Calling out in transit

You know what I need in my life?  Yup - another list to work on!  This one has slightly strange roots though - I love my general music playlist, but at times I feel the need to be a bit more specialist.  So my thoughts recently have been turning to one of my most enduring musical loves - Athens, Georgia's finest, R.E.M. (and I hate those full stops).  My grand plan is to create an R.E.M. playlist for when I'm in the mood for them and the only way to do this is to revisit all their albums and pick three tracks (or maybe four, for their finest efforts) from each album for inclusion.  So let's start at the very beginning (if you ignore Chronic Town, which I have decided to do for the time being) and head all the way back to 1983 - yes, FORTY years ago...

Murmur (1983)

For one of my favourite bands, my impression of their debut album has always been surprisingly "meh" - a lot of that is because my initial entry point for the band was around the time of Reckoning (their follow-up album) but I didn't buy one of their albums until Document (their fifth album in '87 which I bought on cassette) and I don't think I even knew Murmur existed for quite some time.  And then when I checked it out, I just didn't like it as much as the ones I already knew so have rarely revisited it.  Until now...

And, given that I'm going to have to pick favourites, you're getting a track by track breakdown (which is going to be relatively brief for this album, but boy am I going to get boring for later albums!)

(side 1) 

1. Radio Free Europe
Having said that I'm relatively unimpressed by this album, I do like this track - it's classic early R.E.M. for me, being nicely jaunty

2. Pilgrimage
This is like Radio Free Europe but a bit more brooding - it feels quite Velvet Underground to me who were big influences on early doors R.E.M.

3. Laughing
Fine, but not massively different from Pilgrimage.

4. Talk About The Passion
There's a bit more to this one than the previous two tracks - it picks things up nicely.

5. Moral Kiosk
This starts slow and doesn't sound like it's going anywhere but then has some good whooping and yodelling in the middle.  And who doesn't love a bit of yodelling?

6. Perfect Circle
This is nicely slower and hence different - I liked it.

(side 2)

1. Catapult
Not the best track imho.

2. Sitting Still
An improvement on the previous track but not absolutely top drawer though .

3. 9-9
A nice title for the ninth track, this picks up the pace a bit and features some nicely obscure vocals.

4. Shaking Through
Not bad but a bit too similar to "Talk About The Passion".

5. We Walk
This is very different - it's like a indie nursery rhyme.  I quite like what they’re trying to do without particularly liking the track.

6. West Of The Fields
A fine closer, but nothing more than that.

The three tracks I'm selecting for my playlist are "Radio Free Europe", "Talk About The Passion" and "Perfect Circle" - I think they give a reasonable feel of the album.  One of "Pilgrimage", "Laughing" and "Shaking Through" is unlucky not to make it, but when it comes down to it this album just doesn't feel like it deserves a fourth track selected.  Intriguingly, when I listened to it last time, I picked "Shaking Through" above "Radio Free Europe" but I think the latter has to have a place on a general R.E.M. playlist.

Wikipedia tells me that IRS (their record label) wanted the band to have the album produced by Stephen Hague rather than using their usual producer, Mitch Easter.  Which they tried for a bit but they HATED everything he did (like making them record everything over and over and then adding keyboard sounds on top of it) so much that they pretty much told the label they were going back to Mitch.  And when you see that Stephen went on to produce a load of Pet Shop Boys, New Order and Robbie Williams albums, I think it's probably best that they parted ways when they did.  

This album is apparently a fine example of "jangle pop" - which is a phrase I don't think I'd heard before.  It's also quite an unusual R.E.M. album because the sides aren't named - more on this in later entries...

The album cover is apparently an old railway trestle in downtown Athens overgrown with kudzu ("a noxious weed", apparently) which the local authority wanted to demolish in the late 90s but there was an outcry because it had become to be known as "the Murmur trestle" - it received a stay of execution until 2020, but it's probably gone by now.  There are plans to build a replica, but I think we know how likely it is that that will happen.  

The critics all LOVED the album - Rolling Stone declared it their album of the year ahead of Michael Jackson's Thriller, The Police's Synchronicity and U2's War.  I think it was a very different sound at the time - I'm trying to think of anyone else from around then that sounded similar and failing.  I do accept that it sounds a bit dated now but I also think that argument was also probably just as true back then.

Commercially, the album was a bit of a disappointment (for the label at least) - it peaked at #36 in the US charts (which seems pretty reasonable to me) and "only" sold 200k copies in the first year, but was certified gold (500k) in '91.  Over here it has an interesting chart history with just the one week in the charts - peaking at #100 in '94, which is weirdly impressive.

I do like this album and yes, it does deserve a lot of credit for being a very accomplished debut, but it's just that there are, for me, so many "better" R.E.M. albums that I'm very unlikely to single it out to listen to.  However, it will at least have a fair representation on my playlist going forward and hence I might be reminded of it a bit more frequently than I currently am.  If you've not heard it and you like a bit of jangle pop then you really should check it out - but tbh most people that are going to like this are probably already aware of it.

Reckoning - A finer follow-up