Begin The Begin… Again
Are R.E.M.'s Older Works Their Finest Songs?
from flagpole magazine



For those whose first exposure to R.E.M. was “Losing My Religion” or even “Man on the Moon,” the band’s early output can sometimes feel like it exists in a strange, timeless netherworld. Monster, the first R.E.M. album I bought on the day of release, will always remind me of fall, 1994, but Reckoning holds no such nostalgic power. I know Automatic for the People better than I know most of my friends, but I probably couldn’t even name all the songs on Fables of the Reconstruction without consulting iTunes. Sure, us latecomers have all the early albums, and everybody knows the hits - “It’s the End of the World,” etc. - but when people say that Murmur is the band's best album, we just shake our heads in confusion and crank up Out of Time.

If it accomplishes nothing else, the new early-R.E.M. retrospective And I Feel Fine... The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982–1987 at least makes a strong case that yeah, maybe R.E.M. really was better when it started. The 21-track compilation (the “collector’s edition” adds a second disc of rarities) hits all the high points from Chronic Town to Murmur to Document, covering the same ground as the previous I.R.S.-era greatest-hits package Eponymous, but in greater detail (the only Eponymous track not repeated is “Romance,” and the alternate mixes of “Radio Free Europe” and “Finest Worksong” show up on the rarities disc). As an introduction to R.E.M., this is hard to beat, and makes a nice companion to the 2003 Warner Bros.-era compilation In Time. It’s hard to imagine the single-disc version holding much appeal to existing fans, though; the biggest draw seems to be new liner notes by rock journalist Anthony DeCurtis, which weren’t available for review, so it’s hard to say if they’re worth the purchase. The improved sound, particularly on the Murmur and Reckoning tracks, however, might be.

I’m no audiophile, so it might just be that the disc’s overall volume is higher, but there’s something revelatory about “Radio Free Europe” here - it sounds like it must have sounded on college radio back in 1981. The sound is cleaner and sharper, the instruments more defined than on previous releases. Everything just pops, particularly the bass and drums - the disc as a whole, in fact, is pretty much the Bill Berry Power Hour, and really makes it clear how vital his contributions were. There’s a restless, driving energy to these early tracks that sounds brand-new to me. Monster was touted as R.E.M.’s “hard rock” album, but taken as a whole, And I Feel Fine... is faster, tighter and meaner than that album, its rhythms denser and more complex. In music, there’s little worse than nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, but there’s nothing nostalgic about the impact of these songs. It’s hard to listen to them without feeling that something vital really has been lost in the last 20 years.

The rarities disc adds another 21 tracks, six of which don’t even qualify as rarities - Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe each picked a personal favorite from the studio albums, and for some reason “Superman” and “King of Birds” are included as well (perhaps the liner notes, purportedly by the bandmembers themselves, clarify the thinking behind their inclusion, but they as well were unavailable for review). As for the actual rarities, they’re the usual hodgepodge of live tracks, demos and alternate mixes; though 10 of these tracks are previously unreleased, every one except for perhaps “Theme from Two Steps Onward” and “Mystery to Me” is available in different form on other releases. The “Slower Electric Demo” of “Gardening at Night” is interesting, but mainly because it proves that speeding it up was the right idea. Three tracks from a 1983 Boston show establish R.E.M. as a ferocious live band (and provide more evidence for the Bill Berry Is God theory), but it’s a mystery why this particular show was chosen. It’s both the blessing and the curse of the digital age that every scrap of tape a popular band ever recorded will eventually find its way into the marketplace, and though the tracks on this disc aren’t unwelcome, they are by no means essential.

The real bounty for R.E.M. fans is to be found on the collection’s companion DVD, When The Light Is Mine… The Best Of The I.R.S. Years 1982–1987 Video Collection which gathers the band’s 11 I.R.S.-era music videos along with a handful of TV performances and a short film by frequent collaborator and UGA professor James Herbert. R.E.M.’s rise to fame coincided with the ascendance of MTV as a cultural force, and though the band never defined (or was defined by) the channel like Duran Duran or Michael Jackson, R.E.M. used the nascent art form to great effect. Watching the videos and performances on this disc in chronological order, it’s possible to see the R.E.M. mythos take shape and evolve - and any bands watching the disc might notice that it’s a hell of a good primer on how to build an identity and a fanbase while still maintaining whatever artistic ideals you believe in.

The first step, of course, is to be awesome, and the live performances on the disc show that the members of R.E.M. were just that. They tear through “Radio Free Europe” and “Talk About the Passion” on a 1983 episode of U.K. rock show "The Tube," all unbridled punk energy while Berry lays down a near-disco beat (R.E.M.’s influence on the current crop of British dance-rock bands suddenly becomes staggeringly obvious). Two years later the guys are back on the same show playing “Can’t Get There from Here,” but the change wrought upon Michael Stipe in those two years is astounding. In 1983, he’s this slight kid in a hoodie, hiding his angelic yet craggy face behind his curly hair; in ’85, he’s a demonic peroxided dervish, doing his best David Byrne in a too-big suit.

Stipe’s reluctance to embrace stardom is a big part of the early-R.E.M. mystique, even though he seems to have learned to deal with it pretty quickly. But when, thanks to MTV, rock is a visual medium as much as an auditory one, the decision to leave yourself out of your videos is as bold a statement as splashing your face all over them. On most of the videos on the DVD, the bandmembers are either absent or obscured by lighting and camera tricks; when we do see them, they look like hobo pirates. In James Herbert’s 20-minute film Left of Reckoning (essentially a long-form video for the first half of Reckoning), the bandmembers hang out with folk artist R.A. Miller and build whirligigs - a simple situation, but the film itself is stuttery and jerky and flickering and hypnotic, the result of reshooting the projected film while starting, stopping, slowing down and rewinding. The film is the perfect example of the visual identity that R.E.M. created, a mixture of the band's Southern roots and its art-school leanings.

From the beginning, R.E.M.’s music felt like the product of a specific place - a specific culture - and the way the members presented themselves visually only reinforced that notion, whether it was through images of Athens and environs, or by appropriating the art of Miller and Howard Finster. Bands evolve, of course, and since 1987, R.E.M. has evolved in interesting, often thrilling ways, but it’s hard to argue that it has evolved into a better band since Berry’s departure (almost 10 years ago!).

Whatever’s been missing - the experience of playing as a tight four-piece, or just a sense of Southernness (note that the best song on the last album was about New York) - the real value of these new compilations might be in helping R.E.M. rediscover it.


Wolves, Lower


Fall on Me

1. Pilgrimage (Mike's pick)
2. These Days (Bill's pick)
3. Gardening at Night(slower electric demo; previously unreleased)
4. Radio Free Europe (Hib-tone version)
5. Sitting Still (Hib-tone version)
6. Life and How to Live It (Live at the Muzik Centrum, Utrecht, Holland 9/14/87; previously unreleased)
7. Ages of You (Live at the Paradise, Boston 7/13/83; previously unreleased)
8. We Walk (Live at the Paradise, Boston 7/13/83; previously unreleased)
9. 1,000,000 (Live at the Paradise, Boston 7/13/83; previously unreleased)
10. Finest Worksong (other mix)
11. Hyena (demo) (previously unreleased)
12. Theme from Two Steps Onward (previously unreleased)
13. Superman
14. All the Right Friends (previously unreleased; later version released on Vanilla Sky soundtrack)
15. Mystery to Me (demo; previously unreleased)
16. Just A Touch (live in-studio version; previously unreleased)
17. Bad Day (session outtake; previously unreleased)
18. King of Birds (last song cut from the best of…)
19. Swan Swan H (live, acoustic from “Athens, GA-Inside Out”)
20. Disturbance At The Heron House (Peter's pick)
21. Time After Time (annElise)(Michael's pick)

SPARKLEHORSE
Some Sweet Day: After A Five-Year Silence, Sparklehorse Returns With Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain

The vagaries of success in the art world are documented to the point of distraction and cliché: unknown toils over original idea, offers it up, finds as much torment in the acknowledgment or lack thereof that subsequent attempts to create anew are choked by existential dread. Subject and creator are now welded together in a symbiotic death match, and the voyeuristic world fetishizes the ensuing rise or fall.

Reduced to the lowest common denominator, humans are glued to their "Idol," their "Project Runway." It’s an oblique way of participating in the symbolic violence of the deeper human struggle that alternately produces great art at its best, and unimaginable destruction at its worst. It’s not something that regards life with any compassion whatsoever. People live and die on this merciless scale. Anorexia, addiction, anxiety and depression are not abstract; they kill.

It has been 11 years since Mark Linkous and his band Sparklehorse released 1995’s debut album Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot to critical and popular acclaim, and 10 since he collapsed under himself in a London motel bathroom while on tour with Radiohead, sending the arc of his star and the well-being of his psyche into vertigo and darkness. Though the ensuing years produced 1999’s Good Morning Spider, and 2001’s It’s a Wonderful Life, both were considered commercial flops despite the latter being bolstered by the high-profile appearances of PJ Harvey and Tom Waits. In 2003, Linkous produced Daniel Johnston’s Fear Yourself, but soon after, Linkous all but vanished, distraught over the world events that began unfolding in September, 2001 and his own deteriorating mental and physical health. Concerned friends relocated him from his home state of Virginia to remote mountain location in North Carolina, where he began to build what has now become Static King, his studio in a shed on the property. There he began what has now culminated in the release of the gorgeous Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, set for release by Astralwerks on Tuesday, Sept. 26.

“For the first three years after the last album, I wasn’t able to do anything," says Linkous. "I just came into my studio and stared at my equipment. I just totally lost interest in recording altogether, I’d play a song and that would be the end of it. It was like, 'What’s the point?' Then I just got to where I couldn’t pay my rent anymore, so I had to start planning on getting another record out. I had some stuff tracked, and my manager was trying to pull me out of a hole that I guess I’d gotten myself into by sending me stuff that she thought I would be inspired by, other music, and I got The Grey Album. I’d been listening to a lot of The Beatles stuff anyway and I kind of hooked up with Brian Burton, Danger Mouse, and the stuff that came out of those sessions that I did with him up here kind of inspired a little bit of confidence in me to feel that I could do it. I kind of felt that people had pretty much forgotten and moved on and didn’t care much about Sparklehorse anymore.”

“[Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain] is a little more like the earlier ones, I think," says Linkous, "mostly as a by-product of me becoming such a recluse and working on my own. A lot of the songs were recorded alone, I played everything on them and mixed it all here at my own place. There are some songs that I did record with Steven [Drozd] from the Flaming Lips playing drums at Tarbox, David Fridmann’s studio up in New York. I did do some recording up there and then brought the tracks down here and added vocals, guitar and stuff.”

Linkous has assembled an almost entirely new Sparklehorse lineup for the upcoming U.S., U.K. and European tour, which opens at the 40 Watt here in Athens. Long-term colleague Johnny Hott, formerly of House Of Freaks, remains behind the kit, while Paula Jean Brown of Giant Sand takes over bass duties and Chris Michaels plays guitar. Most of the dates are in Europe and the United Kingdom, something Linkous attributes to “having felt better received there from the start. British and European audiences have more patience for slower, more atmospheric stuff. It’s been changing a little in the States, but it would be fiscally irresponsible for me to tour here. Gas prices force us into smaller vans, which is a bitch, and we are able to secure our guarantee a little better over there because of the crowd.”

Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain delivers the soft-electro-pulsing lo-fi that is trademark Sparklehorse. Though the influence of the Beatles is apparent, it is not overwhelming, and Linkous' collaborative streak continues: he recorded with Vic Chesnutt and members of Cracker and Lambchop in Athens in 1995 under the name A Loose Confederation of Saturday City States; and Tom Waits again appears on a Sparklehorse track, playing piano on "Morning Hollow." The Danger Mouse-produced leadoff track "Don't Take My Sunshine Away" cuts the instantly recognizable “you are my sunshine” lyric and pastes it in an entirely different chorus arrangement, wraps it in strings and buoys it with electronic bleeps and robotic murmurs. The track, in a way, seems to be a coda to the sentiment expressed in It’s a Wonderful Life, with its yeah-it’s-dark-but-not-that-dark smirk. The 12-song cycle is distinct within each track, but the album has a dreamy, programmatic feel, which makes it a good choice for late-night, thoughtful activity.

If there has ever been an answer to “Whatever happened to Sparklehorse?" - it is this. It is the response of an artist to a society so morbidly fascinated by the struggle he embodies. It says: I allow this.

It's a Wonderful Life