New Adventures in Hi Fi?

Oh, man! I bet Stipey and co. have sleepless nights over that one.

I'd take Monster over New Adventures. I don't know why I've never really got into NIAH, but Monster is almost always the one I have in my walkman. I like that it's a bit messed up and wrong. Great guitar sound as well.

Uh, drummer. Guitarist = Andy Summers, bassist = oh, I think we all know by now.

Always liked 'Bittersweet Me' and 'Electrolite' OK. Maybe it hasn't really improved that much. We'll see.

Also from these sessions - a cover of Vic Chesnutt's "Sponge" that's probably my favorite R.E.M. track post-1992.

But, yeah, up to about track 10 this is my favorite overrated underrated REM album, after Life's Rich Pageant.

I'd cut "Suspicion", "At My Most Beautiful" and...maybe "Walk Unafraid"? Maybe only 2 need to be cut.

I love "Parakeet".

x-post: "The Michael Stipe Band" is ridiculous. It's Buck, Mills, and Stipe, minus Berry. They have a great regular band w/ McCaughey and Stringfellow and Bill Rieflin is actually a stronger drummer than Berry was.

Bullshit.

I think the rockers sound fantastic - the opening racket of "Departure" might be what Buck was looking for on Monster but never quite finding. OTM on Low Desert's lyrics. "A road owl hit your windshield..."

I dunno. The whole package works, and it does deliver a consistent mood without sounding the same throughout. It's hard not to hear it as Berry's swan song though, or wonder what might have come next if he hadn't bowed out (and I'm speaking as a general defender of Up and to a lesser extent Reveal).

It's hard to believe this is now almost ten years old.

"Reveal" is also underrated, I think. Good songs all throughout, even the weird stuff like "Beachball" works.

agreed on the lyrics here. great stuff. contrast that with, say, "imitation of life," which came on at the gym the other day. aaargh. stipe's "greatest thing since bread came sliced" line. wtf is that? add mill's blander than bland songwriting/arrangement (i assume it's him, since it was such a big deal when his songs started getting more prominent around out of time. sounds like him even it's not.) and buck's surliness/seeming disinterest in being in a band (look at him, he constantly looks pained) and the result is a severely damaged legacy.

That's just nuts. They sure have done a lot of work and toured around the world relentlessly for someone disinterested in being in a band.

Stipe being silly.

And the noise/feedback stuff he does is kind of mediocre in terms of the heavy/psych guitar tradition.

It's such a relief when "Zither" comes on!

I think my favorite recent instance is when he sings "Leaving was never my proud" in "Leaving New York." That's fucking hilarious.

'e-bow the letter', 'bittersweet me' and 'leave' are also fantastic.

i relentlessly get out of bed to go to work five days a week. doesn't mean i enjoy it.

yr not rich. rem is.

i don't see it. especially from buck -- distant, never looks like he's having fun. seems like a guy who'd tell you not to look at him even as he's playing an instrument in front of you.

probably think they are making good records

the first two words are the key, huh? they say it every album they put out -- "best we've ever done" bullshit. they have to say it. press laps it up and spits it out verbatim cuz, well, it's r.e.m. for godsakes and they got to sit in the same room or on the same phone line with them for 25 whole minutes! all to themselves!

based on buck's prior goal of making an album as good as astral weeks (this long after they'd already put out murmur and reckoning, which he didn't think measured up), i can't see how he thinks they are getting any closer.

i guess i'm just amazed by how much it seems berry was the pivotal member keeping all their worst attributes (stipe's attentionwhoring, mills' cheesiness, buck's...i dunno, surliness? personality?) in check. if the rumor is true and he's back in the studio with them...well, just please let it be true.

soref post upthread (re: Monster) very interesting & OTM

yeah great post soref! i like The Wake-Up Bomb as-is, but would definitely be interested in a more artifical, shiny, Monster-type version of it. lyrically it feels VERY appropriate for that album as well.

https://i.imgur.com/3kgJcTN.png

still wish Lady Gaga had gone with my "climb atop David Howell Evans's shoulders shrieking 'I'm on The Edge!'" music video treatment

I think I also just find something off-putting about Wake-Up Bomb's positioning on the album as the second track after How The West Was Won, although they do something similar with the first two tracks on Up - slow, low key, atypical opening song with Airportman, then swaggering suggestive rock song with Lotus. I think Lotus was the last time they did anything in the same style as Monster? I'm not that familiar with the last two albums so maybe I'm forgetting something on one of them.

and think it really works with those two tracks on Up, so idk why it doesn't quite come off for me on New Adventures

zach i'm stealing that for the memes thread.

up fucking rules.

hmm

just got the vinyl, playing it now

WOW, they did such an amazing job on this, hats off to Kevin Gray who remastered and cut the vinyl

modern vinyl can be such a crapshoot, but I tell ya what, when they hit it out of the park nowadays it's as good as vinyl has ever sounded. this sounds huge and i'm noticing little things in the mix i never heard. dead quiet, no bullshit black vinyl, high quality plastic sleeves, A+

especially noticeable during the quieter stuff, new test leper really blew me away

anyway if you've been thinking about the vinyl i would definitely pull the trigger on this. on the bad and hated hoffman boards, praise for the new pressing/master seems almost universal which is rare

thanks for the heads up! buying now

Listened to this quite a bit during my final year of high school in 1997. Returning to it today, it's definitely patchy, but that said, Electrolite could be one of their best songs. I'd completely forgotten about it.

wow, did not realize the original had become one of those $200 records for some reason. tempted to shine mine up, sell it off, and grab the new one, but it's not really how i relate to my stuff.

I fucking love this record.

ty for the nudge ums, i hedged and bought the package with both the vinyl and cds

aluminum, it tastes like fear

idk why i thought this album had a bad reputation (must have missed ivy's p4k review lol), but i listened for the first time ever today and it might be my favorite post-reckoning r.e.m. album? combines the best aspects of automatic and monster with fewer clunkers and higher highs

like "undertow" in particular sounds to me like they're subconsciously saying, "sorry about monster we have actually figured out how to use feedback now"

it's always been one of my favorites, i think it has a pretty strong cult following

It got great reviews on first release, did better business in the UK, and has never gone away.

my parents had out of time, automatic, and monster on cd, but not this one. maybe that's what tricked me

Wake Up Bomb and Undertow feel like they've fully realised their straight-up glam side whereas Monster is this weird, slightly stunted mix of things (not a criticism).

Hi-Fi was the first R.E.M. CD my mum didn't have so I get believing that this one was where things fell apart. I only knew about it when I was little through my uncle's CDs (ditto the next two).

yeah this always had a positive reputation but it was definitely the first R.E.M. album in awhile that didn't make any radio impact iirc. It didn't have big singles, it's entirely stellar deep cuts. Classic album.

R.E.M. from this point on did benefit from the way the UK singles chart's infrastructure changing though - lengthier gaps between radio and physical and crucially having built a dedicated enough fanbase helping contribute to the new climate of first week peaks and front-loaded sales (and the marketing and managing that pushed this change). Hence, E-Bow being their highest charter to date, despite probably having not been played on the radio since (and, if they could help it, probably not too much at the time either).

I've always wanted to call a song "E-Bola, The Virus" but never got around to it

I enjoy Monster now, but, when E-Bow came out as the first single, it was such as relief to have "the old REM" back. And "Electrolite" is so pretty.

These days I think New Adventures is very listenable but is also kind of... their first boring record? Almost everything sounds like another, older, better song.

I always thought "Low Desert" was an intentional Stone Roses' Second Coming pastiche -- the swampy riffing and the "hey heys".

Every good band releases one of these variety packs a couple times in their careers: a summa of what they do best (think Tattoo You, Lil Wayne's Funeral, any number of Yo La Tengo albums).

I adore this album. Well, except for “wake up bomb” and “bittersweet me”.

Do I think The Cure’s Wish might be one of these?

* I think, that should’ve said.

I was thinking the same thing ha. That's the first album with no genuine new territory covered (for all that there are shoegaze guitars and beefy dance-via-baggy rhythms on some songs). Rather it's a this-is-us-and-we're-top-of-the-mountain record.

it's a record of synthesis, not evolution. the fact that it was all recorded while on the road, and they were playing selections from all over their catalog, probably contributed to that (and also gave them an idea of the kinds of experiments that worked and did not)

Do I think The Cure’s Wish might be one of these?

― piscesx,

Why I love it best.

Adore NAIHF, loathe Wish

despite a half decade of the most intense Cure fandom preceding it