by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published November 14, 2015
Reckoning
released April 9, 1984 I.R.S. Records
“It seems they’ve relocated from Murmur’s front porch into the garage, while overall retaining the rural, folksy tone.”
And so, onward. The second act, especially in the face of sudden, unexpected success, can be one of the trickiest maneuvers to pull off in the music industry—the dreaded sophomore slump. I don't know if the members of R.E.M. were already aware of the groundswell of accolades for Murmur by the time they started work on Reckoning, which was released in April of 1984, almost exactly one year after their debut album. I also don't know whether this was a batch of songs that didn’t make the cut for the first record, or newly-written material. Some artists will make a stylistic break to avoid being pigeonholed, but that often feels like a self-conscious decision to avoid a retread, instead of following a natural muse in a new direction, and the music suffers for it. Reckoning, on the other hand, feels like a natural extension of Murmur's aesthetic, with maybe a little more muscle on it.
Instead of engaging in wanton speculation, however, I should probably hand the reins over to my learned co-conspirator and co-author, Tom, who might actually know the answers to some of these questions. (Once again, Tom's text will be right-aligned to visually separate our viewpoints.)
I'm pretty sure the band knew about the accolades coming their way by the time they started recording Reckoning, but they probably didn't have much time to think about it. The album was recorded very quickly, and it seems they—and their returning production team of Mitch Easter and Don Dixon—benefited from their earlier recording experiences. And they also benefited from their constant touring, as many of these songs had been road-tested and were probably easy to bash out in the studio.
Not that I knew much of this at the time. I was still heady with the newness of Murmur, enjoying it for its seemingly self-contained world when, all of a sudden, less than four months after hearing that for the first time, yet another new album appeared. I have a vivid but strange memory of playing this album on Easter morning at home with my Mom and sisters as we, yes, hunted for Easter eggs (the final time for me, at the age of nineteen!).
Overall, I found this album more direct in its approach, but I immediately gravitated to the murky, Murmur-like "Time After Time (Annelise)," with its thudding drums and somewhat Eastern feel. I also loved the single, "So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)," with that guitar riff that's both beckoning (ha) and sardonic.
The main thing I did not like about the album was that it was shorter than its predecessor, but I was in luck, because there was still that Chronic Town EP from 1982, which I picked up not long after—five further enigmatic songs that did actually have more in common with their new album than Murmur, as far as their directness and aggressiveness. And now that R.E.M.'s tentacles were sunk deep into me, I started keeping up with their singles, too, which ended up being repositories for some pretty wacky ideas, my favorite of which was surely "Voice Of Harold"; this track consisted of the instrumental backing of the new LP's standout "7 Chinese Bros." (they did love their quirky punctuation in those days), over which Stipe sang the liner notes to a gospel album ("LST-3-9-oh!"). I've always found their sense of fun infectious and spontaneous, especially in those early days.
So after a thoroughly Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe-soaked summer, I returned to college in the fall of 1984 where, although my roommate Rich was a huge music fan like me, I started to meet other friends who shared my passion for R.E.M. in particular.
When my future wife and I first moved in together in the early '90s, we collated our respective CD collections. While I can't say for certain at this remove, I probably contributed three R.E.M. titles to the pool: Green and Out Of Time for sure, and I'd guess I had probably also retroactively picked up Document by that point (and this excludes any cassette media we were phasing out by that time, like my copy of Eponymous). Her contribution was Reckoning. For owning only one R.E.M. album, circa 1991, it struck me as odd that Reckoning would be it (nor was that the only example of a head-scratcher title representing a band in her collection). It felt willfully arcane—like hipsterism, in an era before I had that descriptive term at my fingertips—and made me suspicious of it. I took it as an indicator that it was probably a difficult album to embrace. She explained that it was hankering for a song she couldn't hear on the radio—"Pretty Persuasion," in this case—that induced her to purchase it. Still, I couldn't shake that groundless bias. I'm embarrassed to admit that, in all this time, I've never given it a fair shake. The manner in which I was introduced to it engendered a vaguely-defined wariness that went unquestioned. It's not as though I woke up every morning stubbornly thinking, "No, I will not listen to Reckoning today!"; just that, filed away on a shelf in a cabinet overflowing with hundreds of beloved titles, it became invisible. My initial resistance created a fissure in my brain, and Reckoning fell into it. (I've never collected their singles, but both "Voice Of Harold" and the entirety of Chronic Town were included on Dead Letter Office—their cleverly-titled odds-and-sods collection from 1987—so I do have them. I like when bands use unreleased songs as b-sides, in large part because it makes the tracks that made it onto the album proper feel culled; carefully chosen and assembled for the most cohesive artistic statement, even though that may not reflect the process at all.)
My opinion on the Reckoning material I knew (i.e., the two songs from this record that made it onto Eponymous) was split. I enjoy the saloon piano, the harmonies, and the (relative) vocal clarity of "(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville." An actual R.E.M. singalong! However, my potential appreciation of "So. Central Rain" is undone by the repetition of "I’m sorry" in that almost-whining register. I like the music surrounds it well enough, but that part wears thin on me.
Now I have a digression, which paves the way for a later digression: The liner notes of the CD I have are woefully spare. And vexing. The front cover image has the song titles embedded in the image. The two aforementioned songs are there, as “Rockville” and “S. Central Rain.” The back cover and the disc itself list them as “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville” and “So. Central Rain.” The hand-lettered tracklisting on the insert has them as “Don’t Go Back To Rockville” and “Southern Central Rain (I’m Sorry).” When the song titles are this fluid, my OCD starts flaring up.
Yes, there absolutely are albums in my collection that I've treated the same way. Maybe I read something good about them, or maybe I bought them because they were "historic," but for whatever reason, they just never really connected with me. And it does kind of bother me that many of these song titles are maddeningly undefined, and yeah, it got a little precious over the years with the numbers and the missing apostrophes, but I do like the "I’m sorry" refrain, maybe because it's just satisfying to throw your head back and belt it out. I will admit that the "ohh-oh-oh"'s in "Second Guessing" used to wear on me a bit, though.
"(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville," as I'll call it, was definitely another highlight for me. Mainly written by the bassist, Mike Mills, it was an affecting little tale of yearning, with just enough of a hint of archness that it didn’t get maudlin. "Pretty Persuasion," which you mentioned earlier, seemed almost cheaply catchy, but catchy it is. "Little America," which closed the album, fooled me and probably many others with the "Jefferson, I think we're lost" line, making it seem as if they were making some kind of state-of-the-union political statement, but in fact it was just an inside joke about their manager and their hapless journeys getting from one gig to the next.
As for my long overdue first impressions of the rest of the album? I've been a damned fool. It opens with a five-star winner, "Harborcoat." (Granted, if the song was not called "Harborcoat," I would have absolutely no clue what he was saying.) This may or may not be the earliest example of Michael Stipe and bassist Mike Mills delivering dueling lead vocals, but it's the earliest example of it that catches my attention. Tightly propulsive verses that launch seamlessly into a buoyant chorus of interwoven voices that skates over the top of it all. Oh, I like it. I could see adding it to my list of favorite R.E.M. songs. "Harborcoat" is followed by "Seven Chinese Bros."—another standout, and the catalyst to doing this catalog reassessment in the first place. In fact, all of the uptempo tracks are hitting my ear favorably, and they are plentiful: in addition to those already mentioned, there's "Letter Never Sent" (which follows "Second Guessing," and features its own run of "ohh-oh-oh"s and slightly more clipped "uh-uh-uh"s), and "Little America." It seems they've relocated from Murmur's front porch into the garage, while overall retaining the rural, folksy tone. I may actually enjoy this one slightly more than Murmur. The only track that I seem to be losing patience with is "Camera," the slowest (and, by nearly a minute and a half, the longest) song on the record.
Wrapping up my part with my second digression, going back to the shortcomings of the album's liner notes: The booklet does one-up Murmur in that instead of listing the band as four first names, it gives their full names and primary instruments; but it doesn't say who's playing the piano. So I'm wondering if the remastered two-disc reissues of the past decade vastly expand the recording information and liner notes. And that reminds me that I'm curious if you've been keeping up with the remasters (I have a couple of them, but of later titles), and what kind of sonic overhaul an infamously murky record—Murmur—receives when remastered.
Humorously, the deluxe reissue's credits actually give less info on the band members than the previous CD (although there are extensive liner notes that cover most of that—and by the way, my guess is that it’s Mike Mills on piano on "Rockville," since he played that live on later tours). So, no, they have not always made it easy to get to know the musicians behind the music, which I guess was by design, and it was probably part of the appeal for me: kind of like anybody could do it. That idea was certainly reinforced in their MTV appearance that year on I.R.S.'s The Cutting Edge, where they're all sweaty and geeky-looking in some back room playing random tunes, or when they made a video of all of Side 1 of Reckoning out of just a meandering segment of black-and-white footage of them wandering around, or even when they put out a live track on a single B-side where audience members are heard shouting out requests, drowned out by one drunken-sounding lout shouting, "Nothin'! How about nothin'!"
As for the remastering on these 25th-anniversary reissues, I have to admit I haven't given a whole lot of time to assessing the remastering itself, other than to notice that it was a little distracting that it sounded different from what I was used to; I have been enjoying the live shows and demos that accompany them on the bonus discs, however. I skipped that whole reissue campaign that paired their albums with DVDs, but I did snap up the ones that simply added bonus tracks to their first five albums on the small I.R.S. Records label. Plus I have that comprehensive DVD collection that came out last year, but I have yet to get through all six discs of that!