Reveal
Simon Wheeler
REVEAL R.E.M. Warner Bros. 2001
'Living standards have improved beyond recognition. So have leisure opportunities... For a few hundred quid we can holiday at the utmost ends of the earth. We should be having a whale of a time. But mostly we aren't.' (The Times August 28 2000.) A year later Reveal, the latest album from American rock band R.E.M., dramatises these thoughts.