New Adventures in Hi Fi?

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.

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

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, November 3, 2021 3:14 PM (thirty-five seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

this was like such a huge vibe for me in my troubled teens and early twenties. i don't think i realized it probably came from these videos until now!

"bittersweet me" does have a sense of humor about it all, true.

xp "electrolite" was always my favorite song on this. i don't think i've ever seen this video though - wow, jeez, it's great. how many videos did they make for this haha.

i think i've had 4 or 5 different favorite songs on this tbh.

now deciding which physical media package to buy. i would love to crank the cd of this in the car but i'm not likely to have a car with a cd player for that much longer.

"electrolite" is my favorite "we couldn't settle on one idea for this music video so we went with all 4-5 treatments we came up with" music video

This is such an incredible album. It would be my favourite if maybe they'd dropped one or two songs, but I'm never sure which ones

the shit tracks obviously

I absolutely despise distorted guitars ...

― brotherlovesdub, Wednesday, November 3, 2021 11:01 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Like, under all circumstances? This seems like a very powerful challop

man that's a great one

Loves dub, hates distorted guitars.

I move across, innocence lost
All flashing pulsar
I move across the earth in my new pattern shirt

Such powerful lyric writing.

If there's a general weakness to this record, it might be that in some of the songs, the verses have a lackluster musical backing, as if "we can't distract from what Michael's saying, let's just strum chords and play a straight 4/4 behind him". Not all of his vocals/lyrics benefit from being pushed up front.

i am in a negative period in my life, or at least that's where the natural weight is. trying to fight back against it, all that shit. but recently i listened to new adventures on a long car ride and i was very disappointed, mostly by many of the same tracks brotherlovesdub mentioned. and i love rem rock songs, i swear!

so instead i'll just say here are my favorite songs on the record, ranked:

e-bow
how the west was won
be mine
bittersweet me
so fast so numb
electrolite
zither

E-Bow, How the West Was Won, and Electrolite are my favorite songs on the album. Also, 'loves dub, hates distorted guitars' gave me a big chuckle, so thanks for that. i don't hate all distorted guitars, i like a bit of shoegaze, and Sensitive by the Field Mice has some distortion and that's a good song, but I just don't like it on REM songs. To me, it feels like they're painting with a borrowed palette when they use it.

painting with a borrowed palette

That's a good description of the wall of guitars on a lot of Monster for me.

i think my thing with the 90s rock songs (and i use "rock" loosely - i don't know, stuff from murmur is rock to me) is that they had written about 20 of the best ones in the 80s. when i want to listen to rem rock there are plenty o better options.

i don't say that, i don't think at least, with any sort of bias against or for the mid-90s, which is when i was like 10-13. i didn't listen to music then, at all. i didn't hear their new adventures/monster rock until the very same time i was hearing their document or fables rock. it just always seemed (to me) that as that in the 90s they started to lean into some of their non-rock sides, sometimes to extraordinary effect

but it was very, very strange, after being so obsessed by Reveal and Up (my first two by them), to finally get to their back catalog and realize that they had all these amazing rock songs, lol. like, imagine hearing losing your religion 10 years after it happened, for the first time, somehow, even though you were there the whole time

anyway, for that reason i think i listened to the harder rocking songs on monster and new adventures with fresh and open ears, and just don't really like them as much as others do i guess

That's interesting. II came to them via the Out Of Time stuff when I was roughly 10 years old and other than Murmur have trouble really appreciating much that came before that.

what do you like about murmur?

(i realize that's a hard question! would take me a long time to explain what i love about murmur (though i could just say, everything)

Love "Departed" and "Undertow" on this, what can I say, I'm a sucker for when they rock out.

(But agree with people above that they don't rise to the level of some of the earlier rockers, most notably "Just a Touch")

To me, it feels like they're painting with a borrowed palette when they use it.

this is fair. they come so much less from punk than from jangle-rock imo so it's really not a natural fit - and how they zoom in on peter buck in those alt-era rem videos when he hits a distorted power chord, it does feel a little put-on, doesn't it?

i think they kind of grew into the sound by new adventures though, made it their own to a degree.