The cover of Lifes Rich Pageant features the handsome forehead and full eyebrows of drummer Bill Berry, whose face is cut off at the nose by a low-contrast picture of two buffalo. It's a curious image, embedded with a Buffalo Bill pun, and it playfully nods to the band's refusal to practice expected music-industry behaviors like appearing prominently on their album covers, lip-syncing in videos, writing love songs, or generally revealing too much of themselves beyond the music. Even four albums into their career, they still cultivated an enigmatic presence on Lifes Rich Pageant, starting with that cover and extending to the dropped apostrophe in that title and the mismatched tracklists. Furthermore, the mysterious painted figures and roughly sketched symbols in the liner notes presented the album as something more akin to folk art than folk rock.
In direct conflict with that visual impression, Lifes Rich Pageant was R.E.M.'s most pop-oriented and accessible album up to that point. Recording frequently and touring almost constantly, the band had been nurturing a grassroots audience throughout the early 1980s, and Pageant is a pivotal album in their career, representing the moment when their Southern post-punk sound anticipated larger venues and began expanding to fill those spaces. It was also, strangely, their most overtly political collection, with songs addressing environmental crises and political malaise. Rather than sounding sanctimonious, however, such dissent energized R.E.M. and injected more pep into Berry's drumbeats, more incisive jangle into Peter Buck's guitar, and more charisma into Michael Stipe's performance. The album barrels along in just over 30 minutes, lending the songs a sense of purpose. This is music that has to be somewhere.
Lifes is celebratory rather than commiserative, with tense tempos fueling heraldic choruses and shout-outs to Woody Guthrie ("Cuyahoga") and Cole Porter ("Begin the Begin"). Stipe's lyrical dodginess, such a formidable weapon on previous albums, allows the band to come at these issues from obscure angles: With its rousing chorus and pensive bass line, "Cuyahoga" mails postcard dispatches from a museum where rivers and plains are artifacts, consigned to diorama and memory rather than reality. "Fall on Me" mixes spiritual and consumerist language to deliver a knotted ecological message that takes some unpacking: "Buy the sky and sell the sky," Stipe sings, then changes the Wall Street phrasing: "Lift your arms up to the sky. Ask the sky and ask the sky, don't fall on me."
Maybe that's why the band chose to close with Mike Mills-sung cover of the Clique's "Superman". Seemingly out of place on such a serious-minded album and certainly jarring after the Civil War fever dream of "Swan Swan H", it's been derided as R.E.M. at their most superfluous. But that's how they must have felt at the time-- like supermen taking on the world's problems and finding they had unknown powers. In that regard, they're aided significantly by producer Don Gehman, who was then famous for helming John Cougar's early albums. Who knew that Gehman would handle R.E.M. better than folk-rock legend Joe Boyd, who nearly made a muddle of their previous album, Fables of the Reconstruction? In addition to giving the melodic leads their own space, he emphasizes the muscle in Berry's beats and the intricate interaction between the rhythm section. No wonder the drummer's on the album cover: Berry's responsible for the furious pace of the album and enables its abrupt detours into salsa and Nuggets pop.
That dynamic makes the remaster on this 25th anniversary reissue sound even livelier and warmer, reinforcing the balance between excitement and gravity that illuminates these songs. It also makes the second disc of demos all the more intriguing, presenting these familiar songs in their most skeletal format. The small flourishes that didn't make the studio versions sound charmingly off-handed: Stipe hums most of "I Believe", then punctuates the end with a sing-songy la-la-la. He tries out a harmonica solo on an early version of "Bad Day", then uses the instrument to cover for forgotten lyrics. This is R.E.M. at their most ramshackle, a vibe that makes Dead Letter Office a fan favorite even today.
Lifes is R.E.M.'s first transition album, one that builds on the innovations of their early releases while hinting at the territory they would cover on Document and Green. It's both epilogue and prologue, yet these songs retain their own specific flavor, as R.E.M. map the borders between small clubs and large venues, between underground and mainstream, between rhythm and melody, between outrage and hope. That in-between quality still sounds invigorating so many years later.
