New Adventures in Hi Fi?

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.

I absolutely despise distorted guitars. Bittersweet Me would have been more tolerable to me without that one layer of distorted guitar. Sounds like a few different guitar parts layered, but the super distorted layer is just off-putting to my ears. Anyway, I like moments in Bittersweet Me, but it's not a song i'd ever want to play. It's definitely the best of the shit tracks I mentioned.

r.e.m. is a rock band

Those tracks improve on the Monster template, mostly by being faster("Low Desert" is nothing special, but listenable in context). The record is really a rethinking of the styles they tried from 87 to 94.

this is all well and good, but "leave" is still the high water mark. in an alternate timeline it's their "like a rolling stone."

my dumb take on this era is that it's the most fully indulgent of michael's tics. i'd forgotten how influential they were on me as a queer teenager!

xp ":leave" was always one of my favorites

"e-bow the letter" sounded kind of unpleasant and indulgent to me then. i like it better now but i still don't get what everyone loves about it. could be that i've never been into patti smith.

his cutest era!

"e-bow" is like no other song ever made

speaking of e-bow, every e-bow part buck plays on this record is the most gorgeous part of the record

"Leave" was my fav for a long time but now it feels like a little too much to me. Overwrought or something. Still hits hard but I need to be in the right space for it

just to keep bringing more songs into the discussion, I love the piano in "So Fast, So Numb," especially that little fill that comes after the chorus.

the range of guitar noise on this album impresses me: a fusion of OOT and Monster's sounds.

the videos from this record have aged well but dare i call them a smidge pretentious itt? lol

i like that they tapped jem cohen for "how the west was won" and "e-bow," his style of blurry nighttime photography of public places that are uncannily empty etc. nails exactly what those songs feel like

the "bittersweet me" video, on the other hand, is hilarious

“electrolite” sounds incredible on the remaster!

― j.o.h.n. in evanston (john. a resident of chicago.), Tuesday, November 2, 2021 7:04 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

man you are not kidding

I love the use of space in "Bittersweet Me." Stipe gets room to preen and make demands.