REMtrospective 1: Chronic Town
Released on: Aug. 24, 1982 (I.R.S. Records)
Favorite tracks: “Wolves, Lower,” “1,000,000”
Recently I heard Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills on “Fresh Air” talking about R.E.M.’s career and it reminded me of how much I like the group. That almost seems to go without saying, especially since I went to college in the 1980s. I never thought of R.E.M. as my #1 favorite 1980s band (which is more of a four-way tie with R.E.M., U2, Talking Heads and Elvis Costello), but R.E.M. was in a lot of ways the definitive band back then, both in the prevalence of their music and their influence on indie/college radio rock, especially at a Southern university.
So I’ve been inspired by blogger/screenwriter Todd Alcott’s cinematic example to do a chronological, album-by-album retrospective of R.E.M., up to their new one, Accelerate, which I’ve barely heard as of this writing. (Yes, I probably should have done this back before Accelerate’s release date.) Now, I’m not a rock critic and I don’t claim to have the ear or vocabulary of a musicologist. To the best of my ability, I’ll write about their sound, their songs, why they “click” and how they’ve evolved. I’ll share any tidbits I come across, and I’ll talk about how the music sounds to me now, as opposed to how the albums sounded when they came out. And I’m giving my self plenty of leeway to share memories and associations the music inspires. Feel free to join in.
Skipping over the band’s 1981 single “Radio Free Europe” (which I’ll mention with Murmur), I begin with the 1982 EP Chronic Town.
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