R.E.M.
Reckoning (1984)
I.R.S.
Produced by MITCH EASTER & DON DIXON

On recently seeing 1983-vintage interviews with the members of R.E.M. I was stunned to see just how young they were, just how impressionable and naive and even innocent they seemed. This creates a disparity and yet it explains something. The disparity is, how did these people manage to look so goddamn disaffected and hip all the time (the proto-Radiohead, don't deny it) and keep putting out their relatively disaffected and hip music, even with the rock press taking them under its wing, obsessed like popcrits have been with few bands since Captain Beefheart or whatever? MURMUR was the precursor to a seduction of children. Which brings us to the part I now understand, that RECKONING is reactionary and tentative because it has to be, and it pretends it's not reactionary by being tentative, and it avoids being hurt by that because it's reactionary.

For the seduction to be driven by journalists is such a copout, of course. What kind of asshole of the rock & roll world is it to be the sort of people music store clerks and (oh lord, no) scenesters follow around? Worse, "intelligent" scenesters. Peers the Replacements had scenesters, but their scenesters were immature and nuts, and a lot of them were babes. If R.E.M. was getting laid in 1983, it was probably by Village Voice writers. How did any kind of rock music get driven to this kind of seclusion? "Radio Free Europe" did get jacked up once on American Bandstand, and the kids did dance.

Speaking of "intelligent," what does it mean in a pop group? That's the buzzword people have tossed around about R.E.M. for decades now. They are the "thinking" band. Thinking, of what exactly? "The biggest wagon is the empty wagon is the noisiest / The consul a horse, Jefferson I think we're lost" is a lot of words leading in no direction at all. RECKONING's cover is a coiled snake or a river, a beautiful painting by Howard Finster, in which nothing moves in any direction.

MURMUR created such buzz that no one in the band knew what to do on the follow-up. That's why RECKONING is a collection of ten extremely divided, separate Byrds jangle-songs jumbled together and very mathematically divided onto two sides, labeled "left" and "right". The albums have the same producers, but they are surprisingly different; absolutely none of the subtlety of the first album is evident on RECKONING. This helps it greatly. Nothing could possibly have hurt the record more than to condense MURMUR's mystery into one dirge in a series. RECKONING has neither menace nor dread. It leaps out, many times.

Side One oh god I'm sorry Side Left is five great radio songs with personality beautifully hampered by nervous second-album-by-critical-darling restraint. "Harborcoat" rings out with harmonies that the band and Mitch Easter would have considered outright unacceptable on either CHRONIC TOWN or MURMUR. "7 Chinese Bros." builds to a miraculously rousing chorus that actually begins and ends (compare "Catapult" and "Sitting Still" with their very slight, clipped refrains) and expands the sonic palette with conservative piano. And "So. Central Rain" is the most commercial song they recorded until "The One I Love," hands down, and it is meaningless, completely, but packs insanely prescient emotional power that can shake a person up to this day. "Pretty Persuasion" is a rock song. It really is, I mean. The vocals are a little oblique, at first, but there's drum fills and a meaty structure and a wild chorus and crazy guitars all the way through, particularly at the bridge.

If these songs bring the lack of meaning in Stipe's lyrics into focus, one can hardly argue against the fact that they prove a vital point of his being a master of atmosphere maintenance. A few of the words are excellent, if free of any kind of depth except that which free association can offer. "So. Central Rain" is beautifully written, and who really notices what "Pretty Persuasion" says (aside from the important "goddamn") or what "Harborcoat" means (nothing)? No one, even among those for whom the words do mean everything. Perverse, but true. The invisibility and simulated intricacy of those words actually adds to the surreal beauty of the performances, even if it does land far away from the enigmatic mutterings of the band's earliest work.

"Time After Time" is just more disparty. They call it their Velvet Underground song. It drones, of course, droning is the thing to do, but it drones so above and beyond '80s indie rock shtick. It's, like, a song, you know? A beautiful, shimmering, slow, mature song, the one that creates the most gripping chasm between the R.E.M. look, the hipster posturing, and simultaneously connects a line to the revealing duplicity here: The art-school cover, the oblique music videos, the music, they manage that detached pretension, but they also are apart from it. The cover is stunning, the videos are often gorgeous, the image has some kind of reality, the rock & roll is the image. Whether they mean it or not, they are masters of achieving sincerity while retaining a special kind of elevated eccentric status, a skill that would continue to abet them for a long career.

Without compromising great songs or doing much to connect them, the first half of RECKONING scores completely with a technique we'd now consider rather foolish of dealing with a problem by pretending to ignore it. Flip the record over and you witness how the same idea can fail.

The problem begins but is not limited to the songs, three of which are questionable. "Little America" is gobbledygook, but it's fast. "Second Guessing" is stupid, unfinished, annoying, but it's fast. "Camera" is the loser of the album. A tribute to some dead friend of R.E.M.'s, it begins as a plodding power ballad and just gets worse with an insipid guitar solo and steadfast refusal to start moving. The lyrics, curiously, are somewhat redeeming here: "I fell by your bed once / I didn't want to tell you / I should keep myself / In between the pages." The strange, startling confessions have a ring of truth. But the song sounds like a band's tribute to their dead friend. It can't move past that idea and fails to connect for five hideous minutes.

An even more private composition, "Letter Never Sent," does pick up the pace and beckons quite enjoyably in the direction of the sing-song southern folk of FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION, but the only real winner of side two is the novelty, the country tune "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville," easy enough to dismiss as a tear-in-your-beer joke, but in fact one of the most well-written songs on the LP and easily the most direct. The only lyrics on the record to match the sweet, unabashedly smitten lyrics of "Rockville" ("Everybody else in town only wants to bring you down, that's not how it ought to be" is read with such sheepish showmanship by Stipe it can generate the rare involuntary smile) are the simple "Time After Time" couplet of "If you're tired and you're tried, you can find me in my room." Obscurity is all good and well, but R.E.M.'s best moments are when their personalities shine through the rubble, and when, in "Rockville," they give in to their country heritage full-force with a great and lively pop song (formerly written as a thrash number), it is to exist in awe of the management of this and all else on RECKONING. They know what they're doing, but they are human beings always.

RECKONING has its limitations, sacrificing not just the mystery and wonder of MURMUR but a lot of its excitement. However, RECKONING is leaps and bounds above MURMUR in emotional power, with even relatively oblique songs like "Harborcoat" generating chill bumps through harmony and the consistent surprises of melody and production. A beautiful, charming, smart record, it takes the CHRONIC TOWN/MURMUR R.E.M. as far as it can go, almost systematically, exercising in all of its songs one extreme or another of their sound, exhausting it, even. "Rockville" and "Time After Time" break through that wall entirely, with the former seeming to deny it ever existed, and it was through this open door that the band gracefully exited, bound for the next adventure.