter/Don Dixon production team, went to London to record and made a record rooted in the South. Which youād think would be right up my alley. But, to me at least, it sounds less like Southern Gothic than just kind of out of sorts.
Which is not to say I donāt like it. I do. Itās probably my least favorite of their early albums, which I believe are their best. But it has my second-favorite of all their songs (āGreen Grow the Rushesā) and itās certainly superior to their post-Bill Berry output.
Albums kind of hit you where you live. This one came out in June of 1985. Iād just graduated from college and was spending my days writing desperate letters to newspapers begging for jobs, nights hanging out with my best friend, who had just graduated from Princeton and was on his way to Harvard Law School in the fall. We were, you might say, at different places in our lives.
Maybe this is the soundtrack of an unsettled time for me. It certainly sounds like it was an unsettled time for the band, and thatās reflected in the albumās sound. The weird, not-quite-atonal guitar intro to the first song, āFeeling Gravityās Pullā sets the tone. Somehow āCanāt Get There from Hereā was a single, but it sounds like forced frivolity (and nothing like the band usually sounds). āWendell Geeā is a downer but itās beautiful.
All of which makes āGreen Grow the Rushesā stand out. I canāt exactly tell you why it hits me so hard. Like a lot of R.E.M.ās songs that I love, I have no idea what it means. Did Stipe used to say it was political? I donāt know. I do know that the snippet of a lyric, āStay off that highway/word is itās not so safe,ā is one of my favorite moments in music. Why it struck me, I canāt tell you. But it did, and it still does.
Eventually one of the papers I badgered would relent and hire me. As luck would have it, it was The Winston-Salem Journal, the hometown paper of Mitch Easter, of all people (who read the paper!), and home to an incredibly cool music scene.
So above all, I guess this is a transitional record for me. You gotta go through some stuff to come out the other side.