New Adventures in Hi Fi?

I love about half of this album and usually end up skipping most of the other part.

Will you show me something that nobody else has seen?
Smoke it, drink - here comes the flood!
anything to thin the blood.

awesome!

this is still the REM album i enjoy the most. even more than green or murmur or automatic. i hardly listen to them anymore, except for tracks off new adventures. e-bow, electrolite, how the west was won, bittersweet me. all some of their best.

So very classic. I just lost an auction on ebay for a sealed vinyl copy. =(

Also, my best friend bought this cd for me on my 16th birthday. Even more classic!

Still an excellent album.

'binky the doormat' ... best song about a doormat ever.

WORD!

I downloaded this on the recommendation of ILM yesterday-- some pretty good stuff on this, but good God, the "rockers" are incredibly painful ("The Wake-Up Bomb" for example).

OOoohhhhhh the wake up bomb.

This is my favorite REM album, bar none.

i think it just might be one of their best. certainly their last really good record.

It's way below their best early to mid-career work, but it's half a terrific album and yeah, it's "certainly their last really good record."

way below their best early to mid-career work

strongly disagree w/this, I think these songs are some of their best

half a terrific album
I would say 2/3 terrific 1/3 good to decent, which considering the length is impressive. Still their longest release by far and quite varied, it's almost like their version of Sandinista.

Great album. Will it also take six years that people will discover how phantastic "Reveal" is?

OTM! Reveal is also excellent.

The end of a really bad period for R.E.M. It wasn't as bad as "Monster", but still had the same weaknesses. They would get better on "Up" and really good on "Reveal".

oh my peer your veneer is wearing thin and cracking
the surface informs the underneath -- the underneath is lacking

my favorite r.e.m. lyric!

i couldn't taste it. i'm tired and naked
i don't know what i'm hungry for. i don't know what i want anymore

"Bittersweet Me" is my favorite forgotten R.E.M. singer. I love when bands crank out singles that on first listen sound effortless and dull but are in fact distillations that they couldn't have written at any other poitn.

*single

Stipe should legally change his name to "Bittersweet Me".

am i a bad person if i say this is my favorite r.e.m. album? i recognize it's not their best, not by a longshot, but i've probably listened to it more than any of their other albums.

i am already dying for the NAiHF reissue. the monster tour seems to have curated their last great songs. "electrolite" is a high quality "all of my love" level sign-off and i am eager to hear whatever else they demoed to get to this

I am never eager to hear demos, especially for albums as long as Hi-Fi, which I hasten to say I love.

austin, this is my favorite r.e.m. album

murmur and monster hot on its heels

from what I remember this is the era when the Brits took to R.E.M. hard, embracing this and Up.

bill's final tour. the secret ingredient pre-retirement. capture the fleeting magic

so many bangers on this. undertow, leave, bittersweet me, etc. etc.

"e-bow" was my favorite rem song of all time for a while, maybe it still is. "low desert" vastly underrated or at least undermentioned

prob my favorite set of r.e.m. music videos comes from this record too

"Be Mine"'s verse chords bears= an uncanny resemblance to Collective Soul's "Shine."

i wrote this very lengthy r.e.m. overview on my blog some years back and it remains one of the most looked at entries on the blog. here's what i said about new adventures:

Motherfruggit, I don't care: this album kicks butts with no prejudice. A boxer or your grandma get the same treatment: a swift kick in the hiney by some of the band's most original material ever. The problem is: everybody hates on the darn thing because it's rumoured to be the album that made Bill Berry have an aneurism and say, "Hey dudes, I'm a farmer now." But, as a final sendoff for the band's original lineup, they basically made an update of Document or Green. It rocks a little, it folks a little, but mostly, it entertains a lot. Go ahead and deny it, like everybody else in the world. Call it too long, call it boring or whathaveyou. I call it a creative rebirth. The more rockin' Monster sound hasn't gone away, but with the sonic chances they took on that album, they must have picked up a new flair for studio knob-twiddling because the dynamics and layers achieved on this album sound like no other R.E.M. album before it. Honestly, this is the first R.E.M. album that doesn't sound like every song was just recorded live in the studio — irony supreme, as it was notoriously recorded in pieces amongst makeshift studios and soundchecks during the Monster tour. They've finally gotten a handle on how to properly overproduce an album. It's a weird one, too. I mean, seriously, the single was 'E-Bow the Letter.' Good song, sure. But that's one weird thing to try and get into the top 40 (even though, wow at the balls it took to release that as an a-side; the hook is "Aluminum tastes like fear" ferrchrissakes!). Highlight: 'Leave.' Only the longest and best song they ever did. Yeah, it's that good. (4.5 stars)

i was drinking heavily at the time, so that's why it's so obnoxiously written. sorry.

i'll ply the tar out of your feathers
i'll pluck the thorns out of your feet

it's maybe the ideal "made on the road" record, it's full of hills and valleys and weird roadside attractions, seems to reflect the landscape they were traversing

LEEEEAVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVE
LEEEEAVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVE

otm. And the landscape and attractions merge with the films in Stipe's head since childhood, hence the not-quite-there-ness of "How the West Was Done..." and "Departure" and "Bittersweet Me."

xpost

Thanks guys, I have listened to more R.E.M. in the last week than in the preceding decade

move across, candyloss
i move like a tank

*candyfloss
blue in the face from navel gaze
you set yourself on fire

Holy shit it's a Wednesday morning and I'm on my way to work and "Electrolite" came on and now I'm crying.

> am i a bad person if i say this is my favorite r.e.m. album?

Absolutely not.