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Few archival releases are as revelatory as this 25th Anniversary edition of Fables of the Reconstruction , so it’s perfectly appropriate the packaging recalls nothing so much as a limited edition, designed by the band itself. Replica LP sleeves, individual portraits of the four men as well as a booklet and a large foldout poster are all extensions of the original artwork.
This 1985 album, is the first dramatic instance of the way R.E.M. redefined themselves with regularity during the course of their career. It represents the original quartet’s willful sacrifice of a sound that had become synonymous ,not just with them, but a whole style of nouveau rock in the eighties(“jangle pop”). And while elements of that style appear here in the form of “Maps and Legends” and even more so in “Driver 8,” the music is otherwise as impenetrable as the disorienting “Feeling Gravity’s Pull.”
Originally produced in England by Joe Boyd, who had worked with Britain’s’ famed folk band Fairport Convention (early home of Richard Thompson and Ian Matthews), this third full-length release isn’t illuminated by guitarist Peter Buck in his liner notes, but his pithy description (comparable to his economical guitar style) of their collective state of mind at the time becomes obvious, in retrospect, when hearing the re-mastered CD, this shadowy, elusive music at once sounds everything like R.E.M. and nothing like what they’d done before.
Which makes it appropriate that, instead of the concerts included with previous such R.E.M. packages, the second disc consists of demo recordings done in the group’s hometown prior to the actual production of the album. Every tune of the finished album reappears with the addition of tracks that would appear on future releases (“Hyena”) plus an otherwise unavailable song (“Throw Those Trolls Away”).
Minus faint touches of orchestration and horns to decorate the sound, the demos create a parallel version of the album as released. In fact, this collection sounds perfectly comparable to Murmur or Reckoning , the albums that immediately preceded it or Life’s Rich Pageant, which immediately followed. In comparison to the murk of Boyd’s production, the no-frills recording reveals the mechanics of the band throughout, from the insistent Mike Mills’ bassplaying that anchors Bill Berry’s drumming to the vocals of Michael Stipe, which otherwise wouldn’t become this prominent in R.E.M. mixes for at least three more studio releases.
Every aspect of this mini-box set recalls the independence and idiosyncrasy that R.E.M. made fashionable in the eighties and nineties. Even the quasi-palindrome nature of the album’s title gains meaning with a quarter century of hindsight, so that ‘Reconstruction of the Fables’ makes just as much sense Fables of the Reconstruction.
