R.E.M. - Murmur

I think I've mentioned more than once here my tendency to only adopt one album from a band and never sway... only to be inundate by those who feel the compulsion to foist another effort from a group's repertoire on your pasty, overweight narrator.

Admittedly, I was wrong about Alice Cooper. There was more to him than "Love It To Death." But I must say that those who feel like they must open my world to the complete fruits of an artist's labor when I am perfectly content with just the apple or the orange do not understand the frailty of me and how desperately I cling to small instances of the exceptional. There are those, like me, who choose to cherish the relative perfection of a fully-realized fruity vision as a snapshot into the soul of the artist at an especially pure moment. And an aversion to all else that follows or came before is truly the only means I have to avoid letting this worship of this isolated, crystal moment become corrupted by the soullessness of history!

So, with no further adieu, I introduce to you the only R.E.M. record I will ever listen to, Murmur.

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Rolling Stone said at the time: Murmur is a darker record than Chronic Town, but this band's darkness is shot through with flashes of bright light. Vocalist Michael Stipe's nasal snarl, Mike Mills' rumbling bass and Bill Berry's often sharp, slashing drums cast a cloudy, postpunk aura that is lightened by Peter Buck's folk-flavored guitar playing. Many of the songs have vague, ominous settings, a trait that's becoming an R.E.M. trademark. But not only is there a sense of detachment on the record – these guys, as one song title says, "Talk about the Passion" more often than they experience it – but the tunes relentlessly resist easy scanning. There's no lyric sheet, Stipe slurs his lines, and they even pick a typeface that's hard to read. But beyond that elusiveness is a restless, nervous record full of false starts and images of movement, pilgrimage, transit.

In the end, though, what they're saying is less fascinating than how they say it, and Murmur's indelible appeal results from its less elusive charms: the alternately anthemic and elegiac choruses of such stubbornly rousing tunes as "Laughing" and "Sitting Still"; instrumental touches as apt as the stately, elegant piano in the ballad "Perfect Circle" and the shimmering folkish guitar in "Shaking Through"; above all, an original sound placed in the service of songs that matter. R.E.M. is clearly the important Athens band.

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