That whooshing sound you hear is a collective sigh of relief from R.E.M. fans everywhere: after more than a decade in the wilderness, the band has finally made a new album for which neither excuses nor rationalizations are necessary.

Around the time R.E.M. released its last unqualifiedly good album, 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi, critic Jim DeRogatis wondered whether the Athens, Ga.-based quartet would be able to do what so few bands have managed and grow old gracefully. As if in response, they promptly disintegrated: drummer Bill Berry, fresh from a near-fatal onstage aneurism, quit the band to farm hay (no, really). The remaining three fumbled and fought their way through the next decade, hobbling along like a three-legged dog (their words) in the nether region between elder statesmen and awkwardly overstaying guests.

For all Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills have gone through, though, no one has suffered more than the fans, the three-year cycle of patience, anticipation, excitement and disappointment repeating endlessly like Charlie Brown and Lucy's football (an image which itself became an intrinsic part of the New R.E.M. Album experience). It's been a long time since it was cool to be an R.E.M. fan, not that it matters. The last thing we'd want is for them to become U2 ubiquitous, though Arctic Monkeys hot wouldn't be so bad. But we've accepted that the guys will never be 25 again, or 35, or even 45. All we care about is, can they still make music good enough to justify sticking it out?

The first three post-Bill albums failed to approach the previous standard, each destined for the ash heap of history in spite of a fan's most earnest rationalizations and compensations, dropping off a handful of salvageable tracks along the way ("Daysleeper," "Sad Professor," "Imitation of Life," "I Wanted to Be Wrong.") In a video on iLike, Stipe talks about the band having lost its focus on 2004's Around the Sun, an album full of interesting ideas smothered by slick classic rock production and overlong, under-energetic tracks. At the end of the day, as Peter Buck told the others, "Guys, I'm too old to spend nine months doing something I don't want to do, making work I'm not proud of .... We should try something different, or else you can do it without me."

Try something different they did. Accelerate is a much more focused, unified effort, charged with a sense of urgency that propels it through a brisk 34 minutes. The band has said that this is the fastest they've recorded an album in more than 20 years; Accelerate has drawn frequent comparisons to 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant, with its high energy and explicitly political (not to mention intelligible) lyrics. Four albums into their career and six years into the Reagan Revolution, Stipe had largely shed the willful obscurity of his earlier lyrics in favor of speaking clearly about things he was mad about, a new directness also present in the others' playing. For the remainder of the Reagan-Bush I years, R.E.M. continued to outdo itself in both quality and popularity, peaking on both counts with Automatic for the People, released the year of Bill Clinton's election. Coincidence or not, by the time he left office, they'd lost a member, released two sub par albums (Monster, Up) and recorded another (Reveal).

In the run-up to 2004 election, the "Bad Day" single offered a hopeful sign, even if (or because) it was based on the original demo of "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)" from 1987; it was catchier and more energetic than the previous two albums combined. Turning inward following George W. Bush's re-election, they failed to deliver on the following album, but this time around, three years deeper into our national disgrace, they've rediscovered their mojo at last. On the Accelerate press tour, Stipe has spoken of his anger and disappointment in the way the new century, already in its eighth year, has unfolded: this wasn't the future he'd foreseen, not what we were supposed to have coming. At the same time, he talks about hearing punk for the first time in the 1970s, and the feeling of possibility that came with it — the destructive, transformative power of rock energy. Both come through loud and clear on Accelerate.

The album's other defining aspect is the way it came together, workshopped live over five nights last July at Dublin's Olympia Theater at the midpoint of a compressed recording schedule. To reward the fans in attendance for bearing with nearly an album's worth of new songs, R.E.M. filled out its setlists with chestnuts from their earliest albums, back when they were living in a van with Black Flag and the Minutemen and the 1,300 people at the Olympia would have been a good-sized crowd. Whatever ghosts or memories the experience stirred followed them back to the studio, where they kept the already-edgy new songs raw rather than pulling them back or producing them to death.

The stage has always brought out R.E.M.'s best. Even during lean years, they've sounded great live; in fact, New Adventures in Hi Fi, the only good album they've made under a Democratic president, was recorded on the tour that claimed Bill Berry. The post-Bill material has also sounded better live; Accelerate makes you wonder how much better those albums could have been if they'd been worked workshopped as well.

Accelerate announces its intentions with the distorted fanfare that opens the hard-driving "Living Well Is the Best Revenge": "Don't turn your talking points on me, history will set me free / The future's ours and you don't even rate a footnote now!" As promised, the arrangements are straightforward and elemental — guitars, bass, drums, a keyboard here and there, with minimal overdubs and sparing orchestration on only a few tracks. Bill Berry's latest replacement, the seemingly permanent Bill Rieflin, punishes his drum kit as the band has rarely asked him to before. "Man Sized Wreath," a screed on the media and those it ill-serves, maintains the intensity with a glam swagger. "Supernatural Superserious," the first single, is a freak rallying cry presented as a tasty piece of power pop: "No one cares / If your fantasies are / Dressed up in travesties / Enjoy yourself with no regrets." "Horse to Water" is every bit the glorious mess it was in Dublin, a strong contender for the loudest song they've ever done. Even the title track, the album's least interesting musically and lyrically, overachieves through sheer vitality.

Three years ago, R.E.M. ventured into Woody Guthrie territory (or Billy Bragg, anyway) with "Final Straw," a protest song whose music stood aside for its message. On Accelerate, "Till the Day Is Done" delivers both, as well as a more literary eye, with lines like "Providence blinked, facing the sun" and "A voice whispers 'Son, The blessed vision comes.'"

Anger at Bush suffuses the album. "Houston," a song about Katrina, opens, "If the storm doesn't kill me, the government will." "Mr. Richards," written during that glorious period between Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby's conviction and the commutation of his sentence, taunts "a messenger pigeon left behind": "So tell me how is prison? / Have they taught you how to listen?" On another of the recent albums, "Mr. Richards" might have dragged, one of too many pushing-five-minutes numbers in a row; it was Berry who'd enforced the band's early concision, a discipline sorely missed since his departure, and this is the kind of mid-tempo four-time song they've lately had a hard time wrapping up. But here, they bring it in under four minutes, with double-time tambourine and consistently interesting production keep it moving. This discipline is a running theme; each of the last several albums would have been stronger if culled of two or three underperformers. "On the Fly" and "Staring Down the Barrel of the Middle Distance," two songs premiered in Dublin but excised from the final cut, might have pushed Accelerate to the point of overstaying its welcome. A half-hour that leaves you wanting more beats a bloated 55 minutes any day.

All but two of the songs introduced in Dublin made Accelerate; the album also features two additions. "Hollow Man," the planned second single, is thoughtful, melodic and radio-ready, "New Test Leper" crossed with "Superman." Three of R.E.M.'s biggest hits, "The One I Love," "Losing My Religion" and "Everybody Hurts" dealt with bitterness at a lover left behind, the fear of voicing a crush and suicidal thoughts — emotions familiar to any adolescent. Nuanced and complex, "Hollow Man" is for grown-ups, at once an apology, confession, plea and pledge.

"Sing for the Submarine," the other late arrival, is the oddest song on the album, a post-apocalyptic fantasy that name-checks various of R.E.M.'s own songs as well as Blade Runner ("Tyrell and his mechanical owl.") A whole album like this might have sunk R.E.M. for good, but in context, the prog epic serves as a breather before the album's blistering finale.

R.E.M.'s best album closers have been either transcendent ballads ("Find the River," Electrolite") or fun and fast rockers ("Little America," "Superman"). They go the latter direction this time out with "I'm Gonna DJ," an ode to the escapist virtues of music (and getting loaded) that recalls the B-52s, Blur and the Dandy Warhols. Reversing the usual pattern, this one is actually better on the album than it has typically been live, where it has lately replaced "It's the End of the World" as the default last song of the night, to the chagrin of many fans. Harder and less poppy, it is a better song now, doing full justice to the band's current incarnation.

Accelerate isn't necessarily better than any of the Bill Berry albums — aside from Monster, anyway — but that's a difficult comparison to make across decades of musical and personal evolution. It's more meaningful to think of it as the band finally picking up where they left off when he departed. Songs like "Horse to Water" and "Living Well Is the Best Revenge" can be traced more readily to "Binky the Doormat" and "Wake Up Bomb" from New Adventures than to anything that's come since; likewise "Houston" and "Monty Got a Raw Deal" from Automatic. Accelerate as a whole hits the target that they aimed for but missed on Monster; the b-side "Redhead Walking" is a more successful version of that album's "Crush with Eyeliner." Still, while one hopes that R.E.M. will guard its recovered mojo with all due vigilance, one swallow does not make a spring. The question now is whether the band can follow it up, and how they'll do it. But that's a welcome change from wondering whether they'd ever get it right again in the first place.

Back in 1996, Peter Buck told Jim DeRogatis, "I want to be 50 and turn in a record that's great. And I know that probably then we're not gonna sell 10 million copies, and that's cool. It would be nice if we could gold and have people go, 'You know, those old fuckers really keep at it. No matter what people say, it's a really good record.' It will all trail down — we won't be sitting in four trailers talking; I'll be on the phone with you — but I think that I can do this when I'm 50."

At 51, he's done just that.