True confession: I did not care for R.E.M.’s Murmur when it appeared—which is the same as saying that if I’d attempted to realize my nascent rock-crit aspirations a year or so sooner than I did, I’d have been dead at the starting gate. At the time, the rock-crit rulebook looked something like this:
1: Murmur is the greatest American rock record issued in 1983.
2. See No. 1.
Years later, Murmur’s kudzu mumble would finally take hold. (The recent deluxe reissue is an easy recommendation.) Where I came in was Reckoning, R.E.M.’s second full-length album. Issued in 1984, the album showed no sign of the much-cited sophomore-slump phenomenon. What it did show was a band capable of playing lean, wiry jangle rock with muscle and heart, stripped clean of the preciousness that delayed my appreciation of Murmur.
Heard again now, the ten songs that make up Reckoning still hold up. “Harborcoat,” with its near-ska guitar shuffle, is as brash an opener as you could want; “So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)” and “Pretty Persuasion” remain among the band’s strongest cuts, and “Camera” retains its mystery. Still, it’s “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville,” the most straightforward song—and the only one with lyrics not penned by Michael Stipe; Mike Mills wrote the tune back in 1980—that sticks in my mind most, not least because of a couplet that still resonates with all the power it had for a then-recently dumped collegiate:
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don’t care that you’re not here with me
’Cause it’s so much easier to handle all my problems if I’m too far out to see
The album sounds crisp, clear and fresh in Universal’s new deluxe repackaging, part of a series that will presumably see the band’s entire I.R.S. catalog spit-shined one last time for the twilight of the CD era. The bonus disc seals the deal, offering a terrific live show taped on July 7, 1984, at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. Hearing the young band play, you get no glimmering of a later grandiosity that would inflate into pomp and border on parody. Listen to “Driver 8,” an as-yet-unrecorded track that would turn up on 1985’s challenging Fables of the Reconstruction, and what you hear in Stipe’s insistent twang, Mills’s nimble basslines, Peter Buck’s melancholy jangle and ominous gnarl, and Bill Berry’s affirmative thump is a combination of hunger and confidence that proved R.E.M. had the stuff of greatness.
