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Radio Free Europe
R.E.M. began their recorded career with “Radio Free Europe,” a song that seems to deliberately challenge the audience’s compulsion to sing along with upbeat rock anthems by rendering its words either...
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Pilgrimage
“Pilgrimage” is the first in a series of songs throughout R.E.M.’s discography that express a distrust of authority and a feeling that people — or the people — are being led astray by charlatans and...
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Laughing
A lot of Murmur‘s distinct charm and singular beauty comes from the way Mitch Easter and Don Dixon were able to engineer the recordings so that even mundane elements such as snare hits and arpeggiated...
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Talk About The Passion
“Talk About The Passion” is a very worried song — the lyrics are a bit vague and elliptical, but it’s essentially about feeling powerless to help people in need — but it’s dressed up in an arrangement...
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Moral Kiosk
The subject matter of “Moral Kiosk” is obscure, but two things are clear enough: It’s got something to do with hypocrisy, and there’s an undeniable spark of sexuality buried beneath its sharp chord...
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Perfect Circle
The gorgeous, spectral piano tone in “Perfect Circle” is one of the most distinct and evocative sounds in the entire R.E.M. discography. The part was recorded on two pianos simultaneously for the...
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Catapult
Appropriately enough, my strongest memory of Murmur is tied to a vague, murky recollection of a cold, lonely night circa January 1994. My parents and siblings were off someplace for the evening, and I...
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Sitting Still
Most of the lyrics in “Sitting Still” are either incoherent or extremely inscrutable, but two lines ring out with the utmost clarity: “I can hear,” and “Can you hear me?” At its core, the song is...
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9-9
“9-9″ is essentially an abstraction, but its dominant emotions ring loud and clear — paranoia, frustration, agitation, and confusion. It is by far the most aggressive song on Murmur, but since it lacks...
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Shaking Through
If Murmur is about anything at all, it’s about communication. More accurately, its songs attempt to articulate the state of being entirely inarticulate, or unable to process the way other people...
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We Walk
If you take the whole of Murmur as something that takes place over the course of one long night, the spritely “We Walk” is like a brisk stroll in the waning moonlight, just before dawn. The tune sounds...
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West Of The Fields
As the final song on Murmur, “West Of The Fields” revisits the core themes of the record — dreams, mythology, difficulty with communication, synesthesia — bringing the album full circle, while ending...
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