Reckoning

Ten tracks in thirty-eight minutes, and most of them are required. Harborcoat has to open: its two voices crossing in different words state the record’s method before any song can be understood. So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry) is the hinge of the first side, the one song where the voice stops evading and repeats an apology. Camera is the needed weight of the second, the only slow piece and the only grief, and Little America has to close, a band on the road naming its own lostness. The test bites in the middle of the second side: Second Guessing and Letter Never Sent say little the others have not said, and Pretty Persuasion could change places with either. About a fifth of the record is permitted rather than compelled, and the cap is cleared narrowly.

Score: 7.6 / 10

What can be stated: a young band from a small Southern town discloses a South that is not the South of story, a place of kudzu, floods, folk art and phone lines down, heard through friendship, apology and grief rather than through history. Sound carries much of it, and is credited in full. So. Central Rain discloses the guilt of absence, a call that cannot get through over rising water, its last minute given to a plain repeated “I’m sorry”. Camera holds grief for a friend who died young without consolation, and Little America discloses the van and the road. What holds the axis well below the bar is the method: the words are obscured by design, and most of what the record gives is a mood of place and loyalty, felt more than articulated.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Elevation comes often and is warm, lit rather than grand. So. Central Rain is the height: the verses held tight over Peter Buck’s chiming figure, then the chorus breaking open and the closing apology sung again and again until it becomes a lament. Harborcoat lifts on its interlocking voices. Camera is the quiet summit, slow and spacious, Michael Stipe’s voice exposed over guitar that rings and decays, the record’s one real stillness. Time After Time (AnnElise) reaches a droning, suspended height, almost a raga. Rockville rises by another route, a country lift in Mike Mills’s voice and the honky-tonk piano. Second Guessing, Letter Never Sent and Pretty Persuasion have drive more than height, and Little America is propulsive. Five or six of ten tracks rise, and the highest falls short of transport of the first order.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Myth is evoked often and built in one song. 7 Chinese Bros. takes its frame from the children’s tale of brothers who each survive an execution by a different gift, one of them swallowing the sea, and sets that tale, half heard, against a personal story of guilt and holding back. The old figure bears some load: the one who swallows the sea is the one who keeps what he cannot say. Beyond it the record evokes. Howard Finster’s painted sleeve summons a vernacular sacred the music points toward without building, and the flood of So. Central Rain, the road west of Little America and the return refused in Rockville are old figures given as atmosphere and situation, not structure. The particular stays particular: a phone, a van, a manager named in the last line.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The inheritance is the band’s own Murmur of the year before, at 8.5 here, and behind it the folk rock of the Byrds, the guitar bands after punk and the Southern songbook. The turn from Murmur is real and small. The production is drier and nearer, the sound of a band in a room rather than a mist of overdubs; the voice comes slightly forward; and Rockville turns openly to country, a direction the band would take further. That is a change of emphasis on a proven path, not a departure. The stake was modest: a young band praised for a debut, making the follow-up quickly with the same producers, on the same label, for the same audience. The band’s whole manner, still unusual in American rock of 1984, is credited, but most of that swerve was placed by the first album, and this is the lowest of the record’s gated axes.

Score: 7.0 / 10

Would changing the form change what the record knows? In part. Its knowledge, loyalty and loss carried through a half-heard voice, lives in an arrangement in which the words are a strand in the weave rather than its message: Stipe sung low and slurred, Mills and Bill Berry singing counter-lines that cross him, Buck’s arpeggios carrying the melody the voice will not. Harborcoat makes that the whole song, and a mix that put the words forward would say something more ordinary. The sequence is counted here, once: the first side moves from crossing voices to the apology and the drone, the second from brisk songs to Camera’s grief, Rockville’s plain speech and the road out of Little America, which leaves the record in motion. The order serves well; it enacts little, and most songs could change places.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Evidence over forty-two years. The record is returned to steadily by the band’s listeners, and the half-sung words keep yielding: decades of transcription and argument over what Stipe sings in Harborcoat or 7 Chinese Bros. are a kind of yield, though some of what is found there is projection invited by obscurity. The formal yield is real: the counter-melodies of Mills’s bass and voice reward close listening, and Camera and So. Central Rain deepen with age. Against this, the attention has been steady rather than intense: critical return to the band’s early work runs first to Murmur, and this record is most often heard as its brisker companion. Second Guessing and Letter Never Sent give what they give on first hearing, and part of the semantic depth is withheld rather than present.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The field is the American rock album of the 1980s, and above all the independent and college rock of the middle of the decade. Intrinsic force is modest. The record consolidated what Murmur had proposed, that an American guitar band could be reticent, Southern and melodic, sound like a band in a room and hold a growing public without the gloss of radio rock; it did not reorganise that possibility again. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the band as a body of work bent American independent rock and the alternative rock that followed, but what can be traced to this record rather than to the debut or the career is thinner, the proof that the first album was no accident, the touring life Little America records, and Rockville’s turn to country.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print throughout and reissued with added material. Presence is real and narrower than its age would usually carry: So. Central Rain is still known and the album is heard whole by the band’s listeners, but it lives somewhat in the shadow of Murmur and of the band’s later, far larger records, and the general public does not much hear it. That is charged. The fabric is little charged: the production avoided the synthesisers and gated drums that fix so many records of 1984 to their year, and the sound of a band in a room has dated less than most of its decade. Nothing in the subject is topical. The record meets the bar exactly.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is skilled and often load-bearing. Mitch Easter and Don Dixon recorded the band close to how it played, and the result is clean, dry and live; the choice serves the songs. Buck’s guitar is the record’s signature, arpeggiated figures that ring and overlap, never soloing, always carrying melody. Mills is the hidden architect: his bass moves melodically against the guitar, and his voice is the second lead of Harborcoat and Rockville. Berry’s drumming is economical and right. Stipe’s voice is placed as an instrument, its slur a decision rather than a fault. The faults: some songs are arranged in one house manner and run together, a few performances are hurried, and the brisk songs of the second side are mixed alike.

Score: 8.1 / 10

One law governs the record: ringing guitar, melodic bass and crossing voices, a reticent singer at the centre, the South heard through loyalty and loss. The two most distant elements are Time After Time, a near-modal drone, and Rockville, a country song with honky-tonk piano and plain words sung largely by Mills. They obey the same law more than they first seem to: Rockville is the record’s one clear statement of the attachment to a small place that the other songs mumble, and its plainness is a turn in the voice, not a break. Camera’s stillness and Second Guessing’s speed sit inside the law too. The range is moderate, wider than Murmur toward country and no wider elsewhere, and the coherence owes something to narrowness, which is not coherence; that holds the figure here.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as guilt, reticence and grief. Friendship and the dead friend are held fully in Camera, and the friend or couple estranged in So. Central Rain. Place is held: the small Southern town that Rockville will not let its friend go back to, the rain and the floods, the road across the country in Little America, and the working band as a small society. The sacred is evoked by the sleeve and the drone, not held. What holds the figure lowest on the page is what is missing: the family, labour beyond the band’s own, the state and history are absent or glimpsed only as weather. Three or four orders joined by one voice and one place: the figure describes this record, not a limit of the form.

Score: 6.6 / 10