There are a few ways one can cleanly divide the catalog of R.E.M. The easiest is their initial run of albums on I.R.S. records before moving to Warner Brothers. But that wasn’t as radical of a break as their work immediately preceding, and soon following, the departure of drummer Bill Berry.
As for myself, I believe they started losing the plot when they stopped naming the sides of their records, instead of just using numbers or the usual letters. Green, for example, has its sides enigmatically labelled “Air” and “Metal”. Fables of the Reconstruction has the jokey “A Side” and “Another Side”. But the best named ones are those of Document, these being “Page” and “Leaf”. It was this curious attention to detail which used to make each new album from them even more special. Each was an artifact to be pored over, especially in the format of the 12” vinyl sleeve.
Document is the apex of that era, and I believe their best album, period. There was information all over this thing, all to be carefully considered and obsessed over. I thought I got the joke of “FILE UNDER FIRE” being written on the spine, as I was familiar with Capitol Records albums of the early-to-mid 60’s, where there would usually be a category at the top, such as “FILE UNDER ROCK”. There was cryptic imagery, including that cover where Stipe is in a double, or maybe triple or who knows how many times exposure photograph. The number 5 features frequently and prominently, and I’m embarrassed by how long it took me to realize this is their fifth long player.
The music inside was even more intriguing. This is a very accessible album, but every aspect of it made me want to dig further. Typical of the band, the lyrics encourage one to try to unravel them to get to the arcane knowledge they surely must be obfuscating.
Even more than what these songs might “mean”, there is something about this album that triggers my synesthesia. Listening to it, I smell both woodsmoke and fresh cut wood, as well as metal and such obscure odors as that of old, dusty office supplies—the last the smell of bureaucracy if there ever was one.
Though I doubt it was their intention, I cannot help but think of this as a concept album, or at least the closest they would ever come to one. Combined with the imagery on the sleeve, this music seems to come from a parallel America that is somehow overlaid by the oppression and long histories of a communist country in eastern Europe. Similar to that multiple-exposure on the front cover, listening to this is often like I’m somehow experiencing multiple places and eras at the same time, with them converging together at various points.
Some elements of Document which instill these feelings in me are more obvious then others. It is easy to imagine opener “Finest Worksong” as an anthem for the proletariat, albeit ones who are probably off to work at minimum wage-slave jobs in the U.S. The title of “Welcome To The Occupation” is sufficient for my purposes. Funny how I don’t associate it with its obvious critique of U.S. intervention in South American, even when the chorus blatantly calls out the southern hemisphere. “Exhuming McCarthy”, my most favorite track of their catalog, summons the ghosts of the 1950’s Red Scare and seems to transpose this with the “greed is good” vibe of the 1980’s. “Fireplace” laments this crazy world and crazy times, though (like in “Exhuming McCarthy”) it is hard to tell if they mean the then-present or the deeper past. Maybe it is just a comment on how the world has always been.
Two of the singles spun off this album were shockingly big hits for an indie band at the time, and continue to be among their best-known today. “The One I Love” is one of those songs people always seem to mistake for being a sincere ballad, in the same way so many fail to pick up on the point of view in “Every Breath You Take” being that of a stalker. As for the R.E.M. song, it isn’t very flattering that the object of the singer’s affection considers their lover to be just a toy with which they waste time.
The only big hit is, of course, “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”. I have an issue of Rolling Stone with a news blurb about the pending release of the album, and Peter Buck said of this track that it is either the best or worst thing they’ve ever done. I still think is it an amazing track, though overexposed to the extent I am often tempted to skip it on full album playthroughs. Still, I don’t think I have done that yet, though I may change the channel if I hear it on the radio. The song at least supports the concept album I see in Document, as it seems to be all of the 20th century’s popular culture of western civilization tossed into a blender.
R.E.M. always has strong album closers, and the one here is no exception. “Oddfellows Local 101” is the kind of song which simply can’t be followed by anything else. Musically, it has the kind of slow guitar churn which they would experiment with further in the next album’s “Turn You Inside Out”. The lyrics paint a curiously disturbing gathering of the followers of Pee-Wee (presumably not he who has the last name Herman). They are very hazy on the details, but I find it easy to imagine it being some sort of primitive folk ceremony. I assume the setting is America, but I get the impression whatever ritual is underway is very old—like the kind of history eastern Europe has, for example.
From the forums I haunt on the internet, it appears Document is not the album most people would rank as R.E.M.’s best. As for myself, it has my favorite song of their oeuvre, as well as many tracks that are permanently in the public consciousness. It is no surprise they were on the cusp of signing to a major label, as this is the last of their albums where they truly felt like an indie band, yet the album has the sonic impact of bigger productions to come. But most importantly, it still intrigues me, and it has somehow retained a bit of mystery for me after what has to be at least one hundred listens. That’s largely what keeps me coming back to it more than any work in their catalog, and why it is my favorite R.E.M. album.