R.E.M.
Document (1987)
I.R.S.
Produced by SCOTT LITT
LIFES RICH PAGEANT was a glorious, impulsive, thorough leap forward from the initially intriguing, later claustrophobic trappings of R.E.M.'s first three albums. Their fifth, DOCUMENT, is just as dramatically a jump backward.

It remains their least impressive album because it is their only record to date that is colored by outside influences. What made LIFES RICH PAGEANT such a startling record was the conviction behind its performances, the way Michael Stipe was able to expand his own words, the way Mills, Buck, and Berry could create something so dramatic and expansive behind him, communicating a feeling of vastness and personal intimacy at once. It was a tricky formula; it's far easier to get lost in big ideas than to do something with them, and it's down this unfortunate path that DOCUMENT travels.

On its own, it isn't a bad record and in some ways it's an enjoyable one, but it makes the most tired statements -- and the most indistinct music -- of their career. In the late-Reagan environment of self-satisfied political rock, R.E.M. stumbles into a locked room and fumble around in the darkness, producing a lot of noise and very little that sticks, jumping out in all directions but landing nowhere. It's vast indeed, setting it apart from MURMUR and RECKONING, but it's also impersonal, unoriginal, and forced.

Just as each given song on RECKONING or FABLES expressed the virtues or problems on its album in microcosmic fashion, the first four songs on DOCUMENT all exhibit their own manifestations of the band's cripping new pretensions. Michael Stipe has suddenly stopped singing with his voice; he has become an anonymous robot throwing off random vitriolic phrases ("The time to rise has been engaged"... "Throw Thoreau, and rearrange") that would have been tired enough during the Johnson administration. It may in fact have sounded great in 1987, but it's all too obviously now an antique. "Welcome to the Occupation" is a melodic featherweight anthem with gratingly melodramatic words ("Hang your collar up inside / Hang your freedom fighter"). If R.E.M. wished to make a statement about What It All Means, they would have done very well to tie it in with their proven facilities rather than half-heartedly imitating the leftist cock rock of the MC5 and the Dead Kennedys (see the atonal guitar assault on "Finest Worksong," huge but horrendously self-conscious). Rather than playing on their limitations, the songs of DOCUMENT simply expose them.

Hence "Exhuming McCarthy," which comes close to being a fun track: there's surf guitar, a sample of the McCarthy Hearings, and a bizarre vocal line foreshadowing the cheery nothingness of "Stand." But not only is the song itself a labored chunk of tired ideas, the lyrics are so lacking in irony as to induce more than one cringe: "Welcome to the book burning" is read with smug smarminess by Mike Mills. The vocal performances here and everywhere on the record have no nuance, no depth, and the musicians are only serving the machinery of the time. Well-intentioned or not, it is its own kind of aural slavery.

As to the ANIMAL FARM retread "Disturbance at the Heron House," it recalls "Gardening at Night" as much as "Finest Worksong" weakly imitates "Begin the Begin," as much as "Welcome to the Occupation" apes "Maps and Legends." The band does "Disturbance" proud, but it's a flawed song to begin with, leading in no direction of signifiance, failing yet again to emphasize any noteworthy connection between the song and the listener.

The problems come to a head on "Strange," a cover of a Wire song that should unquestionably have been left on a b-side. R.E.M. covered a song on their last album as well, but it was an obscure '60s pop tune that they moved into and owned; Wire's PINK FLAG is no obscurity, and more to the point, it's a masterpiece of a kind not necessarily out of R.E.M.'s league but at least out of their range of sensibility. It is not an uninspired choice to turn "Strange" into a rock song, but the arrangement is dull, the newfound laziness in Stipe's vocals more damaging here than anywhere else on the LP. In Colin Newman's voice on the Wire track, it sounds as if the song is taking him over, controlling his tics and convulsions; he comes a part of the music rather than simply a technical aspect of it, as had indeed been the case of Stipe's voice on songs like "Old Man Kensey" and "I Believe." Stipe is just reading lines in the most obvious fashion, never picking up any strand of an idea, much less running with it. For all its unorthodox changing and rearranging, it's a cover song of the worst kind: one by someone who likes the song he's singing, not someone who has something new to add to it.

When experimentation is the matter at hand, R.E.M. still retains a degree of vitality. Though irritatingly tuneless, "Fireplace" is an interesting recording, with an oddball saxophone solo and an appealingly apocalyptic image. ("Throw the chairs... the walls into the fireplace.") Stipe's vocals are still bizarrely nondescript. Sadly, one of his better performances on the album is wasted on a far inferior song, the throwaway "Lightnin' Hopkins," blessed as well with an excellent disco introduction complemented beautifully by Mike Mills' wordless wailing. Instead of thinking more heavily about what could be done to turn "Exhuming McCarthy" or "Disturbance at the Heron House" into brilliant songs, they dump an excess of great ideas on a completely unmemorable track.

It's ironic that the R.E.M. album that seems to have been injected with the least significant level of personality -- which is, in the end, what impresses people and sells records -- became their commercial breakthrough. But this is simple enough to explain. R.E.M. poured great effort into creating two strong singles, "The One I Love" -- a calculated and malicious but superficially appealing revision on the "Every Breath You Take" notion of taking a dark fake love song to the top of the charts -- and "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," a Dylanesque joke produced with courageous abolmb by Scott Litt that buils to an exhilirating climax or three. A darkly comic, smart, even charming novelty, but still a novelty.

The songs that rescue DOCUMENT include, admittedly, one of the best that they would ever record, not to mention a creepy-crawling treasure that might well have been at home on FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION. The latter is "Oddfellows Local 151," a brooding meditation with Gang of Four guitars on the redneck weirdos down the street who may be preparing to eat you alive. At least three songs on DOCUMENT mention "fire" in their choruses, but only in "Oddfellows" does the word approximate what the music itself suggests.

And then there's "King of Birds," the easy highlight of the record and a near-peak for the band, a shimmering and entirely unique march that condenses the disparate influences -- Appalachian folk music, far East exotica, the Velvet Underground, even Leonard Cohen -- displayed by R.E.M. in the five years prior into four gripping, surprisingly beautiful minutes. The lyrics achieve a staggering balance of comfort and terror ("a mean idea to call my own" the perfect sequel to "We have many things in common? Name three!"), the performance ever growing in magnitude until the three-pronged vocal sting of "I am the king of all I see / My kingdom for a voice." The track may be the single greatest achievement of R.E.M.'s IRS recordings; it alone makes DOCUMENT worth hearing.

For all the aching brilliance of the band's work on "King of Birds" (such a far and obvious cry from "Finest Worksong"), it is not a coincidence that the two album highlights -- the final tracks, saved for last as if the band was aware of the weaknesses elsewhere -- contain vocals that proclaim Stipe's excellence as a performer rather than a technically proficient pop singer. On "King of Birds," he is as far as possible from the ground but is looking straight down. He's nearly a god, and for the first time ever, he seems prepared to know it.

There was no possible way at the end of 1987 that R.E.M. could continue to be an alternative group. They would expand vastly, as their music had, or they would shrivel up. DOCUMENT corners shriveling and turns away.