R.E.M. - Perfect Circle

RECKONING (1984)

HARBORCOAT

Charlotte, North Carolina. Another sleepy, out-of-the-way town in the South. As the winter of 1983 rolls in, few of its residents probably realize that here, just a few miles from Athens, the flagship band of an indie rock revival blossoming all over the States has set up camp. Because while R.E.M. holed up at Reflection Sound Studios, bands like Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen, Dream Syndicate, Replacements and co. were spreading a new musical gospel across America.

Utterly at odds with the decade's dominant sound, and directly plugged into what would come in the next one. Stipe and co. are well aware they're part of this nouvelle vague, and they feel the weight of a success exploding in their hands. It's time for a reckoning. A settling of accounts, first and foremost with themselves. To prove themselves. And to finally take flight for good.

This is also why the basement at Reflection buzzed with uncontrolled euphoria, as described in a famous Anthony De Curtis piece for Record, which mentions "wild scenes" and a "bohemian atmosphere". The four had fun experimenting with the most outlandish effects: the sound of a ripped t-shirt, feedback off glasses, vibraphones, metal pipes, and even chairs used as percussion. Experiments bordering on horseplay, in which the producers themselves (the ever-reliable Easter-Dixon duo) took part.

Yet all that exuberance paradoxically produced one of the darkest, sparest and most introverted records in the band's entire history. With much barer arrangements, only softened by a slightly cleaner recording than on the debut. Buck explains why: "We went into the studio wanting to make something different from Murmur, which had complex, layered, multicolored textures full of attention to detail. The arrangements on this record are much more direct and we used fewer instruments. Why? We'd grown up. It's not that we want to become a band whose music you can grasp entirely on first listen, but we don't want to be - how to put it? - a private, almost inaccessible club either".

Against the immediacy and urgency of the sound (literally too: the record was cut in just over two weeks) stands the sheer indecipherability of the lyrics, with an even more extreme use of cut-up technique and abstract collage. Because - as Stipe confessed to De Curtis - "giving everything away is never a good thing, even in a marriage or any romantic relationship you never reveal absolutely everything about yourself to the other person, there's always something you keep for yourself". This is also why he would keep uncovering new shades of meaning in his songs, sometimes transforming them live, leaving it to listeners to complete the interpretive process. And it's also why he long resisted music videos, guilty of "spoon-feeding you" and pushing the viewer into passivity. Better that everything keeps flowing and shifting. Like running water. File under water is written on the record's spine, and for Stipe that's its real title. Just as it's probably a water snake coiling across the unsettling cover art, drawn by Stipe himself and finished off by Reverend Howard Finster, the visionary religious folk artist from Georgia. The tracklist winds along the snake's back, but no mysteries are untangled. Starting with the opener, "Harborcoat", one of the most impenetrable songs in R.E.M.'s entire catalogue.

They crowded up to Lenin with their noses worn off

A handshake is worthy if it’s all that you’ve got

Metal shivs on wood push through our back

There’s a splinter in your eye and it reads “REACT”

The collage is unrestrained, unmoored from any logical or chronological order. Yet the effect works, as does that sense of looming danger lurking behind the unsettling figure of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and that crowd with "worn-down noses." Once again Stipe resorts to an exhortation that, this time, leaves no doubt: “React.” As if the danger were truly close at hand and rebellion the only way out. The title of the song, meanwhile, is a neologism fusing two words, “harbor” and “coat.” And this unusual garment turns into a kind of precious, indispensable companion.

Please find my harborcoat, can’t go outside without it

Find my harborcoat, can’t go outside without it

Another request, repeated twice over. What is this coat, or windbreaker, that's so essential? A reference to the floods in Georgia, later the subject of “So. Central Rain”? More likely it's just a personal association, entirely detached from the previous line, in a kind of journey through Stipe's streams of thought and visual impulses. Despite the indecipherability of the lyrics, however, at least three possible interpretations have been put forward. The first comes straight from Stipe himself, who in an interview with Harold De Muir explained that the song was nothing more than “a reworking of the diaries of Anne Frank.” The second links the presence of Lenin with the biblical reference to the splinter in one's eye (“a splinter in your eye”) and with the sense of shelter evoked by the title, suggesting the idea of a betrayal by someone who had proclaimed himself a hero of the people. The third, again citing Lenin, weapons (spiked clubs), and the call to revolt (“react”), proposes a kind of denunciation of Soviet oppression and the purges of the regime.

Musically, the track delivers another catchy guitar riff and marks another important milestone for the Georgians, sealing the first of the two-voice dialogues between Stipe's harmonies and those of the Mills-Berry duo. A vocal interplay that would go on to brand much of early R.E.M.'s repertoire.

SEVEN CHINESE BROTHERS

A pounding bass that almost sounds like a guitar, and a lovely piano phrase, precede the entrance of the vocals. “Seven Chinese Brothers” opens this way, unfolding into another hypnotic nursery rhyme, tight in rhythm and radiant in melody, spun out from Buck's twelve-string. The lyrics draw on an old fairy tale before quickly losing themselves in another tangle of free-associated images.

This mellow, sweet, short-haired boy, woman offers pull up a seat

Take in one symphony now, we’ve just begun to battle

Wrap your heel in bones of steel, turn the leg, a twist of color

Autumn waited hold it to you in the colored come another

Seven Chinese brothers swallowing the ocean

Seven thousand years to sleep away the pain

She will return, she will return

The direct reference is to “The Five Chinese Brothers”, the fable by Claire Huchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese, published in 1938, in which each brother had a magical power to fight the Chinese emperor, and one of them drowned him by swallowing the entire ocean and spitting it out into his palace. In R.E.M.’s loose reworking, the brothers become seven, and all of them can drink the sea. But the innocent, childlike wordplay suddenly gives way to the pain of a direct, personal and searing memory: that of the death of Carol Levy, photographer and friend of the band, who died in a car accident on that fateful April 12, 1983 — the release date of “Murmur”: “Sleep seven thousand years to chase away the pain. She will return, she will return.” A memory that will resurface even more vividly in two other songs on the album, “So. Central Rain” and (above all) “Camera”.

Otherwise, “Seven Chinese Brothers” once again takes refuge in nonsense. Some have even detected in a few lines (feet “in metal notches”, symphonies to be listened to) a nod to the young musician’s early piano lessons. It’s no coincidence, then, that another version of the song exists under the title “Voice Of Harold” (later released on the “Dead Letter Office” compilation), in which Stipe amuses himself by singing the liner notes of a gospel record in place of the original lyrics.

SO. CENTRAL RAIN (I’M SORRY)

A devastating flood paralyzes Athens, cutting off all communications. “The forecast said: rain in the south-central region, phone lines are down,” Buck recalls. From Los Angeles, where the band had a show scheduled, the guitarist tries in vain to reach his family in Georgia after the flood. This real-life episode gave birth to “So. Central Rain”, where “So.” is the curious abbreviation for “Southern”.

Did you never call? I waited for your call

These rivers of suggestion are driving me away

The trees will bend, the cities wash away

The city on the river there is a girl without a dream

I’m sorry

A text that seems among the most linear and narrative that R.E.M. wrote during this period, even by Stipe's own admission, though he still can't resist one of his typical rhetorical devices ("rivers of suggestion"), as if drawing a parallel between the fury of nature and the flood of anguished thoughts gripping the mind of someone who has lost contact with their family.

Then that cry of pain, set in parentheses in the title: "I'm sorry". Is it a reference to the disaster, or to the band's own personal tragedy? Hard to say for certain, though "the girl who lost her dreams" could well be their friend Carol, whose life was swept away in the prime of her youth.

The rest of the song returns to the text's main core, with small variations on the theme. Back come the fallen lines ("the lines are down", "the conversation's dimmed"), the homes to rebuild ("go build yourself another home") and a personified Ocean that sings ("The ocean sang"). Then, a new exhortation, in an unexpectedly abrupt tone:

Go build yourself another dream, this choice isn’t mine

Go build yourself another dream, the choice isn't mine

A sudden shift in register, jarring against the song's delicate mood. Because "So. Central Rain" is the quintessential ballad of "Reckoning", further proof of the band's gift for painting dreamy, melancholy melodies with the barest of means: a bonsai folk arpeggio opens onto Stipe's lament, set against the cadence of Buck's guitar, dry and cutting riffs, building to a ghostly crescendo in the finale. The chorus is a burning cry: "I'm sorry", in which Stipe condenses all his pain. An uncontrollable pain. "Once, letting out a dark, hallucinatory howl toward the end of the song, Michael lost his balance and fell off the staircase he was standing on, breaking the microphone; hence the sudden fading of his voice before the song's end" (Tony Fletcher, R.E.M. La storia).

"So. Central Rain" is the single and the most intense episode on Reckoning, the latest feat from a band now tackling themes like pain, transition and redemption with total ease, without losing an ounce of its vibrant expressive urgency.

PRETTY PERSUASION

A rhythm section polished to a shine. Powerful and energetic as never before. It's a relentless machine driving "Pretty Persuasion". A ballad again, yes, but charged with adrenaline like a rock gallop. It's no coincidence it had been a live staple for R.E.M. in their earliest shows. And yet, they couldn't bring themselves to record it. As Mitch Easter explains: "Pretty Persuasion was an old song and we had a hard time convincing them to put it on the record. By then Michael hated it. I think at the time Michael was very wary of songs dealing with everyday subjects. I think the fact that it had that chorus going 'She's got' struck him as dumb, when actually it's beautiful. They had no middle ground for their songs: they were either 'crap' or 'gorgeous', and that one fell into the crap category. We'd done a live version of it at the end of the 'Murmur' sessions, and the Reckoning version was almost identical. Though it's a bit of a rip-off of Todd Rundgren's 'Couldn't I Just Tell You'".

In truth, those evocative vocal interplays between Stipe and Mills recall The Mamas & The Papas more than anything, as the singer himself will candidly admit, adding though that "it was missing the tambourine". Fact is, the song is one of the album's other gems, with those ringing guitars and that concise, forceful refrain, running through lyrics that return to darker territory, leaning above all on the interplay of assonance between words and music.

It’s what I want, hurry and buy

All has been tried, follow reason and buy

Cannot shuffle in this heat, it’s all wrong

Try to put that on your sleeve it’s all wrong it’s all wrong

Another riddle, with a single clue, provided by Stipe himself. A recurring dream in which the singer is invited to photograph the Rolling Stones with their feet soaking in water for an album cover (which turns out to be the aborted cover of “Aftermath“). But the connection can, at best, only clarify the hint at something to put on the cover (“Try to put that on your sleeve”, which is also an idiomatic phrase translatable as “make it obvious”), soon followed by the conviction that, however, “it's all wrong”. Nothing more.

TIME AFTER TIME (ANNELISE)

The entire debt Rem owe to the Velvet Underground settled in a single track. An exotic, orientalizing raga, thick with psychedelic musk and assorted eccentricities, from the highly peculiar sound of the crescendoing guitars to the unprecedented carpet of percussion, achieved by Easter by hitting the steel leg of a chair with metal pipes.

All the haunted anguish of Velvet-style liturgies is captured in the three and a half minutes of one of the most eccentric tracks in the Rem catalogue, yet one so hopelessly recognizable, with Stipe's unmistakable vocalizations and grunts giving shape to yet another mysterious story.

Ask the girl of the hour by the water tower’s watch

If your friends took a fall, are you obligated to follow?

There's no way of knowing who the Annelise of the title is, nor what her role in the song might be. All the band has explained about the story is that it draws on a night of mischief Mike Mills spent roaming around Athens with two friends, one of whom would later become Buck's wife. But it's not about Annelise…

“Time After Time (Annelise)” is one of those songs that many fans will long mourn from the Rem of their indie-era heyday. Brilliant and lysergic, a pure exercise in creativity with no commercial ambitions whatsoever. For Easter, it's the most beautiful song on the album.

CAMERA

A new tribute to their departed friend, this time far more direct and explicit, starting with the title, which alludes to Carol Levy's profession and passion: photography.

From the inside room when the front room greeting

Becomes your special book, it was simple then

When the party lulls, if we fall by the side

Will you be remembered? Will she be remembered?

Alone in a crowd, a bartered lantern borrowed

If I'm to be your camera, then who will be your face?

A contrite elegy, carrying all the sorrow of a grief that cannot be soothed even by that final, affectionate legacy, a "special book," presumably containing the last photographs she took. Carol Levy was a dear friend of the band and of Stipe in particular; she often collaborated with the group and even shot the back-cover image for "Radio Free Europe." Her death marks almost a watershed moment in R.E.M.'s history: the end of the age of innocence, the era of college hangouts and wild parties on Oconee Street, and the arrival at a more mature, self-aware dimension. The memory of that cherished companion is entrusted to a ballad with restless, subdued cadences: at first just the voice and the distant ticking of percussion, then the entrance of the other instruments, which nonetheless leaves the song's brooding, aching spleen untouched. A "ghostly" atmosphere was also built through eccentric new studio tricks: Stipe tears up a T-shirt pulled from manager Jefferson Holt's bag, then plays a muted harmonica, while Buck fiddles with bells, Berry produces unprecedented feedback by running his finger around the rim of a glass, and Mills roughs up a vibraphone.

I fell by your bed once, I didn't want to tell you

I should keep myself in between the pages

Of the green light room if we fall by the side

"Camera" is a tricky experiment, because it lays bare all of Stipe's struggles in reconciling his abstract language with his most intimate feelings. The autobiographical reference is obvious, but once again it's cloaked in metaphors and symbols, as if Michael were almost ashamed to expose himself too openly in front of an audience. Until he finally finds the courage and cries out all his pain: "I still like you, can you remember?" A line after which silence falls, broken by a sudden (and absurd) funky little breakdown that seals the song's end.

(DON'T GO BACK TO) ROCKVILLE

Perhaps, though, that absurd funky breakdown made sense after all. It was a way, however surreal, of turning the page and opening a new chapter of the record. Because with "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville" the mood shifts abruptly. It's all breezy, old-fashioned country-rock, galloping along on Mills's honky-tonk piano chimes and Berry's crisp drumming, with Stipe crooning more nasally than ever.

The song, somewhere between a divertissement and a tribute to tradition (Easter considered it little more than a cover), is credited to Mills and is, inevitably, the least cryptic lyric of the bunch. Its subject is a celebrated and much-courted Athens college student, Ingrid Schorr, who is begged not to leave town and move to Maryland for the summer. "While I was writing it I put myself in the character's shoes and imagined I was really in love with her and that she was leaving me forever," Mills himself explained, though he also admitted to having actually dated the coveted student.

Looking at your watch a third time waiting in the station for a bus

Going to a place that’s far, so far away and if that’s not enough

Going where nobody says hello, they don't talk to anybody they don't know

You’ll wind up in some factory that’s full time filth and nowhere left to go

Walk home to an empty house, sit around all by yourself

I know it might sound strange, but I believe

You'll be coming back before too long

Don't go back to Rockville

And waste another year

Recorded by the band with reluctance, almost solely to please their manager Bertis Downs, a big country music fan, “(Don't Go Back To) Rockville” is the most immediate, catchiest track on “Reckoning”. It's an album of delicate balance, halfway between consolidation and transition. It lacks the drive and consistency of “Murmur”, but reveals an even more mature and versatile band, more determined than ever to cast off the moorings and sail with sure-footed confidence through rock's many pitfalls — including those closer to home. Because the album's gestation had itself been fraught with obstacles. And it wasn't just the 25-day limit set for completing the recordings. Jay Boberg, the boss at IRS, wasn't satisfied with the 200,000 copies “Murmur” had sold, good enough for number 36 on the charts. So he begged Don Dixon and Mitch Easter to come up with something to make the band's sound “more commercial”. The pair, however, turned a deaf ear. Dixon, in particular, enamoured of that delicate sonic filigree, sought instead an even more ethereal, shimmering effect, aiming to give depth to the instruments and to Stipe and Mills's intertwined vocals. So he experimented with the “binaural technique”, essentially trying to capture sound with the natural bifocal quality of the two ears. Two microphones stuffed inside a cardboard box were enough for the purpose — perhaps aided by a bit of delay and reverb here and there. The result was a more “open” sound, then, but far from compromised or crowd-pleasing. If anything, it steered back toward the roots of the American tradition: roots rock, Southern boogie, country.

R.E.M.'s identity, in short, was not for sale, and never mind if “Reckoning” wouldn't spawn any top-ten hits. Selling ten thousand more copies than “Murmur” (reaching number 27 on the charts) was already a sign of success, with the critics still firmly on their side. Athens's former freshmen had grown up.

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01/05/2026