Reckoning

About

Many bands stumble with their second album, usually because the group members have exhausted their cache of good songs on their debut. But R.E.M. had such a large store of material that Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mill, and Bill Berry actually discussed making <i>Reckoning</i>—the group’s 1984 sophomore effort—a double album. Their confidence was understandable: Through relentless touring, R.E.M. had become a great live band. And the band members showed off that growing muscle with <i>Reckoning</i>, which features a live sound that captured R.E.M.’s sweaty, dynamic, onstage sound. Many of the songs on <i>Reckoning</i> are powered by guitarist Buck’s rippling arpeggio, fast picking, fluid strumming, and propulsive rhythmic sense. “Pretty Persuasion” and “Second Guessing” showcase the bright tone of his Rickenbacker guitar, and his riffs and licks define the songs and set them in motion—similar to the way Keith Richards did in The Rolling Stone, even though the bands have little in common. Yet for listeners who’d discovered the band via 1983’s cryptic <i>Murmur</i>—and who’d been left wondering just who these guys were, or what Stipe was singing about—<i>Reckoning</i> didn’t offer more clue. Instead, the album is full of water imagery (hazardous harbor, deadly flood, ocean, water tower, and metaphorical “rivers of suggestion”) that deepens the mystery of the song. And while the members of R.E.M. never sounded like they were from the South—they didn’t sound like they were from America, or even from <i>Earth</i>, given how out of time the music was—there is a small nod to the group’s home state of Georgia in “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville,” a loping, country-ish number that Mill, the band’s bassist, wrote as an entreaty to a girlfriend who was going back to her hometown of Rockville, Maryland for the summer. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

Start your shelf to read the full take →