Pilgrimage - R.E.M.

[link] I discovered this earlier album after The Reckoning, which was more subtle and in a lot of ways evocative of R.E.M.'s regional background. Murmur is a masterpiece of atmosphere and anthem; this song has both. One can see where folk music was Cezanne to their Picasso, here in an analytical cubism sense: constructing song as a rich but abstracted interplay and adjacency of motifs. The lyrics of all the earlier R.E.M. were also very pleasingly vague and abstract and stipes murmuring style of that period was the perfect way to deliver them.