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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Soundtrack to a Transition Time, June 27, 2003
Considering that this was R.E.M.'s strongest collection of songs since their debut, there's a strange sense of uncertainty about the whole project.You listen to the first four cuts and think "Aha, another political statement from the band that brought you Lifes Rich Pageant the previous year." Taken together, "Finest Worksong," "Welcome to the Occupation," "Exhuming McCarthy" and "Disturbance at the Heron House" sound very much like a sort of State of the Union address. In each cut you get a different take on America - the dignity of its workers, the evils of its interference overseas, its historical insistence on conformity and its domestic paranoia. "McCarthy" has a few awkward moments, but overall the music displays this band's usual mastery of style and technique; these songs move. Then there's a cover version of Pylon's "Strange" and the whole thing breaks apart. I can't help thinking that the interruption is deliberate. R.E.M. had played plenty of covers before, and even recorded a few, but this was almost the first time they put one on a regular album release, and it's about as close to punk as they had come. (There was "Superman" the previous year, but that one came at the end of the collection rather than the middle, and it was an obvious throwaway.) "Strange" is like a signal to the listener, saying "Whatever you think you've been hearing, that's not it." Then the band proceeds to prove it - the rest of "Document" has nothing to do with political commentary. "The One I Love" and "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" both scored big on the singles charts, and I can't imagine why, since they're both among the slipperiest hits ever recorded. They're both terrific, mind - "One I Love" introduces a classic R.E.M. riff and a devastating lyric, and "End of the World" is both nice poetry and enormous fun. But the first of these songs doesn't mean what you think it does, and the second doesn't really seem to mean anything at all. Why in the world did the audience take to them so strongly? (I know, I know, they have good beats and you can dance to them, but still...) The next two numbers are more R.E.M. American grotesquerie a la "Fables of the Reconstruction" - "Fireplace" is a pounding rock waltz about preparations for a hoedown that turn destructive and "Lightnin' Hopkins" is a vicious bluesy stomp that has about as much to do with the old bluesman of the title as the Ramones do (which may be more than I think, actually). And then "Document" closes out with a couple of straight-ahead surrealist nightmares, "King of Birds" and "Odd Fellows Local 151," with music straight out of a Ken Kesey Acid Test and lyrics by Salvador Dali or something. They wouldn't have been out of place on R.E.M.'s dada debut, "Murmur" - the music is folksy but driven, the lyrics are confusing but significant, the vocal and playing style shouldn't work but they do. It feels like you should be able to dismiss this stuff as self-indulgent, but you can't. It means something, dammit. Taken all together, "Document" is about as disorienting as a game of blind man's bluff. It lurches from simple tunesmithing to scorching rock to something unidentifiable that drifts right through your head and back out into the sky. And here's a thought - in 1987, R.E.M. faced a number of important decisions, like what record company to sign with and whether to tour Europe. In short, they were getting famous, and I wonder if "Document" is the sound of a band trying to figure out whether to give its fans some good old-fashioned pop or stick with its twisted art-house roots. Now, that's the kind of struggle can result in great music, when it doesn't produce a nervous breakdown instead. Fortunately, by the time R.E.M. had to face this pressure, they had been playing together for going on ten years and evidently trusted each other. So they could look outward and inward both at once, knowing that they had each other's backs. Every time Peter Buck bangs out a chord, or Bill Berry and Mike Mills trade backing vocal lines, or Michael Stipe hollers "Listen to me!", you can hear the band's defiance and excitement in the face of the world's demands. "Document" is a summing up of R.E.M.'s career to that point, an important step to take before any giant leap. They may have felt fragmented, pulled in different directions, like that glass sculptor on the cover whose body is shattered in a million pieces by his materials, but there's no doubt that they were still in control of each piece. The following year they signed with Warner Brothers and handed in a collection of, as they said, "stupid pop songs." They'd earned the right. Benshlomo says, The past is a springboard from which to jump, eyes shut, into the future.
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album Document 
