Excelle

Though R.E.M. titled a later album Monster, this 1991 smash was the true monster, with the little Athens, Georgia, quartet graduating once and for all from its jangling independent-rock roots. The confusion Michael Stipe communicates in the catchy "Losing My Religion" and the dark-and-dreamy "Low" hit the mainstream-rock audience when it was most primed for uneasy angst. (Nirvana's Nevermind was released a few months later.) There are also odd but successful experiments, like ceding the opening "Radio Song" to rapper KRS-One (with Stipe playing the moaning straight man) and going peppy for the surprisingly nonsarcastic "Shiny Happy People." --Steve Knopper Matching their ugliest album cover with some of their most sublime music, Out of Time inaugurates the finest phase of R.E.M.'s work. This meditative yet sometimes seething album offers not only their greatest single since "Radio Free Europe" ("Losing My Religion," about which critics and programmers agreed for once), but a moodscape that ties together that song's ambivalence, the sneer of "Radio Song," the doom of "Low" and the sprightliness of "Shiny Happy People" and "Me in Honey." Their bestseller, and deservedly so. --Rickey Wright