(This is the first of ‘No Code’s’ bi-weekly glances back to some of rock’s most enduring albums.)

R.E.M. – “Murmur”

Indecipherable lyrics. Mutinous drum beats. Crackling, adolescent harmonies.

A blueprint for legend? Yes. A legend in itself? Perhaps.

Much of “Murmur” settles into place with an awkward confidence even now, two full decades after it first dropped on I.R.S. Records. Awkward because it knows, at heart, it’s simply a pop album, similar to any one of the thousands ‘given’ in the years before. Awkward because it knows, deep down, it’s a template meant for transition – meant to be expanded upon, broken, built back from the ground on up. Confident because, in that same heart, it knows it’s pulled something uniquely inviting together – reached up into the universe and pulled the threads nobody else had thought to put together. In that mixture, it’s found an elementary form of magic.

Woven into this first album-length exercise by Stipe, Mills, Buck and Berry are the seeds that spawned a career. The album was mined time and again by the quartet (and not entirely ignored by the current, Berry-less trio) for inspiration and direction. When lost, you reach for the landmarks you know, and as far as musical reference points go, few are more concrete than this.

“Pilgrimage” should perhaps be the album’s proper starting point, as the curtain’s are pulled back on Mike Mills’ falsetto, an effect that beget a fruitful relationship and shadows Stipe’s delivery (though at a lesser pace) to this day. Or should it be “Laughing,” a liquid number heralded by the insistent bass of the ubiquitous Mills? The latter plays as a companion piece of sorts musically, with “Catapult,” whose heavy drums/bass bottom in the verses are off-set beautifully by Buck’s gilded touches to the chorus and its subsequent incarnations. All three carry a naturally occurring energy ideal for setting an album down its proper path, a unique texture that…

…well, that I’ll just state plainly: that “Radio Free Europe” doesn’t deliver. That song was, of course, the ‘shot heard ’round the world,’ propelling the band one-step closer to the bright lights and setting into motion all that would make future recordings possible. It is a tightly-wound recording, seamless in its persistence, but held up against the mature, well-versed album that follows, “RFE” sits on the personal back burner – nothing more or less, though a warm place for it burns somewhere in my heart. I’ll place a more welcome mat for a song like “Moral Kiosk.” With virtually the same backbone as “RFE,” listen for the exceptional lengths the band takes in carving out a different path, offering a more unique texture than standard pop-issue generally has to offer.

There’s little sense, though, dwelling in the rare misstep. More substantial are the true achievements, the songs that lend weight to the fact that the past 20 years have found the band trying to record a song more fragile, more delicately crafted, more…right than Bill Berry’s “Perfect Circle.” It’s innocence more pronounced now when held against the lavish production techniques the band would explore later in the decade, it still resonates because it did it here, the first time out, with such forlorn vocals from a young and innocent Stipe. That it came from the drummer no less is astonishing, a lasting testament to the influence his own instinct had own the band’s sound.

A logical place from there (this, of course, assuming you’ve listened to and enjoyed the album as it was intended, and are now free to search around and explore in your own manner) is “Talk about the Passion,” a simply beautiful song that, with a bit of shine, might have found a home somewhere between “Green” and “Out of Time” – listen for it as a logical step out of the latter’s brooding track, “Low.” Unconsciously, the band was casting lines into the work it’d later produce – a body as disparate as the slow, organic burn of “Automatic For The People,” the glammed out rave-up that was the criminally overlooked “Monster,” and the sound-checked, lo-fi grain of “New Adventures in Hi-Fi,” which is still the band’s best effort in more recent years.

Elswhere on “Murmur,” both subtle and pronounced influences (courtesy again of hindsight) ripen. “Shaking Through” rips its glittering intro from a “We Can Work it Out”-era Beatles, while the initial measures of both “9-9” and “Sitting Still” have been plundered by latter day radio pirates staking out their share of the airwaves. “We Walk” is a pleasant enough way to show us the door, if a bit bouncy, while “West of the Fields” calls us back with a gritty urgency when we’re stepping out – it’s at once closing the door on the Story So Far and a fantastic sneak peek to Chapter Two.

It’s easy to sit and critique an album some 20 years gone and impossible not to factor in what the band has since accomplished (and note where it has faltered as well). Refreshing as it is now, “Murmur” truly was a sign that change was in the air. Coupled with the likes of U2’s own document, “Boy,” an energetic guitar front was advancing, ready to dismantle piece by piece the programmed beats that had startled a nation.

Matthew Despres is a Collegian Columnist.