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It says something about the perversity of R.E.M. circa 1985 that the still relatively obscure quartet recorded their cracked Southern Gothic masterpiece Fables of the Reconstruction in what was, to all intents and purposes, the exact opposite of the environment that inspired the songs. The band traded their balmy Athens, Georgia for a dreary London winter, in order to that they might record their third album with veteran British folk producer Joe Boyd. Cold, broke, and allegedly subsisting on an all-potato diet, they had a thoroughly miserable time.
Whether or not this affected the songs is open to debate: Boyd’s mix is notoriously dense, the music harsh and elliptical, Michael Stipe sounding not a little mad. But then as The Athens Demos - the very worthwhile second disc on this reissue - attests, the tracks were hardly a barrel of laughs in (though it is notable that the more upbeat ‘Bandwagon’ and ‘Hyena’ didn’t make the final cut).
Fables of the Reconstruction, also known as Reconstruction of the Fables, is the third studio album by American alternative rock band R.E.M., released on I.R.S. Records in June 10, 1985. The Joe Boyd-produced album was the first recorded by the group outside the United States.It is a concept album with Southern Gothic themes and characters. It says something about the perversity of R.E.M. Circa 1985 that the still relatively obscure quartet recorded their cracked Southern Gothic masterpiece Fables of the Reconstruction in what was, to all intents and purposes, the exact opposite of the environment that inspired the songs. The band traded their balmy Athens, Georgia for a dreary London winter, in order to that they might record.
In any case, despite playing host to ‘Driver 8’, frequently cited as the quintessential REM song, Fables of the Reconstruction tends to get a worse rap than the rest of the band’s early catalogue. The atrocious artwork has a lot to answer for, but a lot of the blame lies with the band themselves, as having had such a terrible time recording the thing, they decided it wasn’t very good and said as much during interviews (about the most upbeat comment at the time was Stipe’s infamous non sequitur that it sounded like 'two oranges being nailed together.'). It wasn't a big deal: they simply ploughed onwards and forwards, the following year’s Lifes Rich Pageant being everything its predecessor wasn’t - loud, direct, sunny, with a lead single that didn’t confuse everybody. The band have since admitted these are some pretty good songs, and this remaster – a game attempt to demurk an exceptionally murky record – ought to open this wonderful, but very ‘difficult’ record up to more general reappraisal.
Even more so than Murmur, Fables... is a very Southern States album. For starters there the title*, a reference to the Reconstruction era. Why? Dunno, but certainly the unsettled chaos of the South’s middle past gels with the record’s tone. As for the ‘fables’, you need look no further than the lyrics, which offer up a barely decipherable but hugely evocative trawl through the lives and stories of the Georgian old folks Stipe was apparently fascinated with at the time. And finally, the thing that really leaves the imprint of the Peach State on Fables... is Stipe’s vocal, which is as richly, absurdly Southern as it would ever be, from the gnarled country bumpkin-isms of ‘Can’t Get There From Here’, through to the mannered country-singer sobbing of ‘Wendell Gee’ and the gentle folk wisdom of ‘Green Grow the Rushes’.
That there is something ‘up’ is apparent from the get go, opener ‘Feeling Gravity’s Pull’ screeching in on a nerve-shredding three note guitar riff. Its presence is a constant shock, like having a steady stream of shrapnel pulled out of you, while to the side a discombobulated Stipe muttering about “a Man Ray kind of sky”. Towards the end harsh, imperial strings join the fray: the whole thing is trippy bordering on psychotic, as if Stipe’s narrator is cracking up and hallucinating under the sheer weight of being alive. It's one of the most awesomely unsettling songs in the indie-rock canon.
‘Maps and Legends’ and ‘Driver 8’ are the two most famous tracks on the album, the most straightforward, and the most written about, and I don’t really have a lot to add – if you’ve not heard them before, click on the links above and you will indubitably ‘get it’. Thematically, though, it is worth noting that ‘Maps and Legends’ is about one of Stipe’s oldtimers, the outsider folk artist Howard Finster, while ‘Driver 8’s repeat line “Driver 8 take a break, we’ve been on this shift too long” offers another vision of sensory failure a la ‘Feeling Gravity’s Pull’.
Explaining exactly what ‘Life and How to Live It’ is about in detail would push my word count through the roof, but all you really need to know is that it was about an exceptionally strange chap called Brivs Mekis, who wrote a book called ‘Life and How to Live It’. There is something beautiful but ultimately rather disturbing about the sheer passion with which Stipe mumblingly hurls himself into this man’s life – “Raise the walls and shout its flaws, a carpenter should rest/So that when you tire of one side the other serves you best” – it’s the poetry of madness. The vocal is matched by quite possibly the finest guitar line Peter Buck ever wrote and it sounds amazing on this remaster, pure and sparkling as a trickle of snowmelt, tentatively growing into a pure, crystal cascade.
After that, things get weird. The only straightforward song is the heartstoppingly lovely ‘Green Grow the Rushes’, a soft, sorrowful piece about exploitation of Latin American guest workers that prefigures the politicisation of the next three REM albums (“The grasses that hide the greenback/The amber waves of gain”). Elsewhere we have ‘Old Man Kensey’, the nightmarish tale of a crazed old guy who aspires to be “a sign painter... a clown on TV... a goalie... dog catcher”; the ridiculously OTT rural funk of ‘Can’t Get There From Here’; the listless, lonely drizzle of ‘Kohoutek’; the harsh, distressed roar of ‘Auctioneer (Another Engine)’; the paranoid but strangely reassuring old time wisdom of ‘Good Advices’; and ‘Wendell Gee’, a melodramatic lullaby about the death of an upstanding figure who “was reared to give respect/But somewhere down the line chose/To whistle as the wind blows”.
Assuming the role of lyricist-as-voyeur, Stipe paints his South as a rusting, haunted place full of disturbing visions of lonely old crackpots at the fringes of sanity. But he tackles it with absolute sympathy and furthermore, he doesn’t exclude himself from the number of the broken weirdos: barely discernible through the mournful grey downpour of ‘Kohoutek’ is the utterly broken-sounding line “Michael built a bridge... Michael tore it down”. The result is staggering tangible.
It adds up to a dark, dissonant record, but awkward and nerve-wracking as Fables... may be, it's strangely un-depressing. The world it paints is more magical that social realist, a nocturnal fantasy kingdom existing independently of the physical Georgia. Perhaps explains why the band could journey into the place so convincingly whilst shivering away in London exile. There are plenty who won’t like the creeping, hook-free weirdness that lies beyond the first four songs, but the latter parts of the record – the unhinged belly laugh of ‘Can’t Get There From Here’, the bottomless pain part-concealed by 'Kohoutek’s strange shapelessness - reward patience, landmarks in a universe 40-minutes long, but infinitely detailed. This remaster opens it up a little more, and certainly does full justice to some of the best crfted harmonies and guitar lines in R.E.M.’s catalogue. At the same time this is, at heart, a very obtuse folk-rock album and nothing’s going to change that.
Birthed in a haunted old South, forged in a drab England, paranoid, sensual, nonsensical and true, Fables... was undeniably something of a diversion on the route to indie rock stardom. Yet for many fans – still a minority, I’ll be the first to admit - this moon-touched night walk exceeds nigh on all the records that followed.
* Famously the original art left it unclear as to whether the record was called Fables of the Reconstruction or Reconstruction of the Fables, but LET'S NOT GO THERE
- Andrzej Lukowski's Score
When making assumptions about 1985’s place in music history, there’s always the idea that the decade’s middle half is remembered for obviously planting consciousness. Charity singles came and went, Frankie goes to Hollywood kept releasing rehashes of Relax because nobody was interested in listening to Welcome to Pleasuredome, and contrived new wave was all the craze. Beneath the glamorous exterior, it was also a noticeable transitional phase for many of today’s most regarded artists: Little Creatures was the Talking Heads’ most accessible album yet, Flip your Wigcleaned up Husker Du's buzz tone garage, and even The Smiths’ Meat is Murder proved to be a muddled effort that never really shook its mid-tempo groove.
Twenty-five years later, the one main argument that’s usually made about Fables of the Reconstruction is that, like the work of R.E.M's iconic counterparts, it merely hinted the promise of better things to come. This is just stating the obvious. The Athens foursome knew that they couldn’t repeat a pattern when their heart was really somewhere else, even if that formula had proved to be successful. Fables was a do or die attempt for R.E.M to challenge themselves with their most revelatory tactic - instead of creating another cerebral set of Byrdsian inspired jangle, the emotional core of the band would lead the way to awaken a creative chapter they hadn’t discovered yet.
Fables opener Feeling Gravity’s Pull instantly threw a curve, featuring dark and brooding overtones about questioning one’s unconsciousness, referencing Man Ray among a backdrop of string arrangements. It was R.E.M.'s first foray into incorporating storytelling elements more perceptively, having already sized up with tales such as West of the Fields, Harborcoat, and Little America. Michael Stipe had begun to expose his political activism, referencing themes such as exploitation, colonialism, working class train conductors and carpenters, and Baptist reverends. He was retracing to his Georgia background, flipping the pages that had filled his memory bank. The common folk that surround Fableswere idealized eccentrics, timeless characters that had left their mark in diminutive, but memorable ways.
Enlisting American producer Joe Boyd wasn’t just an adequate choice, but a logical step in the right direction. In the past, Boyd had already fought thick and thin for the revelation of unsound British folklore, boasting a sensible tact for artists that had an instinctive, pastoral groundwork. Although extensive touring and the move to London stifled the band's energy initially, Boyd’s production sounds supple and finesse. Even if the orchestral arrangements and hauntingly atmospheric design build up its subject matter, the flexibility of the songs themselves bring to life an impending sense of doom. It is as if the meager alteration of a chord could compromise the entire production.
Fables transcends the jangling, ringing guitars and abrasive bass lines. Instead of just delivering a clean, textural amplification off his Rickenbacker/Vox amplifier combo, Peter Buck was beginning to experiment with delay pedals and extending his simplified distortions whilst highlighting some swift, crunchy chords; the alt-rock motif he fully established in the early to mid 90’s. The straightforward approach of Good Advices and Green Grow the Rushes paved the path for Buck to lay bare his gorgeously executed 12 string arpeggios. The Mike Mills/Bill Berry rhythm section was mostly restrained to fit the overall, pensive quality of the songs, although Driver 8 and Life and How to Live it were the exception, showing off some melodically exhilarant behavior that went beyond the basic kick drum, root note bass work. Stipe was also coming to his own, starting to abandon his mumblings with an overall soft-toned clarity.
Fables' original recording had a soiled, low pitch sound quality that was usually present in early CD recordings; it was probably the R.E.M. album most in need of a reissue. Instead of addressing these issues, the remastered versions enhance the overall instrumention, with nary a pop or an indistinct scratch. Other times, it disrupts with low-to-loud dynamics that only mar its idyllic subtlety. The Athens demos are the best representation of how essential Boyd came to be, as they feature the occasional tomfoolery, a constant acceleration of tempos that brought back memories of earlier albums, and some god-awful vocal tonality from Stipe, who sometime seems unaware of how to hit the mark. Even so, this is a fascinating account that breaks the fourth wall, giving R.E.M. fans a candid portrayal of work that was still in progress.
In retrospect, Fables sounds very much like a product of its own time, planted in a furrow so it could cultivate with patience. It’s the least immediate representation of R.E.M.’s canon, displaying an unobtrusive modesty that only resonates when submerged into that specific mindset. And that’s precisely why it has become so timeless. Fables absorbs from the moment it lets go, proving to be the first unpredictable R.E.M. experience into thought provoking meditations such as isolation, loss, and the essence of one’s importance in life. The airy ruminations on Southern life make you feel as if you’re actually situated in a Georgian colonial home, feeling the bright sun rays radiating throughout the never ending view of an agricultural countryside. It achieves the rare feat of replicating time and space, especially when that place you like to call home seems like a distant memory.
Fables of the Reconstruction: 10/10
Reissue: 7/10
29 July, 2010 - 11:33 — Juan Edgardo RodriguezReissue: 7/10