Long before they were Shiny Happy People or an Important Rock Band™, R.E.M. were just an awesome rock n’ roll band in the fledgling American underground.  Released in 1984, Reckoning was the document that showed the Athens, Georgia quartet at the height of their unassuming rock powers.

Recorded just before the critical praise for their debut album Murmur reached a dull roar, Reckoning showcased R.E.M. as a band unafraid to turn up their instruments and record a relatively stripped down, live-feeling album instead of making a “statement” with their sophomore release.  The results are powerful and still hold up after a quarter century.

What made R.E.M a great band in this era was their ability to shift from New Wave-infused sixties pop like on “Harborcoat” to the country pop of “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville” almost effortlessly.  The songs are varied.  Some songs could carry you through a marathon on their power, make you sob, or make you dance all night at a club. Yet other songs you might play just relaxing at home as you read or write, play online bingo or write emails, cook or talk on the phone. They created atmospheric melodies that still carry Peter Buck’s trademark Roger McGuinn-via Sterling Morrison guitar style and Michael Stipe’s constant vocal mumbling all over Mike Mills and Bill Berry’s rock-solid bass and drums.  The result was a template for a million other college rock bands in the eighties.

The real find of this reissue is a here-before unreleased live concert from July of 1984 in Chicago that cooks from the beginning to end.  From the subdued opening cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” to the anthemic feeling closer of “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville”, this show barely lets listeners up to breathe 25 years later, let alone the audience who was lucky enough to attend the concert that evening.

What Reckoning and the accompanying live disc prove, beyond any doubt is that Van Halen weren’t the consummate rock superheroes in 1984, it was R.E.M., and here is where they prove it.  Who needs David Lee Roth yelping from a flying surf board when you have Stipe, Berry, Mills and Buck playing full-throttle renditions of “Radio Free Europe”? Certainly not this reviewer and listeners won’t either, instead take a deep breath and delve down into the murky California pop meets Southern Gothic style rock of R.E.M.. It’s worth reconsidering.

R.E.M. on the web: www.remhq.com