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 "A gung-ho Candide with a taste for places it is wiser to avoid. . . the reports collected in 'I Wouldn't Start From Here' are graphic, comic, bemused and properly contemptuous of faith and ideology."
- Jonathan Meades, Books of the Year, Evening Standard
"An utterly sui generis report from the world's plague-spots."
- Michael Bywater, Books of the Year, New Statesman
"I can think of no more entertaining companion on a perilous journey than the ever hopeful, wildly optimistic yet clear-thinking Andrew Mueller."
- Rory MacLean, The Guardian
"A tour-de-force of hilarious, harrowing and ultimately enlightening reportage that will remind readers of the work of P.J. O'Rourke, Jon Ronson and David Foster Wallace."
- The Washington Times
"Unafraid to portray the world's warring people not just as victims and sufferers of legitimate grievances, but also as bloody-minded bastards and ill-informed fools."
- The Kathmandu Post
"A mix of dark humour and incisive political discourse."
- CNN Go
"His sardonic, self-deprecating perspective makes for unstuffy company."
- The Los Angeles Times
"Peppered with trenchant observations that reflect a nimble, cut-to-the-chase practicality, Mueller's interviews with everyone from terrorist warlords to international peacemakers are refreshingly irreverent yet astute."
- Booklist
"Travel writing in the danger zone that maintains its hipness and humanity."
- George Dunford, Books of the Year, Readings Monthly
"An addition to the genre founded by P.J. O'Rourke's 'Holidays In Hell', but it is one that pushes the boundaries."
- The Australian
"Mueller is the embodiment of what can happen with a fire in the belly and a desire to write out loud."
- Australian Book Review
"Mueller's travel writing is as incisive and entertaining as anything he's ever written about music."
- TNT
"A joy."
- Financial Times
"Delightfully laconic."
- The New Statesman
"Alternately chilling, funny and surprising, there's some great reportage here as Mueller struggles to reach an understanding of the world, quizzing the highest minister and the lowliest peasant."
- The Glasgow Herald
"His acerbic wit is matched by true empathy. . . we need this kind of gonzo journalism more than ever."
- Wanderlust
"Mueller spins what could have been the grimmest geopolitics into the finest black comedy. Like a print version of 'The Daily Show'."
- FHM
"Lively reporting from a gently humorous narrator."
- Chris Ayres, The Times
"Touching, often blackly comic reportage."
- GQ
"Brilliantly observed, articulate, often funny and immensely readable."
- The List
"Snappy, self-deprecating and sometimes outright hilarious."
- The Age
"Indelibly humorous and heartfelt."
- Sydney Sunday Telegraph
"An instructive ricochet between cities and continents and war zones."
- Time Out
"He brings to his material the mixture of rage and earthy irony that is the mark of a great satirist
. . . rewarding, thought-provoking and ludicrously funny."
- PopMatters
"Mueller's book is an excellent example of why today's brave, lucid hacks are forced to admit fear and confusion."
- South China Morning Post
"His reporting is sharp, his experiences terrifying and funny."
- Melbourne Herald-Sun
"If you enjoy your international affairs and politics with a good dose of cynicism and black humour, then this book is one to read."
- Brisbane Courier-Mail
"Often laugh-out-loud funny, the writing is utterly engaging."
- Launceston Sunday Examiner
"Mueller's irreverent reportage from abroad is fundamentally a clever cover for the author's ruminations on race, religion, revolution, rock'n'roll and other important issues since September 11, 2001."
- The West Australian
"As hilarious and sardonic a host as this ridiculous world of ours demands."
- Shortlist
"Mueller busies himself with finding the odd, the surreal and the laughable as much as the shocking and upsetting."
- New Zealand Herald
"A real eye for surreal moments of black humour. . . Mueller's work here digs much deeper than the standard newspaper travel essay."
- Sydney Sun-Herald
"His best story, about his brief, bizarre jailing in Cameroon, reads like a 21st century 'Goon Show' script."
- Good Reading
"A rollicking ride through some of the world's scariest scenarios."
- Kalgoorlie Miner
"A strikingly funny book about some seriously unfunny places."
- Perth Sunday Times
"Not bad for a guy from Wagga Wagga."
- The Wagga Wagga Advertiser
 "Andrew Mueller's piece about my band's tour with The Hold Steady is my favourite thing ever written about us. The fact that he is a war correspondent (though he claims otherwise) and music journalist and
approaches both with a similar slant makes him one of the most interesting
writers out there to me."
- Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers
"The most important critical anthology on popular music from a single author in a long time, its humour and insight equal with collections by Nick Tosches or Robert Palmer."
- KEXP Seattle
"Take one part P.J. O'Rourke, a healthy dose of Lester Bangs and a dash of Hunter S. Thompson, and you've got Andrew Mueller."
- Bookgasm
"Sharply observed and wittily constructed."
- Honolulu Star-Advertiser
"New edition of the rock classic."
- NY Press
"Mueller's humour makes for some enlightening reading."
- Biloxi-Gulfport Sun-Herald
"Sharp, witty and sarcastic."
- Chicago Tribune
 "Really rather good, in a barnstorming, country-punk sort of way. . . a highly capable ensemble."
- The Quietus
"A more than capable debut - allusive country-tough songs."
- Uncut
"The Blazing Zoos are undoubtedly fun, but they also have depth. . .
everything from Mueller's extensive use of brackets to the band's loving
recreation of classic country riffs bespeaks sincerity."
- Americana UK
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Get Ready To Mumble
R.E.M.'s "Murmur", reconsidered
Uncut, February 2009
THE truism that you only get one chance to make a first impression applies more strictly to rock’n’roll than to most areas of endeavour. A debut album is what you spend the rest of your career, should you be lucky enough to have one, living up to, or living down, or both. It’s your best opportunity to create that most exciting, improbable and wonderful of things: the album that sounds like nothing else anyone has heard before. Nobody who reads this magazine – or, indeed, just turns on the radio occasionally – needs to be reminded that R.E.M. are a long-standing component of the cultural furniture, as venerable, reliable and immovable as a grandfather clock. Twenty-five years ago, however, their debut album, “Murmur”, seemed as surprising and strange and beautiful as catching the aforesaid timepiece unaccountably waltzing in the hallway. Twenty-five years later, it still does.
“Murmur” was a work of studied ingenuousness, which is to say that R.E.M. went to considerable pains to present themselves and their music as ineffable, ethereal, elemental. There was the band’s name, taken from the medical acronym for Rapid Eye Movement – the state of sleep that promotes the most vivid dreams. There was the title, “Murmur”, the onomatopoeic term which served as a pretty accurate description of the lyrics and lead vocals of this peculiar group’s singer. The cover, too, was wilfully oblique: a gloomy, washed-out landscape of kudzu vines, a bleak acknowledgement of R.E.M.’s home state of Georgia, and a further reinforcement of an apparent attitude of ironclad diffidence. This was an album that appeared utterly unconcerned about whether you loved it or not.
When “Murmur” first appeared in 1983, on Miles Copeland’s I.R.S. label, there was already some vague awareness of R.E.M.’s existence – a debut single, “Radio Free Europe”, had appeared on a tiny independent label in 1981, and a five-track EP, “Chronic Town”, released the following year by I.R.S., had attracted some decent reviews. But while the likes of “Wolves, Lower” and “Gardening At Night” were affable, enthusiastically played tear-ups, they much more sounded the work of a band who were going to peak with an opening slot for Camper Van Beethoven than they did like harbingers of a masterpiece.
R.E.M., at least, saw the potential in their early material, opening “Murmur” with a re-recorded “Radio Free Europe”. It is, like everything else on “Murmur”, elusively restrained, not entirely approachable. It’s an urgent, pulsing song with a chorus as huge and hook-laced as a tidal wave which has overturned a fishing fleet, and R.E.M. must surely have been tempted to let it fulfil its manifest destiny as a soaraway hit (a temptation to which they would later succumb, with glorious results, on the structurally similar “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” and “Bad Day”, among others). Instead, Michael Stipe’s already indistinct lyrics are buried beneath Mike Mills’ shuddering bass, Bill Berry’s drums are brought way up high, and even Peter Buck’s guitar – about to announce itself as one of the dominant influences upon rock’n’roll for the next quarter-century – is a modest, timorous presence. “Radio Free Europe” is a fantastic anti-hit single.
When “Murmur” first appeared, most reviewers seeking to locate a context for it picked up, not unreasonably, on R.E.M.’s obvious influences, The Byrds and The Velvet Underground. With the perspective of two and a half decades, though, what really distinguishes “Murmur” – what delivered it, indeed, from being more than just another album of agreeable, jangly college rock – was R.E.M.’s willingness and ability to incorporate a much wider, and weirder, range of inspirations. From the earliest interviews with R.E.M., it was apparent that they – Buck in particular – had omnivorous musical appetites, and this was reflected throughout the album: the verses of “Pilgrimage” are perched on a herky-jerky riff that wouldn’t have sounded amiss on a Gang Of Four record, and the basslines of “Sitting Still” and “9-9” owe considerably to Jah Wobble-era Public Image Ltd. R.E.M. also sounded more like a single entity than they ever would again – the cult of Stipe, in particular, had not begun to flourish. There are barely any solos on “Murmur”, scarcely a moment at which one musician imposes himself on the other three.
This new edition of “Murmur” has, of course, been remastered. This is a sales pitch usually of interest only to people with firm opinions about speaker wire, but in this case there is a perceptible difference. The 2008 “Murmur” is cleaner and crisper, but the restoration has been sensitively done, disinterring some of the record’s subtler details, and bestowing extra sheen upon Buck’s Rickenbacker arpeggios: that opening riff from “Talk About The Passion”, long a staple of the indie rock fan’s first month with his first guitar, buffs up as fragile and shimmering as a dew-sprayed cobweb. Overall, though, the feeling remains one of almost ascetic restraint, of a band determined to occlude their (eventually obvious) populist instincts: a more bombastic take on the exquisite “Perfect Circle” could have been an “Everybody Hurts”, and the structural similarities between the chorus of “Catapult” and that of Van Halen’s roughly contemporaneous “Jump” are a congruent coincidence – a foreboding of the fondness for unreconstructed radio rock which R.E.M. would acknowledge a few years later with a spirited cover of Aerosmith’s “Toys In The Attic”.
This reissue is packaged with the solemn sumptuousness apparently now obligatory for records regarded as capital-A Artefacts: essays by producers Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, as well as contributions by former I.R.S. executives. More exciting is a separate disc containing a previously unreleased live show, recorded in Toronto a few months after the release of “Murmur”. The set includes much of “Murmur”, a cover of The Velvets’ “There She Goes Again”, and some ghosts of R.E.M. future: “7 Chinese Brothers” and “Harborcoat”, which later appeared on the second album, “Reckoning”, and “Just A Touch”, which wasn’t recorded until 1986’s “Life’s Rich Pageant”. Aside from engendering fervent desire that one had been present at Larry’s Hideaway that night, the recording also reinforces what an odd proposition R.E.M. really were at this point, expressing the curiosity and irreverence of art-school post-punk in a native tongue of old-school rock.
It is no exaggeration to suggest that “Murmur” amounts to a Rosetta Stone for what is now thought of as indie rock: the thanks and blame it is therefore due are immeasurable.
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