At times, Pearl Jam's ambiguous lyrics seem miles apart from the work of the Minutemen, whose every album outlined a clear artistic and political mission. And yet, like the Minutemen -- who honed some of their best work down to a single lyric or song title -- Pearl Jam often invite listeners into their world through enticing pinpricks of clarity. Such has been the case throughout the band's career, and it remains true with Yield.

Rather than opening their windows wide, Pearl Jam prefer to inch the frames up just a crack, allowing fans enough space to find their own means for pushing further into the open air and light. Of course each listener finds cracks in different places; and once such openings are discovered, they often require effort from the listener before they fully relinquish their treasures.

Those who apply the effort on Yield are duly rewarded. To be sure, Yield's music mines what has become familiar territory to fans, as Pearl Jam rely both on the larger-than-life rock idioms that defined Ten, Vs. and Vitalogy, as well as on the quieter meditations that marked their last album, the more experimental No Code (1996). Yield's lyrics are a tougher nut to crack, but at least as fruitful. At their best, each of the album's lines opens portals to understanding another, like a domino chain of doorways opening to reveal corridors of exhaustion, skepticism and escape.

Pearl Jam have long shown a penchant for lyrical enigmas, so perhaps I should have guessed that I might discover my own entryway into Yield where I'd least expected it, in the aptly titled "Wish List." The song is, in fact, a straight catalogue of one-line fantasies. The registry-like structure of its lyrics -- each line begins, "I wish ... " -- is complemented by the song's delicate musical foundation.

Guitarist Mike McCready brings the track full-circle with a guitar solo that climbs as high as the clouds where dreamers lose themselves in thoughts such as "I wish I was the full moon shining off your Camaro's hood."

But it wasn't until the singer utters what I at first thought was a bothersome wish -- to be "a sacrifice that somehow still lived on" -- that I stumbled upon my own cracked window. To be a sacrifice that remains is, of course, a paradox; and among the more carefully crafted wishes in the song, this line came across as too self-conscious, as if it were banally generating perplexity for its own sake -- that is, unless it were intended not as a paradox at all.

Historically, and figuratively, sacrifices have long lived on, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Jesus Christ (appropriate touchstones in light of the angels, prayers, choirs and sins that pervade Yield). Perhaps such immortality is the singer's goal when he wishes to be "the evidence ... for 50 million hands upraised and open toward the sky." Still, even though MLK and Jesus were willing to be sacrifices, they were by no means wishing to go.

And then, in the lyric just before the Camaro line, it all began to make sense. "I wish I was the messenger and all the news was good," says the singer. Even Jesus knew that his good news also involved pain -- and that is precisely what the singer wants so desperately to avoid. "Wish List," then, is a catalog of escape. The singer here isn't immature -- he's exhausted.

Exhausted by what he doesn't say, but an obsession to introspect is probably not too off-base, as other Yield tracks offer similar revelations. For example, after exploring his mind and finding it "so revealing" and "too clear," a singer on the verge of collapse chants, "I'll stop trying to make a difference" in guitarist Stone Gossard's "No Way."

Bouts of existential exhaustion are fortunately not enough to kill Yield's curiosity or skepticism. Indeed, "Push Me Pull Me," a warped piece of sonic chaos undergirded by Jeff Ament's throbbing bass, asks the biggest question of them all, observing that, "The oceans made me, but who came up with love?" (Meanwhile, on the cathartic and boastful romp "Do The Evolution," the singer curses a human race that, having risen from the oceans, has become dangerously self-centered.)

Skepticism is allowed its most forceful airing on the album's second track, "Faithful," which, along with "In Hiding" and "Given To Fly," portrays a band ready to resume its tenure as masters of arena-sized rock anthems. But like the rock anthem "Born In The U.S.A.," "Faithful" hides its distrust between the lines of a rallying chorus. Any time a writer as individualistic as Vedder offers an absolute such as "We all believe," the lyric should not be trusted. Here, the singer damns communal myths that blind us to self-awareness and swears off prayers "that nobody hears." In the end, he pledges himself faithful only to the individual soul and spirit.

Of course we've already seen how such self-awareness can be fatiguing, and on several songs the band searches for escape from the exhaustion. In "Push Me Pull Me" the singer readies himself for the ultimate retreat in death and actually looks forward to the calm it will bring. "Like a cloud dropping rain," he says, "I'm discarding all thought."

With that, Pearl Jam pave the way for Yield's positively Beatlesesque closing song, "All Those Yesterdays." "Don't you think you oughtta rest?" Vedder asks with lullaby gentleness. After all, with sleep comes a new tomorrow, and perhaps a clean slate. As the track fades to a close, the band promises, "It's no crime to escape."