R.E.M.: Murmur (1983)

(I.R.S.)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

I was always more fascinated by photographs of the Band than I was by their music. Locked into a ghostly dissonance, a relationship with time obscured beyond recognition, they looked like they sounded, only more so. In The Last Waltz they captured what felt like an integrated-plus-Ringo Starr Civil War-era plantation banquet. The juxtaposition went beyond appearances; something wasn't right about them, deep down, in an industry of pop music bred on image.

R.E.M. set this terminal and distinctly southern-gothic surrealism to music -- more genuine than the Band not least becuase they're actually southern, maybe more because of the layers of terrifying comfort and beautiful chaos in their music. Perhaps the most cerebral band of their generation, R.E.M. is really an issue separate from Murmur except in the sense that Chronic Town led up to it and Reckoning attempted to make sense of it. The handful of rock LPs that redefine the form -- not rock, but the album itself -- always escape the clutches of the artist and lead lives of their own. This band would never record anything remotely similar to Murmur again, but to their credit, no one else would either. Chronic Town could at least be rationalized as rough Byrds or soft Television with enigmatic production from the Let's Active guy. Murmur was earthly but backward, an alien artifact of delicate, seductive mystery that wrapped itself around its witnesses for good, every second demanding almost scholarly attention.

In 1983, the origins of R.E.M. were no less murky than the brooding layers of mush in their music. Out of left field comes this widely embraced recording that attaches itself to the intangible, in a Pet Sounds / Sister Lovers / Marquee Moon tradition of introspective, nonverbal therapy. But the motivations behind all three earlier records were so much clearer, the Beach Boys desperately hanging on to delirious amounts of success, Big Star descending into bitter rage over their lack of it, Television's Tom Verlaine succumbing to the lifelong need to define and respond to the world around him. Nothing is so simple for R.E.M., whose drummer talked of hanging around cemeteries "looking for ghosts" as a favorite pasttime, whose roster on their debut album includes not a single track with a true linear subject; everything is suggestion in what Peter Buck called "spooky gospel." "You pick the words you need to hear," he said, setting up the post-rock empire of My Bloody Valentine's revolutionary Loveless.

The words you need to hear bring you strands of the riveting, distressing, timeless -- the EP Chronic Town was a trip around the world with the artful juxtaposition of the ordinary to create, appropriate to their name, a dreamscape. The spirit has not changed but the mood has. R.E.M. rose to favor, at least for critics like Robert Palmer, with their debut single at the dawn of the indie age, "Radio Free Europe," but the first track on Murmur -- the same song, slowed down and mystified with the organic grace of the music to follow -- rejects the loud/fast aesthetic even of Chronic Town in favor of an elegiac subconsciousness. "Laughing" and "Perfect Circle" pick up tiny vignettes of relationships in transition with a sense of deterioration, the stark, sophisticated music saying as much as the free-association, inexplicably powerful and mostly indistinguishable words. "Circle" surrounds with its delicate, swirling piano for quiet but sobering effect in an astonishing ballad, as beautiful as any of its era. "Laughing" toys with slightly off-kilter vocal harmonies and Mike Mills' bouncing, low-end bass playing for pop music locked simultaneously in the past and future.

The dusty ambience does not stop with the maddening album package, a photograph of kudzu and a practically illegible tracklisting. All of the songs are about decay, all are gleefully evocative with their imaginative wordplay but much more with the endlessly multilayered tracks and the restraint of their boundless energy. As much care was taken with this record as is devoted to most feature films. On "Pilgrimage," for example, the jarring Appalachain opening -- Michael Stipe, the man whose postcards read like the middle of a play without the beginning or end, wailing over random notes on a piano -- builds to another awe-inspiring nightmare of acoustic mush, the Byrds hiding in a Tennessee church somewhere with Brian Eno. But you can't really get anywhere by comparing these things. The music is what it is and there's no hope of explaining it or how it affects you. It does, though, to a sometimes startling extent.

If you're strugging to understand these songs, you're missing the point, which is only to discover the sense it makes to you. The joyous, tower-of-sound chrouses on the tweaked pop perfection of "Catapult" and the fragmented, bizarre garage rock of "Sitting Still" attest to R.E.M. as the band in love with the world and everything in it, the rejection of rejection, of Johnny Rotten's classic "Food is such rubbish." What's stunning about this is how both the simultaneous bliss ("Shaking Through," their most astounding pop construction ever) and omnipresent threat (the rolling gibberish, Yellow Fever assault "9-9," the ominous closer "West of the Fields," and particularly the trad folktale "We Walk") turn this entirely unusual collection into accessible rock & roll music.

Is it rock & roll? It could be argued easily that, say, Eno escapes all prior convention of the genre. Is it even music? Well, few things are more rock & roll than an experience like this, and nothing is more musical. This band's black & white distortion of the south is as artful and lively as it gets, and it remains a uniquely perfect example of the striking mystery and mood possible in the form. Automatic for the People may revise it into something linear, but how necessary is that when perhaps the lack of order is what makes Murmur so moving (and at times so disturbing)?

When "Talk About the Passion," the most conventional song on the album, explodes into cello, that's something you feel, and so is the immersion deep into the woods of Stipe's scarred monologue on "9-9," the corruption of simplicity on "We Walk." Of all these intricately detailed songs, none is darker or more pregnant than this penultimate cut, after which "West of the Fields" feels almost like an afterthought. The track features the lite-folk repetition of a children's song, marred by depth-charge booming that approaches subtly but explodes continually, unexpectedly, with no rhyme or reason. All the while Stipe continues with his simple song -- "Up the stairs, to the landing" -- and the suggestions are too much to consider, like that train roaring by forebodingly at the end of Pet Sounds.

We all know there is a dark side to the south because we've driven down the interstate and we've seen Deliverance. We probably even know there is a beauty, a splendid curiosity, to that darkness. Memories come out of the woodwork and there often are emotions, reactions you can't understand or control. Murmur captures every trace of that far from exclusively intellectual (or southern) phenomenon, and we revisit ourselves as children on "Catapult," "Sitting Still" -- about the frustrations of communication -- "We Walk," "Shaking Through," and "9-9": "Now I lay me down to sleep / I pray the lord my soul to keep / If I should die before I wake / I pray the lord... hesitate."

My ideal soulmate for Murmur is not so much children's folklorist Alvin Schwartz (see Fables of the Reconstruction), who certainly comes to mind, as Clarence John Laughlin, a surreal photographer who sensed the horror in the ideal of the Old South as its romance increased, and responded with beautiful pictures of abandoned plantations slowly turning to dust, of lives left in shambles by the old world, the revolution, and/or its aftermath. There is an elegance to any regard toward the past, whether it's nostalgia or regret or simply discovery. Murmur is about the dark corners of the past, and its untouchably delicate music reaches in our darkest recesses to find it.

[Originally posted elsewhere in 2005.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Eponymous (1981-87)
Chronic Town EP (1982)
Collapse into Now (2011)