New Adventures in Hi-Fi

8.0/10

  This is another really solid album and ended up being the last one to feature drummer and founding member Bill Berry, who retired to devote more time to farming or something.  It's kind of understandable since he suffered a brain aneurysm during the Monster tour, which was when this album was also recorded.  It's made up of a combination of live cuts, stuff recorded during sound checks, and a few actual in-the-studio recordings.  Despite the varied nature of how the tracks were recorded, it mostly sounds of a piece.  It also kind of sounds like a mashup of Monster and Automatic for the People, which makes sense because those were the two previous albums and they were actively touring behind Monster.  This one doesn't seem to have garnered the same disrespect as Monster has over the years, nor the praise of Automatic.  It was generally well received, but it's become kind of overlooked.

  For me personally I was in my sophomore year of college when this came out.  I remember still being excited for it, but my R.E.M. obsession had worn off a little bit by this point.  College is a good time for expanding one's music tastes and mine were expanding in all sorts of directions.  I was discovering all kinds of new bands, as well as how getting inebriated can positively affect how different kinds of music sound.  I wouldn't say that I was "outgrowing" R.E.M., but I was becoming aware that there was a much wider world of music.

  As such I don't have quite as many personal memories associated with this one as I do with the three or four albums prior to this.  I still like it quite a bit, and I remember liking it quite well when it first came out, it just had to jostle with a lot of other things for my attention.

  For some reason the initial copy of this I bought had a weird glitch in the CD that made the opening track How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us cut in and out.  I didn't realize at first that this wasn't intentional, even though it seemed like a pretty odd choice.  They really are going for some new adventures, I thought to myself at the time.  It wasn't until a little bit later that I realized I hadn't heard the "real" version of the song.  So I finally got the true experience and it still is a bit of a departure for the band.  (A bit of an unintentional joke in that last sentence, since there's a song on this album called Departure.)  It features some kind of sparse piano lines and almost a hip-hop beat.  This ends up setting the par for the course nicely as there are several instances throughout the album where sounds and textures are prominently used that haven't really been on an R.E.M. album before.

  Second track Wake Up Bomb is not really one of these instances as it sounds like it could have come straight off of Monster.  Indeed I think it was probably originally an outtake from the Monster sessions.  If I remember correctly you can find the title of this song among the various bits of text in the Monster artwork.  It's a good song though.

  Later on we get E-bow the Letter, which if memory serves was released as the first single from this album.  It reminds me a little bit of Country Feedback, which is overall a good thing, since I really like that song.  Instead of the pedal steel and feedback, it uses a sound created by an e-bow, which is partially where the title comes from.  E-bows are pretty cool, if you've never seen one.  You kind of hold them over the guitar string and they make it vibrate through usage of an electromagnetic field.  Science, people.  It works.  Anyway it sort of makes a sound like bowing the guitar strings.  It also sort of sounds a little like the noises in Country Feedback, but it's a cool sound.  E-bow the Letter also has prominent Patti Smith backup vocals, which work well in this context.  

  Elsewhere we have Leave, which has a prominent siren sound throughout its seven minute-plus run time, which represented the longest R.E.M. song to date.  From what I understand rather than use a loop or a keyboard preset this sound was actually created by backup musician Scott McCaughey of Young Fresh Fellows and Minus 5 fame, who had to move a dial back and forth for the entire seven minutes.  I bet his hand got really tired by the end of that.  I think they might have been playing a bit of a prank on him.

  On a slightly related note I actually had a brief semi-awkward conversation with Scott McCaughey years later in a bar in Austin one time.  He was playing in South by Southwest with Tuatara, a band which also featured Peter Buck.  As it turned out Mike Mills was in the crowd that night as well.  It was kind of weird for me because I had been such a huge R.E.M. fan in my younger days and here I was in a small bar where two of the members were just kind of hanging out after Tuatara played.  I couldn't really think of anything to say and I didn't want to bother them so I didn't talk to them.  But I did almost bump into Scott McCaughey so I just mentioned how I was a fan of Young Fresh Fellows and Minus 5.  I don't know if he gets approached all that often because he almost seemed a little surprised I knew about his other bands.  I was a little bit drunk and I didn't really know what else to say, so I ended up kind of awkwardly excusing myself.  He seemed like a really nice dude though.

  Getting back to New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the one complaint I seem to hear leveled against it most frequently is that it's too long.  I'm somewhat inclined to agree with this.  At over an hour in length, it's the longest R.E.M. album to date.  It's also got a lot of songs that break the 5 minute mark.  The thing is, I actually like all the songs here and I wouldn't really want to cut anything.  I guess Zither is kind of a slight instrumental, but it fits the album and I don't mind listening to it.  Maybe a couple of the songs could have been very slightly trimmed in length.

  I also have to nominate Binky the Doormat as the goofiest R.E.M. song title to date.  I guess it's a reference to the movie Shakes the Clown, which is kind of goofy in and of itself.  It's a pretty cool song though, with some tasty Mike Mills backup vocals.

  There's really nothing to dislike here.  It's a solid album.  I don't know if I've ever met anyone who would claim it as their favorite album, but there's no reason why it couldn't or shouldn't be somebody's favorite.  If you like their other stuff, you'll like this one.  Unless you're one of those snobs who only like the IRS years.  Then you'll think they're total sellouts who suck long and hard.