Another great "railways" song from Fables Of The Reconstruction, Auctioneer features a great guitar riff from Peter Buck which sounds like pistons on a steam train, which collapse into jarring jangly arpeggiated notes during the chorus that provoke a sense of unease and urgency. The guitar solo during the middle 8 and outro hits you like bullets from a machine gun and then suddenly the song is over. In short, it's a frenetic thrash of a song and never was this better illustrated than the way Stipe used to perform this song live on the 1985 Reconstruction tour. His vocal performance would descend into a series of howls and screams almost as though this particular song was his outlet for venting his frustrations at what was a self confessed crisis period for the band.
The song doesn't really work played live in the present day because all of the urgency is missing and, from a technical point of view, Peter Buck doesn't play the guitar riff correctly, as it was played on Fables. I found this a hard song to cover because it's like three very different segments that Joe Boyd was able to marry together perfectly on the album but my recording sounds disjointed.
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