A friend of mine asked me to compile a list of albums that have meant a lot to me through the years as she tries to add important records to her vinyl collection, with the option of including explanations for why they were so important to me. I was able to narrow the list to 25 albums and Im trying to write concise reasons for their inclusion on the list. I cannot be concise, it seems, about music. Heres one of my entries. R.E.M.—Fables of the Reconstruction Okay, here goes. R.E.M. is the band most responsible for shaping who I am as an audiophile. They’re the first band whose releases I specifically sought out, the first band whose members’ names I learned. I sat in my bedroom trying to decipher R.E.M. lyrics for hours, since they never included them in their liner notes until the late 1990s, and Stipe was notoriously incomprehensible in the early years. When I really started to get into R.E.M., it was around the holidays in 1991. My uncle asked me what I wanted for Christmas that year and I said R.E.M. CDs. I specifically asked for Out of Time, the blockbuster of that year, but he didn’t get me that. He knew R.E.M. and he made a point to get me an earlier work, something that illustrated just why they were college rock darlings and why Rolling Stone had dared to rank their debut LP Murmur above Thriller in their album of the year listing of 1983. (I actually just looked up what the rest of the list was beyond Thriller, and it included two albums that are on my “honorable mentions” list: Xs More Fun in the New World and The Polices Synchronicity. Apparently music was pretty damn good when I was 6 years old.) Although for the longest time Life’s Rich Pageant was my favorite R.E.M. album, I realized recently that Fables is a more concise embodiment of 1980s R.E.M., with Stipe wavering between clarity and ambiguity, Buck’s Rickenbacker jangling as Byrds-y as ever, and Mike Mills’ harmonizing backing vocals really coming into their own. It has rockers, folksier tracks, Southern aphorisms, and everything that made R.E.M. who they were. They strayed from this to varying degrees throughout the 90s and 2000s, but it always remained their underlying foundation, except perhaps on their less remarkable penultimate album. “Driver 8” is one of my all-time R.E.M. favorites. It’s the only song I ever specifically bought for use on my Wii Rock Band game beyond the songs the game comes with. “Maps and Legends” has what I think is my favorite Mills backing vocal of all time, “Can’t Get There from Here” is a great relic of Stipe’s lyrical oddities, and the album closer “Wendell Gee” is important to me—it was once my least favorite R.E.M. song of all, and that was when they had a full seven albums to their credit. (I’m not exaggerating—in 1992, I ranked all the R.E.M. songs in countdown form for a really ridiculous party I threw.) That was stupid—not the party, but the ranking of “Wendell Gee.” It’s so pretty. Another classic backing vocal from Mills, and such a great representation of R.E.M. never being able to quite leave the South behind—not that I think they ever wanted to.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 21:58:36 +0000
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