New Adventures in Hi Fi?

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.

The atonal piano solo in "How the West Was Won" is so cool

what do you like about murmur?

― have you considered that there are 1 shades of gray (Karl Malone), Wednesday, November 3, 2021 9:28 PM (forty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't know, it's just iconic and the songs, impressionistic as they are, feel like songs whereas a lot of what comes after sounds a bit watery and of its time. Murmur feels timeless. It's hard to explain exactly, but I've tried to listen to the rest of the IRS stuff and it just doesn't really stick.

KM, what drew you to pick up Up and Reveal in your REM-less youth?

Listening to this now... "E-Bow" still has that magic (and its zenith is the chunk beginning "Seconal, Spanish fly" and continuing to the end of the verse), but the rest of the album is just not my jam.

I like all their stuff pretty much up though this album, but Murmur does have a certain quality to it that feels mysterious and timeless

It's definitely an REM record but has something special

xp hideous lump

my friends! in my sophomore year in HS i became best friends with an incoming freshman, and he really changed my life, musically. we started playing together in a band (our first jam was us playing "everlong" as a guitar/drummer duo) and he introduced me to all sorts of bands, and also other music nerds. Up was the new one at that point, so i picked it up at the local cd store and listened to it several billion times

the reason i asked about murmur was that if you like murmur, you should definitely check out chronic town. i imagine the venn diagram between those two is almost completely overlapping, and it's also Iconic imo

sure, it's only 5 songs, but it does what i wish a million other bands would do: just release songs that are top notch, all killer no filler, even if it's only one side

just the first few minutes alone of 'wolves, lower' contains a New Adventures amount of "rock"

which song on Chronic Town contains the word "chronic town"? if you don't immediately know, you have not listened to Chronic Town recently enough

shit pop quiz and i failed :/

it's been ages but my memory is you are right

i guess i meant more reckoning and fables, great great albums but something not quite like murmur that i can't really articulate because on paper and in practice they aren't really that different

they don't have Murmur's kinda muffled production, right? big part of the mystique

totally agree about the timelessness of murmur, too! and yeah it's really hard to nail down why

Cervical of Sorts

I didn't correct what the phone thought

i guess i meant more reckoning and fables, great great albums but something not quite like murmur that i can't really articulate because on paper and in practice they aren't really that different

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, November 3, 2021 6:23 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

they don't have Murmur's kinda muffled production, right? big part of the mystique

― lukas, Wednesday, November 3, 2021 6:26 PM (three minutes ago)

i definitely don't have good ears for this kind of conversation (too many drums played in concrete basements!) but to me, for some reason, it's murmur that's always sounded crystal clear to me, while fables and reckoning have seemed murky

xpost lol rip van winko

cervical of sorts (boxcar)

one thing I remember about murmur and early rem in general is Mitch Easter talking about how they recorded their parts in separate rooms/isolation and how that was like so not punk rock or whatever

cervical of jorts (hotboxcar)

This conversation heartens me because my students don't know them at all. They've vanished. U2 have not.

Anyway, LRP rules.

Asked in 1999 about his favorite projects as a producer, Easter cited R.E.M.'s Chronic Town and Game Theory's records – Real Nighttime (1984), The Big Shot Chronicles (1985), Lolita Nation (1987), and Two Steps from the Middle Ages (1988) – which Easter called "a lot of fun, because of the variety in the way they approached recording".[4]

I actually think Murmur is produced very cleanly, the vocals are just kind of low in the mix

REM is so much better than U2, feel bad for the kids

REM is so much better than U2, feel bad for the kids

i don't think any kids like U2, but i may be wrong. U2 has a new single out for some animated film and it's the worst song of all time. i'd like to think that the kids can still identify total trash

they KNOW U2, that's the difference.

rem obviously the better band overall but u2 peaked higher

it still trips me out to remember that rem were as big as they were. i mean sure they had catchy songs that catered somewhat to the zeitgeist, but it was hard to hide the fact that they were artsy, insular and retro leaning at heart, just a band playing together and looking weird doing it. i guess that was the general trend with college rock from the 80s though so it does make some sense, it's just that rem, to me, somehow feel more unlikely as a success story than others.

i disagree. i think that rem is so much better than U2 that it's unbelievable and it makes older people at the BBQ choke on their hotwings.

i say that as a fan of 80s U2

xp