Fables of the Reconstruction does not sound like it came out twenty five years ago; rather, it sounds like a display at the Smithsonian museum, discovered deep underground and preserved in amber. It’s the sound of days gone by, times past – a sepia-tinged photograph of another era, albeit one that was somehow caught on vinyl a century after the fact. The album was R.E.M.’s attempt at tapping into the Southern Gothic vein – hell, its original title was The Sound and the Fury – aching with nostalgia for an era the band weren’t even alive to see, and capturing a dark Americana that they rarely revisited. This 2CD reissue is long overdue, especially with regard to its mastering, but Joe Boyd’s muffled production refuses to let most of the songs sparkle and breathe, which somehow aids the mystery.

Greil Marcus once wrote that “there is no American identity without a sense of portent and doom,” and by that definition, Fables might just be their most American record; every track hinges on some kind of tension that never quite gets resolved. ‘Feeling Gravitys Pull’ belies its title by sounding almost weightless, with Stipe’s turns of phrase more cryptic than ever, abounding with images of sleep-reading and the bold proclamation “It’s a Man Ray kind of sky – let me show you what I can do with it.” ‘Maps and Legends’, meanwhile, teeters uncomfortably across two chords, as if trying to answer its own question of whether its chief character (the reclusive outsider artist Reverend Howard Finster) is “to be reached” or not, and both ‘Kohoutek’ and ‘Good Advices’ – two of the album’s most confoundingly brilliant songs – sound so shrouded you barely feel like you’re listening to anything at all. Oddly, the album also contains some of their more upbeat material; the wonderously kinetic ‘Driver 8′, the Stax-aping curio ‘Cant Get There from Here’ and ‘Green Grow the Rushes’, a song that’s so by-numbers it somehow manages to sound even more transcendent than their regular fare.

Sitting proudly at the album’s heart is ‘Life and How to Live It’, another tribute to a local weirdo, Brivs Mekis, who divided his house into two distinct sides, alternating living between the two until he died. When people cleared out his belongings after his death, they found a cupboard stacked full of copies of a book he had written entitled Life: How to Live, none of which had been given out or sold. The track is one of their hardest to pin down, a pre-End-of-the-World torrent of some of Stipe’s finest words (“the air quicken tension building inference suddenly”), Peter Buck’s most inflammatory guitar lines, some blissfully melodic bass from Mike Mills, and the most solid backbeat Bill Berry had yet hit. Even on recent live renditions of the song, Stipe looks more Cheshire Catlike than usual, his eyes beaming as if to say “Yeah, I don’t know how, but we wrote this, and you didn’t.” Bastard.

Alongside the similarly-maligned Monster ten years on, Fables of the Reconstruction is their most thematically consistent record. The pre-production demos that are included with this reissue are interesting at best (a tempo change here, an alternate melody there, and some cute studio banter to boot), and identical at worst; yet they, and the box in which this album is packaged, only serves to heighten the pseudo-historical spirit that the album embodies. It’s taken a quarter of a century for another band to come close to writing an album like this (thanks, Titus Andronicus! Maybe I’ll be picking The Monitor apart in another twenty-five years…), which shows just how singular a vision this album manages to have, especially for such an influential band. From here, the band moved on to bigger things, but they never quite got better than this collection of Fables.