TS: R.E.M.'s Murmur vs. Reckoning

Murmur is more consistent: there aren't songs as meandering as "Camera." However the songs are punchier on Reckoning - the singles sound like radio singles.

Mad love for both.

(xxpost! Alba OTM)

"Letters Never Sent" may be my favorite REM track, so I have to go with "Reckoning", but "Shaking Through" is my 2nd favorite...

a whack of xposts Yeah, what everyone else is saying.

xpost Hm, you're right, there is something magical I almost don't want to admit about some of the Murmur songs. I need to be in a really wussy mood for it but you're right.

multi-xpost to Alba's "R.E.M of today" comment:

Yeah, I know. I mean, "Man On The Moon" is a good song, but when I see people listening to The Best Of R.E.M: The Warner Years I think "Isn't that an oxymoron?" Except that when I think, I don't use big words like 'oxymoron.'

Both are beautiful. Psych-folk-disco! I keep meaning to through on some early R.E.M. and always forget.

Yeah, I think the songwriting was still getting better there. The reason people (myself included) don't like it as much as the first two is that it doesn't sound anywhere near as good. Can you imagine Fables with a Murmur-style production?

Robots are brilliant, but Berry had a fine style of his own.

(I hope I'm the first person to refer to "uncut funk" in a sentence about R.E.M.).

Anthony is right about the psych-folk-disco sound and the pre-Reckoning stuff. What happened to the rhythm section after Murmur? I've wondered that for a long time.

"electrolite" is indeed good but you have to get through "so fast, so numb," "zither" and, what I might consider their worst song ever, "Low Desert," to get to it.

Sigh, I'd like to hope this won't be another fuck-up like the recent New Order reissues. But I'm a pessimist. I reckon we'll see a lot more releases like this before the record industry as we once knew it finally collapses.

I like Murmur about a million times more than Reckoning. Although I love a lot of R.E.M.'s albums, Reckoning just isn't one of those. Don't know why, maybe something is wrong with me...

Nope! Murmur is 50% better than Reckoning, I'd say.

Always seemed pretty clear to me that he was singing "Silly tryin' for the big kill—waste of time sitting still," which, if nothing else makes far more sense than any of the transcriptions suggested above...in the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't ambivalence that would permeate American underground rock for the next decade. On my copy, the lyric is clearest the first time you hear it.

The versions you get from the various lyrics sites are most amusing, though. Can't remember what the 33 1/3 book about Murmer provided.

It's hard for me to recall now, unless one of the early songs catches me off guard, just how odd they sounded when I first heard them. I mean, there were bands that had hints of that old American spookiness, and obviously a zillion bands around then that twitched and jittered, but REM did both, and they seemed simultaneously familiar and unnerving.

Chronic Town still sounds the oddest, and it's still the most propulsive—I wish there were more material from that patch. "Stumble" is bit of a drag, but the "Carnival" and "Gardening" are magic.

They'd write great songs throughout the 80s, but for me their sound got less interesting as they went along, so I'd go with Murmer over Reckoning, but I think I might now take Chronic Town over both, short as it was.

i've always heard "see them try for the big kill, wasting time, sitting still." but then again, i want him to be singing "we could gather, throw up beer." both these albums are fantastic. murmur sounds to me like an artifact of a band amazed by how good they are right off the bat, able to follow up "chronic town" with a monster twice its length. but for my money the sound of reckoning hearkens more to the "chronic town" kudzu spookiness the cover of murmur depicts. i can't choose. i can't choose between any of their first four albums. they're all great

There's a bass part on Radio Free Europe, the build up to the chorus, that gets me going too.

^^^^
this

... which is what, exactly?

Well, both of the first R.E.M. albums were basically jangle pop albums produced by jangle pop "guru" Mitch Easter.

Does 'don't go back to Rockville' partly mean 'don't go back to Rockism'?

http://pix.epodunk.com/locatorMaps/md/MD_2764.gif

Yes, there is a place called Rockville; thanks for locating it.

Does 'don't go back to Rockville' partly mean 'don't go back to Rockism'?

nope

The After-Party: 'Rockville' and Other Riddles

By Richard Leiby
The Washington Post
Wednesday, October 13, 2004; Page C03

Mystery solved: For years we've wondered whether the great R.E.M. song "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" referred to the historic town that serves as Montgomery County's seat of government. "Yes, that's right," band member Mike Mills, who penned the lyrics, confirmed to us while partying after the Vote for Change concert rocked the rafters of MCI Center. Sporting sunglasses at 2 a.m. Tuesday, Mills and fellow R.E.M.'ers Michael Stipe and Peter Buck mingled at nearby Zaytinya restaurant with a VIP crowd heavy on arty, liberal, more-champagne-please types.

Side 1 of reckoning is absolutely stunning, whereas murmur spreads its glories

side two of reckoning is better!

although harborcoat may be my favorite REM song

no waiiiiiiiiiiiii side 1 rules

camera ruins side 2 for me

camera is pretty but side 1 is better

<3 camera

when was 'all the right friends' originally recorded?

early r.e.m. is the only thing i want to listen to these days.

interesting thread revive i know. I've been listening to the podcast R U Talkin' R.E.M. RE: ME? and that's been the catalyst

i tried to listen to the first episode of that and it was like twenty minutes of inside joke stuff from the previous incarnation of the podcast, and then another ten of them doing jokes about how they didn't know the actual names of the band members. that zone just wasn't my cup of tea, but does it become something else? cause i'd be into a fun REM podcast for sure.

I wanted to like this podcast, but I also couldn't get beyond their unrelated chit chat. Maybe some superfan can extract the good bits and reshare them so we don't have to sit through the bullshit.

lol one of the features of the podcast is them reading the annoyed itunes reviews along the lines of the last couple of posts

do they ever talk about REM on that podcast?

it's usually about 2/3s bullshit and bits (i enjoy the bullshit). the latter third is talking at length about R.E.M. from a personal point of view. so probably not for either of you

yeah not sure what you expect from an REM podcast by those two guys

i had no reference point for those two guys before checking out the podcast, so yeah. jim, thanks for clarifying that!

i would be into, like, the podcast equivalent of perpetua's Pop Songs 07-08 but that too is a tricky formula to pull off.

I love the banter and "Wait, is this an episode of I Love Film?" Their song-by-song takes on REM records are actually the least enjoyable part for me.

It was funny to me, as in the U2 podcast they were both such dorky apologists for the band whereas with R.E.M. only Adam Scott was a superfan to the end.

adam scott to almost every song "this is a really great song".

i quite like their reminisces of being teenage boys getting into R.E.M. That pre-internet way of consuming music where you learned about things by word of mouth or seeing a clip on the tv, and you'd buy the B-Side compilation rather than an album because you didn't know any better etc.

But in R.E.M.'s case you'd get one of their better albums!

true

Most of the songs on both were being played live even at the time of Chronic Town, so isn't there a valid issue centering on song selection and sequencing in the Murmur-vs-Reckoning debate?

I had to go back to http://www.remtimeline.com/ to check

Live sets in the months after the release of Chronic Town were still mostly material from Chronic Town and (increasingly) Murmur ... I think "Pretty Persuasion" is the only Reckoning track that was already a staple, and they'd been doing that one for a while ... several more Reckoning songs showed up later in 1983, after the release of Murmur

I remember reaction to Reckoning among my Athens friends as somewhat mixed; the shift from Nuggets-style covers to originals to a stronger folk influence was happening a bit too fast for our spongy young brains to process

Murmur > Chronic Town > Reckoning

Thanks for the input,, many of my REM bootlegs are un-dated but their style led me to believe they were from the same era.

interesting, the db's blog (Chronic Town demos) shows 'Just A Touch' being demo'd at the '82 RCA sessions, the REM timeline says otherwise.

conversation fear

Back then, I would have said Reckoning. Pretty sure today it would be Murmur, the difference summed up succinctly by Christgau: "...when all this was a tad more spontaneous." (He was talking about a later album.)

My favourite is whichever one I listened to last. Seeing as I only played Murmur yesterday that's where I'm at today.

Thing I love about both of these which seldom comes up elsewhere: The momentary unnamed jams (after Shaking Through, Camera and Little America). Years later they repeated this at the end of Bang and Blame, which could have been flagged up as a particularly self-conscious back2basics move but, alas, has never encouraged as much as a passing mention except on Wikipedia's list of hidden tracks.

Or so it seems, alas.

pavement did the same occasionally and i always assumed it was a nod to early REM

I think the jam “after Camera” is technically the beginning of “Rockville” (“gettin’ in the mood… alright…”). Is there one after Little America(?) That’s the last track on the album…

Whether the first of those jams is included at the end of Camera or start of Rockville seems to vary wildly between releases. On Spotify for instance, it's at the start of Rockville on the old master and end of Camera for the remaster. The one at the end of Little America is (iirc) on the original vinyl, the Sound Lab reissue and the 2008 remaster, but not elsewhere (shades of the one at the end of U2's Boy there).

The Camera/Rockville one is also the best, sounds like they're about to stumble across what became Lightnin' Hopkins. You got it UGH.

Huh, so there was a jam at the very end of the original vinyl? I don’t remember that, interesting

I should have been clearer - it's on some, but not all, original pressings. Someone will have to shed light as to which.

At 3:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g9qeYHOiMY

Wow! yeah, I’ve never heard that before…