Murmur

Twelve songs of three to four and a half minutes, and inside the songs almost nothing can go. Peter Buck’s figures are short and repeated, Mike Mills’s bass carries a second melody, and each song ends when its figure is spent; nothing is there for display. Radio Free Europe must open, the one song with a single’s drive. Perfect Circle must close the first side, its slow piano and guitar the still centre the side has been moving toward, and West of the Fields is a fit last word, an open close. Held off the top across the middle: 9-9, its voice garbled on purpose, could go with little lost, We Walk’s charm is local, and the songs share one mode closely enough that the order could shift without loss.

Score: 8.6 / 10

What the record brings into the open is a way of hearing a place. The voice is set into the band rather than over it, so that meaning arrives as tone and fragment, and that discloses something true about how memory and region are held: as a texture, not a statement, a world known by its murmur. Disclosure through sound is credited in full, and here the sound is the disclosure, kept across twelve songs without a lapse. A few titles state more: Radio Free Europe names a broadcast across a wall, Moral Kiosk names judgment sold at a stall, and Talk About the Passion lifts toward a meaning and stops short. Held well below the bar because the statements are withheld, and the condition disclosed lies nearer a mood than a meaning that can be stated and held.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Elevation is frequent and of one kind: beauty, wistful and close, rarely grandeur and never terror. Perfect Circle is the summit, a slow figure on piano and guitar under a voice that seems to be remembering rather than singing, with the harmonies of Mills and Bill Berry rising beneath it. Talk About the Passion lifts at each return of its title, and a string line darkens it. Pilgrimage opens on stacked voices like a chant heard through a wall, and Shaking Through and West of the Fields rise in their choruses. Radio Free Europe has drive, not height; Moral Kiosk and 9-9 are tense, We Walk and Sitting Still level. Height on five or six of twelve, and the top is not among the medium’s highest.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Myth is evoked throughout, densely and consistently, and the evocation is of one country. The record summons the American South as a half-remembered land: the kudzu on the front of the sleeve and the railway trestle on the back stand for a country overgrown and a way across it, and the music gives the same thing by ear. Pilgrimage names the journey to a holy place, and Talk About the Passion carries, by its title, the sacred sense of suffering. A summoning this dense and this single in direction is the evoked kind at its strongest. Held well below the bar because none of it is load-bearing: no figure, no journey across the sequence, no structure that would fall if the archetype were taken away. The particular stays particular only as texture, a porch and a field glimpsed.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The inheritance is the guitar band of the 1960s, the chime of the Byrds above all, beside the Velvet Underground, Television and Patti Smith; around it stood the American rock of 1983, synthesiser new wave, the arena guitar solo and the hard, bright production of the year. The turn is from all of that at once: the guitar played as arpeggio rather than display, a voice mixed into the band with its words left indistinct, a production dense and dark rather than loud and clean, and a South that was neither Southern rock nor country. Four refusals made together are more than a turn of degree. Held below the top because the sources were proven and admired, the chime was twenty years old, the stake of a debut on an independent label was small, and the record refused a moment more than it invented a language.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because its knowledge is the murmur: a voice heard within the band, words half caught, songs that keep the listener at the edge of understanding. Put Michael Stipe in front of the mix with his words clear, and these would become a set of oblique songs; set into the texture, the words become part of the sound of a place. The production enacts it: Mitch Easter and Don Dixon pack guitar, bass, piano and layered voices close together, so that nothing is fully foregrounded. The sequence is counted here, once: the first side moves from drive to stillness, the second from tension to an open close. Held from the top because the form is one container repeated in nearly every song, and the order could be changed with little loss.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over forty-three years, of two kinds. The words have drawn decades of attempts to hear and transcribe them, and the record keeps the question open rather than answering it. Musicians have taken apart the interplay of Buck’s arpeggios and Mills’s melodic bass, and the record is a standing reference in histories of American independent rock. The yield is in the recording too: harmonies and countermelodies surface on return, and the dense mix separates under close listening, so that a record heard many times still gives up parts not heard before. Held from the top because part of what is found in the words is projection invited by indistinctness, as with every record that withholds statement, and once the texture is known the songs yield less than the sound around them.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The field is American rock of the early 1980s, and the independent and college-radio rock then forming. The intrinsic force is a template set against the dominant sound of its year: the chiming arpeggio, the melodic bass, the submerged voice and the regional mystery, joined so as to show that a guitar band could be both obscure and widely loved. The force was a refusal as much as a reorganisation: it changed what a guitar band could sound like and still be heard, not what a rock song could be, and the band’s later career is not credited to it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is widely credited as a founding document of American alternative rock, its reach runs through the 1990s, where later bands named it among their sources, and it stands as a reference in that music’s histories.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-three years. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, remastered and reissued, with live material added as evidence. Presence is continuous but narrower than that of the band’s later records: the album is placed high whenever the decade or American rock is counted, but its public presence is smaller than that of the band’s later singles, none of which is on it, and much of it lies among critics and musicians. That charge stands. The fabric is the record’s strength: it refused the gated drums and synthesiser tones that date most records of 1983, and its guitars, bass, piano and voices carry little of the year. The fabric lifts the case against the charge, but not past it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing on most tracks: Buck’s arpeggiated figures interlock with Mills’s bass lines, which move as melodies in their own right; Berry’s drumming is plain, propulsive and well judged; and the harmonies of Mills and Berry under Stipe give the record its depth. Easter and Dixon keep a close, dense sound legible, placing piano, strings on Talk About the Passion and treated voices without clutter. Stipe’s voice is used as an instrument, and its indistinctness is a decision. The faults fall across a share of the record: a narrow palette, one guitar manner and one band of tempo; 9-9 and Moral Kiosk less achieved than the rest; and tracks where the murk muddies more than it veils.

Score: 8.3 / 10

One law governs the record: everything half heard, a voice inside the band, a region remembered as sound. The two most distant elements obey it. Radio Free Europe, the fastest and most single-like song, and Perfect Circle, the slowest and stillest, both set the voice inside the texture and both hold the same chime. The tense, garbled 9-9 and the slight We Walk keep the law in different keys, the one by distortion, the other by a childlike lightness, and nothing on the record breaks it; the sleeve, a landscape overgrown, keeps it too. Held from the top because narrowness is not coherence: one band of tempo, one palette and one manner of voice make the law easier to keep, and a wider record governed as well would stand higher.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as memory and half-attention. The natural order is held more than on most rock records of its year: fields, kudzu, rivers and weather enter as images and as the texture of the sound. The sacred is evoked, in a pilgrimage and a passion, and the region, the American South, is held as atmosphere throughout. One sensibility joins them. What holds the figure lowest on the page is the kind of join and what it leaves out: the orders are joined by mood rather than by structure, the state and history enter by title only, in Radio Free Europe and Moral Kiosk, and labour, the family, the couple and the body are absent or cannot be made out.

Score: 7.3 / 10