Review Summary: Crawling from the South.
Some quick backstory: an art student and a punk-obsessed record store clerk meet a pair of childhood friends and form a band. The conceptually ambitious amateurs (Peter Buck and Michael Stipe) are tempered by two relatively seasoned young musicians (Mike Mills and Bill Berry), creating a sound that would shape the college rock era like few other artists. Over a 30 year recording career, R.E.M. would define, dominate, and deny the mainstream rock music of their time. It begins here, with the 1982 EP
Chronic Town.
Chronic Town represents R.E.M. at its most elemental: jangly, arpeggiated open chords, a tight and extremely active rhythm section, obscure lyrics with even more obscure enunciation. It’s ostensibly post-punk, but I think it sounds more like party music made by a band that’s discovering the power of mystery. And that’s exactly what R.E.M. were in 1982: a band that played a slew of house parties and mid-week “New Wave Nights” at dive bars that now had an opportunity to make the kind of recordings they found compelling as listeners.
As an early recording,
Chronic Town doesn’t have the same masterful sense of atmosphere as
Murmur or the increasingly sophisticated songwriting of
Reckoning and
Fables of the Reconstruction. What it does have in abundance is energy and a surprisingly adroit sense of structure. Opener “Wolves, Lower” exemplifies the record’s strengths, opening with nervy arpeggiated guitar and low, paranoid vocals (“Suspicion yourself, suspicion yourself, don’t get caught”) over stop-start drum fills before moving into an unexpectedly consonant chorus, Stipe belting wordlessly in a higher register over a Mills/Berry harmony. It’s a nervous song with an undercurrent of vital joy, or maybe it’s a party song with a hefty layer of mystery and menace. In any case, it is textbook R.E.M.
Michael Stipe is more or less unintelligible on
Chronic Town. He drops syllables, sometimes whole words, and has a tendency to mutter when in his lower register. Across most of the record his voice is simply another instrument, another line of melody to follow along with Peter Buck’s chiming guitar and Mike Mills’ lyrical basslines. This lyrical obscurantism might be frustrating to some, but it’s a style I’m very amenable to. It forces me to find other avenues of decoding meaning, it makes the songs feel mysterious, replayable, and exciting. My favorite song on the record is “Gardening at Night”, a melancholy tune with spiritual undertones of which I can understand precisely three words (the title).
The appealing tension between the energetic instrumental tracks and the mysterious vocals really is the thing that makes this era of R.E.M. so special. This dynamic makes
Chronic Town both immediate and elusive, an endlessly replayable five songs. “Carnival of Sorts (Boxcar)” always feels unnerving, “1,000,000” always sounds cocksure and manic in the best way, and “Stumble” always surprises me with its wistful sweetness. It’s an album that is simultaneously a promising start and a career highlight. A treasure.
