R.E.M. - Document (1987)

1) Finest Worksong; 2) Welcome to the Occupation; 3) Exhuming McCarthy; 4) Disturbance at the Heron House; 5) Strange; 6) It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine); 7) The One I Love; 8) Fireplace; 9) Lightnin’ Hopkins; 10) King of Birds; 11) Oddfellows Local 151

Upsizing to stadium size, maybe a little too soon. But what a singles run, right?

Key tracks: "Finest Worksong", "It's the End of the World As I Know It (And I Feel Fine)", "The One I Love"

R.E.M. go big. The jump between Life’s Rich Pageant and Document is the largest so far between albums: far from the enthusiastic ramshackle riot of Pageant, Document is super-slick and booming like an American answer to what U2 were doing in the 80s. The production is sharp and gives even the smallest of songs a stadium-like feel, ready to be played for huge crowds. The angles the record covers are similarly big, with R.E.M. becoming more openly political and shaping Document to be a reflection of the political landscape at the time. It’s not quite enough to call Document a deadly serious album but there’s a conscious effort to make it an important one, both topically and as means for the band to reach larger audiences. This is R.E.M. knowingly attempting leap to the big leagues.

That they did. Document features not only the band’s first genuine hit but also their first pop-culturally iconic song. The former is “The One I Love”, a spiteful anti-love song performed like a fiery political fist-pumper: a song that sounds vulnerable in its verses yet rises into a furious chorus designed to soar, Stipe belting out like he’s never done before. The latter is “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”, a wild machine-gun rollercoaster with a ridiculously charming levity and an incredible array of hooks, including so many individual seconds in Stipe’s rapid fire stream of consciousness and the countless different backing vocal lines carrying each other. Both songs are famous enough that they don’t need any further introduction or description, but both are bonafide classics for a reason - “It’s the End of the World” especially so, which will never fail to throw a flurry of excitement whenever it plays, leading into impromptu singalongs wherever it goes: it’s a joyously perfect song. The third single off the album, “Finest Worksong”, doesn’t quite share the immortality of the other two but it’s where the R.E.M.’s ambitions for Document show up the clearest. It’s a huge song, meant to be played ridiculously loud and turned into an anthem. It only suffers in comparison to the other two songs, but on its own it’s a stormer, with Mills’ backing vocals once again stealing the spotlight in the chorus. There are very few songs in the R.E.M. catalogue as colossal as this in terms of sheer weight of the music.

The rest of Document is tame in comparison: not as bombastic as “Finest Worksong”, not as wild as “It’s the End of the World”, not as impassioned as “The One I Love”. Even the token off-kilter cut is just a slightly out of place cover of Wire’s “Strange”, which is decent enough and mainly merits a mention for Stipe changing the lyrics to address himself. The first half of the record is particularly affected by this, with the four-song stretch from “Welcome to the Occupation” to “Strange” being a series of fairly interchangeable rockers, all of which are by and far enjoyable but which only just register. “Disturbance at the Heron House” has a classic Buck riff that lifts it above the others, while “Exhuming McCarthy” is so lightweight it’s borderline twee, and comes off as a somewhat awkward coupling of the band’s lighter side and Document’s general sound and production. Which leaves us with “Welcome to the Occupation”, a good song which feels unfinished as it chugs along on a single track through its short length. It’s not until “It’s the End of the World” that Document really picks up again, at which point half the album’s done. There’s an attempt to make a set of energetic politically savvy rock songs here but it’s not a direction where R.E.M. at this stage shines: as songs they’re fine enough, but there’s only a trace of the band’s signature moves within.

The second half of Document makes a conscious move away from the straightforward rock songs and this is a blessing for the album, because it revives Document’s mojo. “Fireplace” and “Lightnin’ Hopkins” in particular are more in line with what “Finest Worksong” promised all the way in the beginning: almost-anthems with a fire in their belly and a commanding charisma. “Fireplace” sways and tilts with its rhythm alluringly before breaking down into an extended instrumental section starring a sax going crazy: it’s an unexpected swerve not just in the song, but on the entire album and it makes the song stand up even more, if the already interesting first half of the song didn’t do it already. “Lightnin’ Hopkins” meanwhile goes hard - it’s very atypically muscular and beefy for R.E.M. and arguably one of their most outwardly aggressive songs. It’s a rush of power and this time the hit lands. It’s excellent and exhilirating and stands up among the album’s best songs. “King of Birds” is a slight retread of Reckoning’s “Time After Time”, with a similar march-like beat and a dulcimer part that echoes the vaguely sitar-like guitar lines of “Time After Time”. There are worse songs to make a spiritual sequel for, and even if it’s not the most exciting of the cuts here it still has flashes of brilliance to it.

That leaves us with “Oddfellows Local 151”, a somewhat overlong slog of a song that never picks up into anything particularly interesting even if tries to reach for that moody closer spot, which closes off Document in a mildly disappointing manner. It suits Document in that regard: the album aims high and promises a lot (especially if you’ve only ever heard the two classics off it) but it doesn’t quite reach its goals. R.E.M. wanted to prove they can hit it big time while taking advantage of that in order to get the messages they wanted to send out heard, but if anything it proves that purposefully aiming for that scope doesn’t come naturally for R.E.M. They became a stadium band eventually but not through the kind of stadium rock sound they tried to go for here, and R.E.M.’s attempts at it vary greatly. Document is a good album but it’s also one where you can see the cracks more clearly than in a lot of other R.E.M. albums: in an attempt to scale up deliberately, they only managed to muddle up their own sound. And let’s face it - without its three solid classics, it would definitely be rated a notch lower.

Rating: 7/10

R.E.M. - Dead Letter Office (1987)

1) Crazy; 2) There She Goes Again; 3) Burning Down; 4) Voice of Harold; 5) Burning Hell; 6) White Tornado; 7) Toys in the Attic; 8)  Windout; 9) Ages of You; 10) Pale Blue Eyes; 11) Rotary Ten; 12) Bandwagon; 13) Femme Fatale; 14) Walter’s Theme; 15) King of the Road; 16) Wolves, Lower; 17) Gardening at Night; 18) Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars); 19) 1,000,000; 20) Stumble
The I.R.S. Years Vintage Edition bonus tracks: 21) Gardening at Night (Acoustic); 22) All the Right Friends

Discards, throwaways and studio injokes. Not the most inspiring b-side collection around.

Key tracks: "Crazy", "Burning Down", "Ages of You"

R.E.M. were never a particularly good b-sides band. They were a very economical group whose recording sessions were carefully planned out, and any of the rare actual outtakes would be repurposed into soundtrack cuts and such like. Instead, the majority of their occasional studio b-sides were either ex tempore instrumental jams or faithful covers. B-sides were never a priority. The liner notes to Dead Letter Office, a collection of single flipsides across the band’s first four albums, say the band always wanted to keep their b-side game strong in honour of all the curios they had found so interesting from artists they loved.

The actual songs on Dead Letter Office are - nonetheless - largely made out of inessential covers and throwaways, and the same liner notes that raised the b-side tradition upon a pedestal are not afraid to lacerate R.E.M.’s own offerings in that regard. Peter Buck’s track-by-track breakdown of Dead Letter Office’s contents are sharp and unafraid to call the band out effectively churning out inessential off-cuts. He’s not too wrong either. Dead Letter Office consists mostly of inside jokes you had to be there for to fully appreciate them, or quickly thrown together bonus material which the band never intended to make anything meaningful out of. Stipe recites the liner notes to a gospel record over the backing track for “7 Chinese Bros.” (“Voice of Harold)”, the band cover Aerosmith just for the sake of it (“Toys in the Attic”), they perform half-joking originals based on a single idea that amused them (“Burning Hell” is a hard rock song because Buck found a guitar pedal suitable for it, “Bandwagon” crams together as many abrupt chord changes as it can fit), or they just butcher a cover song while completely off their faces (“King of the Road”, where you can hear Mills shout the chord changes to everyone who’s too drunk to remember how the song goes). They are all sort of amusing but it’d be an incredible exaggeration to say any of them is in any way a must listen or a lost treasure, and there’s no reason to ever return to them. At least they’re somewhat entertaining, because at worst Dead Letter Office barely registers in any scale. There’s a grand total of three Velvet Underground covers on the album, and as someone who’s never been a fan of the band the songs themselves are by and far the most boring of the bunch, and R.E.M. do not do anything interesting to them either. The “Toys of the Attic” cover is much the same: as wild as the idea of R.E.M. taking on Aerosmith might be, the actual execution is about as bland as you can take that concept to.

There are some things worth mentioning though. “Crazy” is the most inspired cover of the bunch, with the band taking on their peers Pylon and delivering a punchy yelp-along with a cheeky spirit. It’s not just a heck of an earworm, but it’s joyously so: just a fun, catchy, groovy number, with a killer melody in its chorus that’ll last for ages. “Burning Down” and “Ages of You” are two full-on R.E.M. originals, vocals and all, and are in fact partially the same song, with the former having had its best parts saved and turned into the latter after the initial scrapping. “Ages of You” is the obviously more developed of the two and could easily not just have found itself on a proper album but also defended its place reasonably well, with some signature R.E.M. melodies appearing across its bridges. “Burning Down” shares some of those sections and while overall is a bit more obviously an exiled outtake or a near-finished sketch of a song, it’s still more infectious than the bulk of the songs here. The token instrumentals, surf-rocking “White Tornado” and loungey “Rotary Ten” aren’t too bad either, even if they’re very typical R.E.M. instrumental b-sides: that they’re the only ones here (apart from “Walter’s Theme” which is a separated intro to “King of the Road”) make them stand out more than they probably would in any other context.

The main reason why Dead Letter Office should ever cross anyone’s mind is what’s been tacked on at the very end, and it’s got nothing to do with the point of the compilation. After the main tracklist ends you can find the entirety of the rather good Chronic Town EP (reviewed separately on this blog, check the tags!), and it’s miles ahead in both quality and vision to anything else on Dead Letter Office. It’s the only vital part of the compilation, and the compilation is the only place you can currently find the EP physically, and it’s probably worth the price alone. In addition, while the I.R.S. Vintage Years series of re-releases have generally had somewhat ignorable bonus tracks (most of which can be found on this compilation, natch), ironically the ones for Dead Letter Office are actually better than most things in the main album. The acoustic version of “Gardening at Night” is a lovely take on a great song, and the studio outtake version of “All the Right Friends” is a nice curio, given the actual final recorded version took about two decades to finally appear. It’s a really fun little stormer, even in this early stage, and it’s somewhat surprising it never saw the light of day at the time.

Other than its various bonuses, Dead Letter Office doesn’t particularly wow. The I.R.S. years were R.E.M.’s weakest when it came to non-album cuts and given the band have always been very hit and miss in that regard to begin with, this ramshackle collection of odds and ends has no hidden gems to unearth. If there is something revelatory to it, it’s highlighting the erratic, lighthearted side of the band. There’s a certain kind of (likely intoxicated) charm to Dead Letter Office and its shambles of a nature, and it’s raised a surprise smile a number of times with its sheer anything-goes mentality. But as actual songs, these are mostly scraps at best and litter at worst. A snapshot of the band in the security of their practice space goofing off, but which only very rarely results in anything that has any lasting value.

Rating: 5/10