It seems almost quaint, this EP. However, I can tell you that nothing sounded like this on these shores in 1982. It's been 40 years since Chronic Town was released, and the record, reissued by UMD next week on multiple formats (including for the first time as a standalone CD), still stuns. In the days of New Wave and synth-pop, and Top 40 dreck, absolutely nothing in America was as wonderfully obscure and enticing as the Byrds-ian twists and turns of this Mitch Easter-produced college rock.
For those of us who came in on Murmur and went back to get Chronic Town, things seemed even more mysterious than they already did. It didn't matter what Michael Stipe was singing on "Gardening at Night", but how he was singing it. And on "Wolves, Lower", the opener, it's the interplay between instruments that pulls us in even now. I got this on cassette in 1984, after Reckoning came out, a memory I recounted a decade ago here, and the EP was worth the effort it took to find it in a Sam Goody or whatever then. I mean, Murmur got a lot of press in Rolling Stone and the like, but how the hell to describe music like "Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars)"? That one, the closer to the first side of Chronic Town sounds now faintly like post-punk from the U.K., a fact that that gets overlooked by those writing about Stipe's inscrutable lyrics or Buck's McGuinn hooks. Mike Mills and Bill Berry anchored this, and on this one, they give the band's early sound a funky edge that's, if not Gang of Four, at least Pylon-like.
"1,000,000" opens the second side of Chronic Town with a similar rough force. Stipe sings with a near-sneer until he gets sweet on the chorus, but the choppy guitar chords and supple bass-line give this one a heft that's missing from the glorious "Stumble", the closer here. This one, with the band sounding like The Byrds a whole lot, might make us think of stuff on Side 2 of Murmur, but in 1982 this must have seemed like music from outer space. There was nothing lurking in the catalogs of Tom Verlaine or Talking Heads then that quite approached the raw poetry of this kind of thing, with a pastoral fervor running through what would have been in Northern hands, more intellectual and aloof. R.E.M. were, as we can hear here, an emotional band, even if we weren't quite able then or now to pin down the emotion, nor the lyrics. But don't blame Mitch Easter as this has never sounded more crisp, and still as vivid as a dream.
Chronic Town is reissued next week everywhere by UMD.
[Photo: Sandra Lee Phipps]