Music : Fables of the Reconstruction [VINYL]

Rating: - Great REM album & a highlight of the 1980's.
Fables of the Reconstruction of the Fables (to give it its circular title)is possibly the most under-rated of REM albums. Unlike patchy albums like Monster, New Adventures in HIFI & Reveal, every song is sublime. Another plus is the fact that this takes you back to the 80's: no 70 mins of cd to fill up with patchiness (see New Adventures...). So, 11 tracks that make up this beguiling album (though the inner sleeve lists When I Was Young as the second track, this would become I Believe on next album Life's Rich Paegent).

For an album that evokes that southern gothic mysterious thing (see William Faulkner-Flannery O'Connor-Carson McCullers), Fables was surprsingly recorded in a miserable London winter by Producer Joe Boyd (Nick Drake, Fairport Convention). The band, by all accounts, had a miserable experience making it- surely some distance shows what a diamond it is in their back catalogue, to me as great as my fave albums of theirs (Murmur, Green, Automatic, Up). The mumbling is lessening, though I still have little idea of what Stipe is singing about- which is a GREAT thing. If anything, it picks up from where The Band were with their eponymous album, on songs like King Harvest & Up on Cripple Creek. The theme of the album is a state of the union, in wake of Reagan's reconstruction- rather than the Brogan history another reviewer has suggested, I'd take a look at Zinn's People's History of the United States & Faulkner's classic The Sound & The Fury (which details the fall of a Southern family and thus the fall of the South).

REM at the time were far from the stadium band they are now, their ramshackle charm was found between the so-called paisley underground (Dream Syndicate, Opel,& The Rain Parade) and bands like Green on Red and Jason & the Scorchers. There is much here REM would develop from, rather than the mistake suggested in REM biographies.

Feeling Gravity's Pull is a wonderful psychedlic riff, with falling strings and lyrics that would leave Jung headscratching; later songs like Oddfellows Local 151, I Remember California, You & Undertown would develop out of this. Arguably an influence on Screaming Trees' Dust... Maps & Legends extends on the melancholic acoustics of songs like Pilgrimage & South Central Rain and shows the gorgeous vocal interplay between Stipe & Mills (the acoustic version on It's the End of the World...is even better though!)...Driver 8 was another non-hit single, though Buck's riff is as classic as any of Johnny Marr's around this time, it's full of that imagery you find in Dos Passos, or a certain line in The Great Gatsby regarding the network of trains. Er...Life & How to Live It is another great song that builds out of a slight riff, there is a tendency that some members of the band may want to rock out more than others: a definite collision of styles that might (not)explain Stipe's great statement that this album was like two oranges nailed together!

Old Man Kensey is another slow pulsing psychedelic inflected song, think King of Birds meets The Byrds' Old John Robertson perhaps. Is he saying (in harmonics) "That's my father"? Who cares, just the sound of sinking against a gorgeous, mysterious backdrop...

...Can't Get There from Here is a song that I like. You can see where the flirtations with pop emanated from- Stand, Shiny Happy People & Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite came from this place. It's almost funk in parts, has a nice bit that sounds like the late 80's megaphone experiments on the Green tour & has a great video if you get chance to see Succumbs. (Stipe was blone & gorgeous around this point, then he got a monk's haircut; because he could). Green Grow the Rushes is a gorgeous Byrds-Gene Clark inflected ballad, which references a famous poem by Robert Burns- though relocates the Scottish poet's protest to US behaviour in Central America (as would the later Flowers of Guatemala)...

...Kohoutek is another gorgeous, oblique song that reminds you of novels like Desolation Angels, or films like Koyaanisqatsi- falling poetic images... Auctioneer (another engine) builds from a train-like percussion, moving into Little America territory- "listen, listen...".

Good Advices demonstrates that Buck's minimal jangly guitar is like no one elses- oh, and that they were as important as bands like Green on Red, Jason/Scorchers, Replacements, Uncle Tupelo and Cowboy Junkies in establishing the current alt country scene (there are corrollations between this album and Stranger's Almanac by Whiskeytown, I feel...). The album ends on the sublime American folk of Wendell Gee, which ranks up there with material from the Harry Smith folk anthology & the first two Band albums. It also shows the band making material for the studio enviroment, rather than to play live- this would be the approach that succeeded on their 1990's sucesses Out of Time & Automatic for the People (though you can trace later songs like Swan Swan H, The Wrong Child and Country Feedback from this...).

Fables of the Reconstruction is a great, great, recurring album. It has moved from my least fave REM album to my favourite- though Up is a close contender. Sure they couldn't make this jangly-folk inflected dreamsludge forever, and they went on to bigger and better things- but this album still enchants to this day.