New Adventures in Hi Fi?

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.

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

Happened a bit earlier, Out of Time was everywhere the summer of 91 and AFTP was huge, 7x platinum. Didn’t tour them of course so the Monster tour was a big deal. I went to get tickets for the Glasgow show and the queue snaked all around the inside of the SECC and out. In end didn’t matter as show was cancelled following Bill Berry’s aneurism.

One reason why I get down on post-Bill REM is that I wasn’t done with the New Adventures formula; the monochrome artwork and the sense that this was a band who were aware they’d been around a while but were just going to keep on doing what they do best, which is what Hi-Fi sounds like.

Not that I was hoping for endless xeroxed variations on this exactly but after this album you hear them trying things out, with different influences becoming much more explicit; obviously they felt they had to do this and some of this was a success but I suppose i selfishly felt that New Adventures was a platform for REM to move forward...obviously this went out the window after Bill left

It’s still their most mature album; one can only wonder what might have come as a 4 piece

yeah agreed, there's a world where this is the base for four more amazing albums that don't sound the same but have this in their DNA, the way murmur is for the 80s stuff

I’m a terrible musician but “Be Mine” is about the only song I’ve been able to play half-competently on guitar. Love it and the album so much.

Tasty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWlINyu1COw

It already sounds like an album full of outtakes to me; can only imagine what the bonus disc is like…

this album features stipe's best writing, imo

some of my favorite lyrics ever

"Bittersweet Me" and "New Test Leper" are next-level Stipe, yes.

Surprised to hear that pov; I think both are very clumsy songwriting (in different ways).

I don’t really remember the lyrics but “new test leper” musically is great, it reminds me of “try not to breathe”.

This album eventually grew on me - love it quite a bit now and it may be the last one that I enjoy without qualification. (I kind of like Up too, and only select tracks on everything after that.)

it was the first “new release by a band I like” I bought so I listened to it a lot out of perceived duty. it did take more than a few listens to open up for me, yeah. So long!

^Same here. I was 10 years old and my mom was cool enough to buy it for me at Blockbuster Music the day it came out. I must have listened to it hundreds of times, but a lot of it went over my head at the time. I tried transcribing the lyrics to "E-Bow the Letter", definitely misheard a lot of it (I remember thinking "fields of poppies, little pearls" was "I feel to pop his little pearls" lol)

I feel to pop his little pearls

i.e. how Stipe would've written the lyric in the Murmur era.

I love this album.

until today i thought that line was "she was the poppiest little pearl"

This record consolidated their stylistic journey from Document to Monster, and I prefer it to any of the records from that era.
Though it's long, and there are maybe five songs on here that are "just OK", I've never been inspired to sequence a cut-down version of this. There's an ease and casualness that completely got lost after Berry left, whereupon it sounded like every chord change and sound choice had been painfully negotiated and second-guessed.
I love the Mills/Stipe interplay on the chorus of "Binky the Doormat", it's a revelation when they finally sing together at the end of the song.

Mike Mills b-vox was always one of their best secret weapons.

feel wrung-out from writing about this record but it is so fucking great

Well *that* sent me straight to p4k but I suppose it’ll be the Sunday review?

not sunday, but you'll have to wait a bit

“electrolite” sounds incredible on the remaster!

okay y'all got me to order the vinyl :)

About 70% of this album is great, the other part (the part that sounds like leftovers from Monster), is horrible garbage. I do wish they had sequenced the album in such a way that all those shit tracks were isolated to 1 side of the vinyl, but oh well.

Monster sounding shit:
- Wake Up Bomb
- Undertow
- Departure
** not quite as shit but still want to skip **
- Bittersweet Me
- Low Desert

oh come on

the supposedly monster-y material on this record has always failed to sound much like anything on monster imo, they're mostly just hypercharged r.e.m. jams. "departure" and "undertow" feel almost document-y to me?

and "bittersweet me"... maybe the best rock song they ever made

those songs all rule, good god! Wake-Up Bomb maybe the closest to sounding forced or obligatory but still manages to rule.

i don't think the album works without these tracks tbh --- too consistently shaded. to my ears, the rockier tracks add a lot of texture and lift, while still belonging somehow to the same universe. much moreso than the way, for example, "Ignoreland" drops into the Automatic tracklist.