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It was the superb 1983 album Murmur that made critics sit up and notice a radical new four-piece from Georgia. Released 25 years ago, we commemorate the impact of R.E.M. with this perceptive Creem review by John Morthland. -- Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

I KEEP HEARING about the rise of the new garage bands, who draw their inspiration from the original punks, those brash, anarchistic, one-hit bands so plentiful in the mid-sixties and now preserved on such anthologies as the pathbreaking Nuggets and the Pebbles series.

By now, I've also heard a fair number of such bands, and pardon me for saying so, but my ears hurt. They remind me of nothing so much as the neo-rockabilly bands that have proliferated in the last couple years before emerging as a potent commercial force via the Stray Cats – which is to say they all turn out to be little more than a haircut and a period costume.

Besides, the best of the garage bands has been around for a couple years now. R.E.M. hails from Athens, GA, though it has little in common with other Athens bands beyond a firm dance beat featuring a dub-like heavy bass. Though they've already released an indie single and an I.R.S. EP, Murmur is their debut album. Like their previous work, it's produced by Mitch Easter, the North Carolina pop alchemist who really does work out of a garage studio. Because there aren't quite enough strong songs, Murmur doesn't hold up all the way, though. But it's still a gallant, often galvanizing, effort; R.E.M. outshines the competition because they use that garage sound only as a launching pad, and not as something to be slavishly emulated.

They're most often compared to the Byrds, and thanks to Peter Buck's ringing guitar on songs like "Talk About The Passion," "Catapult," or "Sitting Still," along with Michael Stipe's lead vocals over soaring harmonies, it's easy to see why, But that's merely one influence, and a misleading one at that, because with no one source dominating, R.E.M. faintly recalls a host of mid-'60s L.A. bands from one-hit wonders like the Leaves to "underground" (i.e., album-only) faves like Kaleidoscope, David Lindley's first band. R.E.M. has so thoroughly transformed their influences that it sometimes leaves them on shaky ground, but the result sounds both familiar and wholly original.

The key work up there is "faintly," as faint as the radio signal they long for on their new version of "Radio Free Europe," and Murmur is an apt album title for a band that makes music (onstage as well as on record, so don't give Easter all the credit) this murky, and this druggy. I still have no idea what these songs are about, because neither me nor anyone else I know has ever been able to discern R.E.M.'s lyrics. But the fleeting images of "Talk About The Passion" or "Perfect Circle" are intriguing enough, and the music picks up the slack. Phrases jump out of "Pilgrimage," too, but none suggest the song's title so faithfully as do the shifting tempos. "Moral Kiosk" may or may not be about the difficulty of making tough decisions in such stultifying times ("It's so much more attractive inside the moral kiosk"), but the splayed rhythm guitar seconds that emotion. And when Stipe does attempt to make his words clear on "We Walk," I'm so tranced out by Buck's rolling, repeating guitar fillups that I'm not paying attention to the lyrics anyhow. Buck's guitar solos are capable of breaking through the mix and soaring just like the ghostly background voices, and any band that can come up with melodies this rich knows a thing or two about pop music.

The EP may yet prove to be R.E.M.'s best medium, But when I listen to the other groups rooted in the mid-'60s, I hear none of the bursting-out that their models represented. Instead, I hear those unpredictable shrieks and yowls of freedom being reduced to conventions, to a set of rules that are to be followed and mastered. R.E.M. uses those same conventions to destroy the rules, or at least to get out past them, and that counts for plenty. Often enough, they succeed, and that counts for even more.

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