REM'S RECKONING @ 40

This was the first REM vinyl I owned. I'd had Murmur on home taped cassette but didn't even know the song titles. I bought a second hand copy from Skinny's in Brisbane (Queens Arcade?) in early 1985, after a Rockarena special on the band. I put it on as soon as I got home. I very soon learned that, like Murmur, you didn't pore over the lyrics because, when you could actually understand the words, they were so abstract you let them glide by, hoping at some point to get them. Mainly it was the jingling '60s country rock that appealed. Guitars set to hot clean and a growling vocalist whose melodism had instant appeal.

I'll pick out some highlights for this but prefer to leave an impression that the album is a whole experience that offers listening pleasure without great commitment. The record felt like a lingering Brisbane summer and I even think I mixed up a lime cordial to go with it. The wash of plinky Rickenbacker guitar riffing, solid drums and bass that did a little more than it needed to. That's all it had to do.

The second track Seven Chinese Brothers was the one that caught me. A bright upward moving riff with a breezy vocal give way to a chorus that feels much bigger than the rest of the song. So. Central Rain brings the Rickenbacker 12 string electric with a minor key riff. The movement is country rock with a chorus of "sorry" repeated. This was the only clip on Rockarena that had the band playing. Later it emerged that they didn't like mimed videos and this one had live vocals.

Pretty Persuasion is more 12 string jangle, a huge gated drum and fluid tag team vocals of words that defy interpretation but that is an essential of the band's mystique and one they gave up on finding wide success. The song works as an overall sound workout and seems happy to fill your ears with joyous sound. Time After Time introduces different textures like autoharp and takes a more dramatically paced motion.

Side two is almost all sound over meaning but something happens in the pause for the song Camera where Stipe is singing quite clearly over a bass led backing. The chorus lifts with a chorused guitar and a mournful declaration: "Alone in a crowd, a bartered lantern borrowed. If I'm to be your camera, who will be your face?" The arrangement keeps to a live sparseness until the final chorus when Stipe raises the melody on the repeat, as though his grief is breaking free of the duties of a singer and into the real of eulogy. He sounds like he's resisting tears. As it happens, the lyric remembers Stipe's friend Carol Levy, a photographer who died young and violently in a car accident. I didn't need to know that, the genuineness of the emotion is too plain to dismiss. A work of great beauty that is like, if anything, a continuation of the gem of Murmur, Perfect Circle, a lament for lost childhood.

This should have been the album closer but we get two fine chiming bright songs I often used to skip because I didn't want the spell of Camera to be spoiled.

I recall this album strongly as being part of the soundtrack to quitting Brisbane, Queensland, my childhood, and the beginning of my young adulthood. Melbourne felt far more grown up and offered its own challenges. Thankfully, I didn't go politically loopy as I had the last time I moved to a new city without knowing anyone. I did wade through some undiagnosed depression for a few years but the new town brought new adventures and culture. Through that, I would happily return to the sense of happy discovery in second hand record shops and put this LP on, especially when it got warm and sunny. And then, in a strange short-term nostalgia, I would feel pleasantly reset and get on with whatever waited in the next few minutes.

Listening notes: I don't play vinyl anymore so my return listen for this one was done with the splendid hi-res download from HD-Tracks. It's clean, clear and doesn't point to itself as a digitisation (i.e. loudness wars)