R.E.M.
Murmur
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NATN Recommended
R.E.M.
Murmur
IRS, 1983
RiYL: Television, the DBs, Love, the Rolling Stones' Aftermath |
The 1983 offering introduced R.E.M. to the masses and endeared them to critics ("Rolling Stone" named the album tops of that year, outdistancing such strong competition as Michael Jackson's Thriller and the Police's Sychronicity). Its subdued garage-folk rock doesn't really sound much like anything that came before or after it, including the group's initial EP, Chronic Town.
The conventional wisdom is that the band members at this early stage of their musical development were pretty much amateurs, and their innocence led directly to their inventiveness. Truth be told, the band was three full years old by the time of Murmur's release, and in terms of songwriting, the young group had put in a considerable amount of work by this point. Guitarist Peter Buck has remarked in interviews that in the early days of R.E.M.'s existence (following their initial covers-filled gig at a friend's birthday party on April 5, 1980), the band wrote and discarded between 25 and 40 songs in an effort to improve through experimentation with their new craft.
Judging by the fact that a few of Murmur's songs turn up on bootleg recordings from as early as 1981, one could surmise that the debut LP achieves its range and consistent quality as a result of compiling the "best of" what the band came up with during its first three years of existing as a unit (while none of Chronic Town's tracks appear, both the A and B sides of the band's debut single are included on the LP in re-recorded form).
But we must also factor in the young group's focus. The four -- drummer Bill Berry, Buck, bassist Mike Mills and vocalist Michael Stipe -- were still basically college kids at the time (though they had quit school), and their sole focus in life for January of 1983 was recording at Charlotte, North Carolina's Reflection Studios with Don Dixon and Mitch Easter, trying to express everything they liked about music in one record. Buck again: "I just wanted to put everything on that record, from listening to the records I loved as a kid. There was no guarantee we'd get to do another one, so there were lots of over-dubs, tape loops, backwards things, weird sound effects."
Berry is the steady sticksman throughout the record. His Charlie Watts-esque restrained style ensures a beat that is steady and can move a song, but only jumps to the forefront in rare instances (the opening salvos of "Radio Free Europe" and "Laughing," for instance).
Buck, on the other hand, is all over the place. He hasn't come into his own as a traditional rock guitarist yet (nary a solo on the disc), and he alternates between picking out sweet melodies or arpeggiated riffs and serving a primarily rhythmic function, interplaying with Mills' bass.
Mills is a melodic force who can rapidly change his focus from accompaniment and rhythmic foil to the music's centerpiece. His darkly tuneful bass lines often introduce the songs, and he also tickles the ivories on a couple tracks, such as the superb "Shaking Through."
Stipe completes the picture with his esoteric lyrics and delivery. His untrained voice is boisterous and exciting at times (the choruses of "Pilgrimage") and softly meandering at others (Berry's wistful "Perfect Circle"). And, due to his creative pronunciations and stream-of-consciousness diction, his vocals sometimes end up functioning less as verbal communication and more as a melodic instrument.
Probably the best example of this vocal inventiveness comes in the aforementioned "Shaking Through." 2.15 into the song, Stipe launches with inspired passion into a phrase that's ostensibly going to be "In my life," but the vowel phrasing in the last word gets stretched out for 15 seconds, the singer's melisma providing a wordless, yet evocative, middle-eight that picks up the song in a whirlwind and deposits it safely at the beginning of a final verse.
The understated production gives the album a cohesive sound built around spare echoes, compression and, reportedly, "subliminal" cricket chirps layered throughout. This all adds to the album's distinctly southern sense of mystery, visually captured well by the cover art of muted black-and-white stills depicting a wooden railroad trestle and a kudzu-enveloped shack.
This enigmatic but beautiful record doesn't really define a time period or make any obvious political statements. It merely stands as a finely-crafted piece of music, one of those albums that stands never to lose its magic. R.E.M. would go on to create several more excellent works of musical art in the course of a well-documented career. But while many of these could be considered their "best" album in one sense or another, the band (or any other, for that matter) has never been able to come up with the equal of Murmur.
TROY CARPENTER | Troy Carpenter founded NATN from a Chicago apartment during the ambitious winter of 1998 with co-conspirators Ben French and Jonathan Cohen. After a five-year stint in New York, he and wife Lourdes have recently relocated to Indianapolis, where he spends days listening to music and nights in the kitchen at Elements restaurant. Musical heroes: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Super Furry Animals. What else makes life worth living: Sushi, Phucty, runs in the park, and the Atlanta Braves.