With thirty-five years’ perspective, R.E.M.’s Document (released 8/31/87) remains the dual artistic/commercial pinnacle of their career. The group’s fifth album represents the culmination of their creative growth to that point as well as the certified breakthrough to a wide mainstream audience that had previously eluded them.
Even more keen hindsight reveals it’s a statement of purpose that, at the time of its release in 1987, allowed the band to observe the fragmentation of America at the conclusion of the Reagan years and on the threshold of the first Bush era. Seen through the prism of these eleven tracks, that fractured state of affairs pales in comparison to the United States circa 2022.
The Southern standard bearers of the DIY/alternative movement would assume a more overtly activist/political stance on their next record, Green. But that may well have been to assuage those vexed with the group’s move to the major label of Warner Bros., after having built their career at independent IRS Records. Regardless of the motivation, R.E.M.’s final long-player of new material for the latter captured a rock and roll band at the top of its game, thereby setting the stage for the group to ratchet up its commercial popularity significantly further–and even gain Grammy Awards, with Out Of Time and Automatic For The People respectively–but only by even more dramatically altering its sound (and ceasing touring to boot).
The epitome of rock independence, R.E.M. had grown incrementally as songwriters, performers, and recording artists by the time they inaugurated work with Scott Litt as session producer for Document (he would continue for five more outings in the role.) It’s wholly plausible the magnification of the unit’s recorded sound–amplified across the frequency spectrum on a 2012 remaster by Robert Vosgien–is the biggest advance the engineer/co-producer brought to the proceedings. But the inclusion of “Strange,” the four-piece unit’s cover of British eccentrics Wire, also spoke self-referential volumes about their collective state of mind.
In a slightly different but no less crucial vein, R.E.M.’s self-confidence permeated this entire project. Eight of its tracks appear on the setlist in the live recording from Holland they included in the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition. And, notwithstanding the politics of those times, the musicianship on “Exhuming McCarthy” radiates an edgy purpose.
Ringing out loud and clear from the very outset on “Finest Worksong,” these virtues are the most direct reflections of the band’s growth. Taking part in a redefinition of the guitar/bass/drums/vocals format, Peter Buck all but reconceived the role of rhythm guitar in the genre, to the point Keith Richards might well envy the layered, complementary work on “Disturbance at the Heron House.”
Yet the most striking departure of all here may be the heightened prominence of Michael Stipe’s lead singing. His voice is clearly upfront within the well-defined mix as he enunciates cryptic lyrics like that of “Oddfellows Local 151” and “Lightin’ Hopkins.” And, at the conclusion of “Welcome to the Occupation,” the eccentric frontman repeats ‘Listen to me!’ over and over again, with increasing urgency.
Document is the work of a band that wants to be heard, even if the quartet refused to spell it out for their listeners new and old.
R.E.M aficionados in particular though will still be delighted at the thought the Athens, Georgia band’s first bonafide hit, “The One I love,” is an exercise in irony the likes of which the group, and vocalist/chief lyricist Stipe in particular, never surpassed.
Mike Mills also declared himself the unsung hero of the foursome here, albeit in a somewhat tacit fashion. He carefully contoured his bass lines within arrangements such as that of “Welcome to the Occupation” and with one of them fired a sharp shot across the bow of Bill Berry’s booming drums on the aforementioned clarion call of an opener. Meanwhile, his voice commanded attention whenever it appeared, to the extent his counterpoint singing nearly supersedes the refrain of the exultant “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”
For a band that demurred from placing photos of itself on its album covers–the one on the front here is a pastiche of images individually and collectively vivid–to express itself so clearly and directly as this is no small gesture, especially when the tunes come from opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Yet for all R.E.M. ‘s emphasis on bedrock arrangements on Document, there’s also a restrained and judicious use of additional instrumentation.
Besides carefully placed touches of percussion (tambourine, guiro), the dulcimer on “King of Birds” foreshadowed the varied, often acoustic textures on those two aforementioned blockbuster LPs of ‘91 and ‘92 respectively. In addition, Steve Berlin of Los Lobos added the liberating squawk of saxophone to the cacophony of”Fireplace.”
The impact of Document had a broad ripple effect in the rock milieu of the era. As such, it mirrored that of R.E.M. as progenitors of a genre unto itself. In that light, three and a half decades on, the band’s progression seems not only supremely logical but also all the more purposeful. And in careful hearings to it today, the songs sound eerily prescient.
Apart from allusions to unhinged zealotry and righteous zeal in “Exhuming McCarthy,” reverberations of contemporary cultural, political and social themes are unmistakable in Document, to the point its title has taken on even greater meaning(s) in the interim since its release. R.E.M. had always used ambiguity effectively from the start of its recording career, but never with more potency than here.
