R.E.M. - Fables of the Reconstruction (1985)

1) Feeling Gravity’s Pull; 2) Maps and Legends; 3) Driver 8; 4) Life and How to Live It; 5) Old Man Kensey; 6) Can’t Get There from Here; 7) Green Grow the Rushes; 8) Kohoutek; 9) Auctioneer (Another Engine); 10) Good Advices; 11) Wendell Gee
The IRS Years Vintage edition bonus tracks: 12) Crazy; 13) Burning Hell; 14) Bandwagon; 15) Driver 8 (Live); 16) Maps and Legends (Live)

Slower and moodier - R.E.M. add subtlety to their arsenal

Key tracks: "Feeling Gravity's Pull", "Maps and Legends", "Life and How to Live It"

Fables of the Reconstruction marks a change for R.E.M. After two albums recorded with Don Dixon and Mitch Easter back in their home country, for the recording of Fables R.E.M. found themselves in the UK, recording with Joe Boyd. It didn’t go quite as expected: the extended period spent in a strange country full of the typical British gloom and rain left the band homesick and miserable. Stipe fought the homesickness by burying himself into the US lorebook - tales of great wild frontiers, mythic individuals and events and the unique characters from where he grew up. Meanwhile the overall malaise affected the music the band came to record. Fables isn’t a melancholy or dark album, but murky might be a more appropriate term. It’s more downcast and the band’s famous energy they tried to especially showcase on Reckoning has been replaced by a number of mid-tempo, contemplative numbers. The cover of the album isn’t a particularly good one but its overwhelming browness and the photos of the band members lurking in shadows make it one of R.E.M.’s most descriptive.

The band turning inwards paves good way to expand on the flashes of new tangents that Reckoning’s more curious sidetracks showed, and Fables is R.E.M.’s most nuanced so far by a long shot. R.E.M. have always been brilliant in treating their album openers as perfect introductions to their albums, and “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” is no exception. It’s full of pathos and mood, it slumbers rather than pushes forward and its driving element is Peter Buck’s piercing, foreboding guitar riff that’s a long way away from the happy-go-lucky jangling of the previous two albums. It’s when the song suddenly brings a string section to take the melody to a fragile, emotionally wraught rise, accompanied by Buck’s squealing guitar before bringing the song down again, that “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” really intones the album’s characteristic nature. It’s a small section of the song but so crucial to it, the pay-off to the ever-rising tension the song otherwise represents: a moment so great that it brings the whole song to a new light. It’s these moments that Fables is all about. The songs are largely one-track, one-tone affairs which come off practically monotonous for the longest while, until a sudden detail emerges that shifts the song to a new rail and absolutely makes it. Fables of the Reconstruction is an album of moods, and its highlights are the details that make the moods come alive.

To put it in another way, Fables isn’t an album where R.E.M.’s songwriting as a whole necessarily shines, but it’s full of moments that stay with you and colour your impressions of the rest of the songs. For some, it’s a staple part of the song like the guiding bass riff and the atmospheric guitar of “Old Man Kensey”, a song that’s on the brink of becoming a slog if those two riffs didn’t carry it afloat, or the gorgeous guitar riff that bridges the various sections of “Green Grow the Rushes” together (Fables is by and far where Peter Buck really steps in, after Mills and Berry dominated the first two albums; his guitar carries so many of the songs here). In others, it’s a single moment that uplifts the whole song. The railroad anthem “Driver 8” is one of Fables’ most famous songs and I’m of the opinion that it’s solely because of its middle 8 which, much like with “Feeling Gravity’s Pull”, pulls out the emotional chord of the song for a concentrated strike, underlining the wistful tone of the song that’s always there but somewhat obstructed, primarily by the little nothing of a chorus. Much of Fables operates on this basis. Particularly towards its latter half, with the stretch of the muted “Kohoutek” and “Good Advices” and the tense “Auctioneer”, it turns into an album where it’s not the songs that necessarily stick with you but abstract ideas of them and individual parts, be it how Stipe raises his voice during the title drop of “Kohoutek” or how wound-up and anxious “Auctioneer” gets by its chorus (if the band weren’t having the best time during the recording of the album, it’s definitely audible in the mood of this song).

That’s not to say that there aren’t a handful of consistently gripping, A-game songs within Fables, and in fact the album is frontloaded with them - and I’d also include “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” here because despite its one standout moment, the way the song rides its lurching melody and Buck’s brilliant guitar riff is consistently excellent throughout and the choruses are sweet in their subtleness. “Maps and Legends” behaves like the big standout single even if it never was one: Stipe’s americana storytelling meets a melodically rich song which has a clarity the rest of the album intentionally avoids, packed with the album’s peak standout chorus enhanced by Mills’ backing vocals. It’s probably the most comfortably R.E.M.-esque song here, but I’m uncertain if the best because its major competition is right round the corner in the tracklist. “Life and How to Live It” is Fables’ concentration point for all of the band’s early days energy, unleashed into a tour de force song where the band relentlessly thrust forward with a hyper pace as Stipe shouts out one long stanza after another. It only breaks for a moment for Stipe to yelp out the title before picking up again, sounding even more frantic as it kickstarts after the brief pause. “Wendell Gee” closes the album in a complete opposite manner: all guns lowered and tension removed, it’s a gentle goodbye into the night where R.E.M.’s grand backing vocal power duo lay their vulnerable lament all over the song and right into the heart.

(There is also the mystifying case of “Can’t Get There from Here”, a song that takes the band’s tradition of once-per-album novelty/style-breaking songs and hammers the point down with its ridiculously cheery, jangly bouncing full of southern drawl and punchy horn sections. It really has absolutely no place on this album, and yet by the end of the song you’re smiling with the band and jamming along to the silly chorus. It’s a song that quite possibly works better outside its context than within, and I’ve really no idea how to place it within these broad categories I’ve created.)

Perhaps the key thing to take away from Fables of the Reconstruction is that it acts a little like a prototype for the band’s moodier side which they’d ride to triumph later on. It’s their first full step outside their original signature sound and like a lot of first steps go, it’s not quite firmly on the ground. It’s an album of lovely moments and sudden gorgeous surprises, bound together by a lot of appealing atmosphere but perhaps not so many real highlight songs. It also admittedly takes a while to grow on you - out of all R.E.M. albums it’s been the most slow-burning of the lot, for a long time being one of my least appreciated of the lot but slowly revealing its charms on me. It’s still not one of the band’s strongest collections of songs, but even now it’s got a unique charm to it that picks things up when the songwriting occasionally falters.

The I.R.S. Years Vintage edition bonus tracks are actually not half that bad. “Crazy” is a cover of a song by the band’s peers Pylon and could just as well have been a lost R.E.M. gem, so well it fits the band’s style; the punchy chorus alone is a lot of fun and it’s actually one of the better 80s R.E.M non-album cuts. “Burning Hell” and “Bandwagon” are two R.E.M. original b-sides and they’re curious if nothing else: the former sounds almost like a R.E.M. take on 80s hard rock (but keeping it constrained enough), and “Bandwagon” is a silly throwaway more notable for Buck’s wildly chord-skipping guitar line than actual merit as a song. The live version of “Driver 8” keeps the reissue series’ trend of suitably enjoyable but kind of pointless live cuts, but the version of “Maps and Legends” at the end is actually an acoustic version which suits the song well, and works well as an interesting alternative take of a great song.

Rating: 7/10