It wasn't a big deal: they simply ploughed onwards and forwards, the following year’s Lifes Rich Pageant being everything its predecessor wasn’t - loud, direct, sunny, with a lead single that didn’t confuse everybody. The atrocious artwork has a lot to answer for, but a lot of the blame lies with the band themselves, as having had such a terrible time recording the thing, they decided it wasn’t very good and said as much during interviews (about the most upbeat comment at the time was Stipe’s infamous non sequitur that it sounded like " two oranges being nailed together."). In any case, despite playing host to ‘Driver 8’, frequently cited as the quintessential REM song, Fables of the Reconstruction tends to get a worse rap than the rest of the band’s early catalogue. But then as The Athens Demos - the very worthwhile second disc on this reissue - attests, the tracks were hardly a barrel of laughs in (though it is notable that the more upbeat ‘Bandwagon’ and ‘Hyena’ didn’t make the final cut). Whether or not this affected the songs is open to debate: Boyd’s mix is notoriously dense, the music harsh and elliptical, Michael Stipe sounding not a little mad. Cold, broke, and allegedly subsisting on an all-potato diet, they had a thoroughly miserable time. The band traded their balmy Athens, Georgia for a dreary London winter, in order to that they might record their third album with veteran British folk producer Joe Boyd. circa 1985 that the still relatively obscure quartet recorded their cracked Southern Gothic masterpiece Fables of the Reconstruction in what was, to all intents and purposes, the exact opposite of the environment that inspired the songs. It says something about the perversity of R.E.M.
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