Document

Very smart clean vinyl with a good strong cover and inner sleeve.

Document is the fifth studio album by the American alternative rock band R.E.M. It was released in 1987 a few months after their rarities collection Dead Letter Office appeared and is the last album of new material by the band released on the I.R.S. Records label. It is the first album on which the band worked with producer Scott Litt.

Document was R.E.M.'s first album co-produced by Scott Litt and the band, a collaboration that continued through Green, Out of Time, Automatic for the People, Monster, and New Adventures in Hi-Fi. The album's clear production and muscular rock riffs helped to move the band towards mainstream success and built on the work done by Don Gehman, who had produced their previous album Lifes Rich Pageant. This release not only launched "The One I Love," R.E.M.'s first Top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 (it reached number nine), but also gave them their first platinum album.

"Exhuming McCarthy" makes an explicit parallel between the red-baiting of Joe McCarthy's time and the strengthening of the sense of American exceptionalism during the Reagan era, especially the Iran-Contra affair. Starting with the click-clack of a typewriter, it also includes a sound clip of Joseph Welch's rebuke of McCarthy from the Army-McCarthy Hearings: "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.... You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

The song "Strange" was originally recorded by the post-punk band Wire on their debut album Pink Flag. This version has slightly altered lyrics, changing "Joey's nervous" to "Michael's nervous" in the first verse, and has a considerably faster tempo.

R.E.M. expanded their instrumentation somewhat on the album, adding dulcimer to "King of Birds" and saxophone to "Fireplace".^[1] Steve Berlin was brought in to add his saxophone skills because of a prior relationship with producer Scott Litt.^[2] This experimentation would lead to their adoption of the mandolin, which featured prominently on their subsequent albums Green and Out of Time. Furthermore, the band's musicians began swapping instruments both in concert and in the studio in an effort to create new sounds and avoid stagnation