As huge as they are now, R.E.M. started out with a small cult that this first album inspired; Peter Buck's chinging guitar, Michael Stipe's impassioned but incomprehensible singing, and the band's unpretentious interaction with its audience were genuinely revolutionary at the time. Stipe's famous mumbling of words, obscuring them in the mix, was less about creating a mystery than about creating an aesthetic of pure sound--without focusing on what he was singing about, you had to listen to the way his supple, distinctive voice mingled with the instruments. Murmur ends with a remake of their first single, "Radio Free Europe", as joyful a song as they've ever recorded, and a song that in a very real way created "alternative rock". --Douglas Wolk