by Bryce Napier and Tom Demi, first published December 16, 2015
New Adventures In Hi-Fi
released September 10, 1996
Warner Bros. Records
“In music, both in macrocosm and with R.E.M. in particular, my tastes gravitate toward the poppy end of the spectrum, so it’s remarkable that I find so much to connect with here, their most straight-ahead rock and roll record.”
I picked up New Adventures In Hi-Fi, R.E.M.'s tenth studio album, out of the completist's sense of obligation. If the mid-'90s had proven a hotbed of new music I loved, I might not even have bothered; I had been so nonplussed by Monster a couple of years before that I had sort of given up on R.E.M. I've mentioned Nirvana a couple of times now, in previous entries to this series, but I haven't noted that I was ambivalent, at best, to their music. The landscape, as made over in their wake, kicked the idiosyncratic power pop that I personally love the best back out to the fringes. My favorite groups at the time, Crowded House and XTC, had stopped making music (the former disbanded, the latter went on strike for eight years against their label to be released from their contract). It would be another year before Ben Folds and Radiohead pulled my attention back toward current music, so during this period most of my music purchases were either expensive imports to secure listening rights to obscure b-sides from long out-of-print singles, or back-catalogue reissues to fill the gaps in the discographies of bands I'd been following since the late '80s. But it's a kind of sickness that collectors have, that compulsion to buy the new material even if they no have particular interest in it, so yes, I bought it and gave it a couple of cursory spins.
The lead single, "E-Bow The Letter," made no impression on me, and vanished from the airwaves within weeks. The opening track of the album, "How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us," was a slow simmer like "Drive" or "Low" from previous records, which had never been my favorite of the band's modes. I could hear the music was more accessible than Monster had been, but I had little inclination to put in the effort to get to know it better. I shelved it, and forgot it.
Behind the scenes of our discussion of Monster in the last installment, I talked Tom out of detailing some of the background information that makes this such a unique title in the R.E.M. canon. Thus, I'll turn the floor over to him, that he may do so now.
It surely is unique—and not only for the fact that I usually cite it as my favorite album of theirs (Murmur is the closest challenger)—but because of the way it came together. R.E.M. fans were well aware that the plan during the Monster tour was for the band to not only write and work up brand-new songs on the road, but record them, too, until they had a complete new album by the time the tour ended. As fate would have it, though, a string of medical emergencies afflicted the members of the group throughout the tour, and their songwriting momentum got derailed. Still, they knew they had some great performances of the handful of songs that did get finished, so they decided to make the album a studio/live hybrid.
What sounds in theory like an awkward plan somehow worked beautifully. The live songs had tons of energy, and the quieter studio tracks benefited from the intimate atmosphere—a 20,000-seat arena is not ideal for conveying subtlety—and the transitions between the live and studio tracks were handled with creative masking and effects to transform the audience cheers into otherworldly white noise. And not only that, but unlike on Monster, there was actually respite from the savagery and cynicism dripping from tracks like "Leave" and "Binky The Doormat." The empathy and open spaces of Automatic For The People return to balance things out, and my opinion is that there's a better balance here, as Automatic had only one all-out rocker, while New Adventures has at least four, depending on your definition.
This album was also unique at the time for being the longest R.E.M. album to date—at over 65 minutes, it was sixteen minutes longer than the previous champ and twice as long as some of their others. Was it the sprawling nature of this album that doomed it to only middling success? Or was it, as some posited at the time, a backlash against the extremely lucrative new contract they had just signed with their label? It sure didn't help that they picked the ominous "E-Bow The Letter" as a single—though it did very well in the U.K., it was too much of a downer to catch on in the U.S., as Bryce's initial reaction typifies. (I like the song a lot, actually; it's like a better-realized version of "Country Feedback.")
I would think it weird for people to write R.E.M. off at this stage due to their payday. I acknowledge that there is a certain breed of fan who will abandon their fandom at the drop of a hat once they feel too many people have wrested away "ownership" of a band. It's hard to feel on the leading edge of what's cool if your mother can sing along with it, too. But I'd imagine those fans chose to disembark after the chart success of Document. As for "E-Bow The Letter," perhaps the vocal presence of Patti Smith—a mentor/hero of the band, and Stipe especially—elevated it in someone's mind to single material, but it defies radio wisdom by resisting a hook that'll leave you humming it after it's stopped playing. And it has a peculiar title, which can be off-putting. (I'm looking at you, too, "Binky The Doormat." As someone who orders the Moons Over My Hammy any time I go to a Denny's, I can tell you there's a deep sigh of hesitation before letting a cringe-inducing name like that pass my lips.) In my personal ranking of the songs from Adventures, "E-Bow" wouldn't make the top half of the list.
There's no way to move forward without getting ahead of myself for a moment, so suffice it to say that I enjoy Up—a lot. I liked it enough when I first got it that it reignited my interest in R.E.M. as a band, and I went back to re-explore some of the older titles that I'd written off, including this one. That time around, I found quite a bit to like that had previously fallen on deaf ears. Alas, the goodwill generated by Up couldn't rehab my opinion of Monster, but I'm pleased that it rescued New Adventures In Hi-Fi from the scrap heap, because I'd now put it among my second-tier favorites (after the triumvirate of Pageant, Green, and the aforementioned Up).
The first songs to (belatedly) grab my attention were "The Wake-Up Bomb" and "Leave." Ironically, these two songs in particular illustrate the album Monster could have been. In "The Wake-Up Bomb," Stipe professes his desire to "practice [his] T.Rex moves and make the scene." This is the synthesis of R.E.M. and the sexy swagger of glam rock that "Crush With Eyeliner" aimed at and (in my view) missed. It would have been my choice for the lead single, had anyone called me two years after the fact to ask for my input. And "Leave"—at seven minutes and eighteen seconds, more than a minute longer than any other song on one of their studio albums—features a screaming electronic pulse that runs through the song like a dentist's drill, from the moment it comes in (about the one-minute mark) all the way to the end. But I like how it keeps me on edge, refusing to let me completely settle into the groove of the song, or letting it be too pretty. Still, if this had been the Monster aesthetic, the noise would have been brazenly heaped on top of the rest of the song, burying a strong melody and making it an unbearably grating listening experience; New Adventures lets it sink down in the mix (you almost have to listen for it during the chorus to realize it's still there) only to periodically roar back and reassert its menacing presence. (By contrast, a slower, electronica take on "Leave" made it onto the bonus disc of the special edition of their 2003 In Time retrospective—by way of, I believe, the soundtrack for the film A Life Less Ordinary.)
I find "Leave" very compelling, too, and I do believe that Scott MacCaughey had to be manually toggling that switch back and forth to make that noise for the entire six-ish minutes you hear it—for me, it's funny that even when it's audible, it seems to disappear after a while. "The Wake-Up Bomb" did seem like the obvious single—in fact, they played it live on the MTV Awards a year before the album came out, so maybe that's part of the reason they didn't pick it: it was already "old"? In any case, this was a tricky album to pick singles for: "Bittersweet Me" had an absolutely classic R.E.M. sound, but it had that prominent "chew my leg off" line in the chorus that probably didn't help its fortunes. For some people, "Electrolite" may have echoed "Nightswimming" too closely in its piano riff (plus it was just too late by this time), but I think it's a glorious song, superior to its predecessor and a perfect way to end the album, hopeful and gently playful. I'm flummoxed as to how anyone would think that "How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us" was single material; it's effective as an album opener to set the mood, but too muted and "hazy" to be commercial, and then that whacked-out piano solo, cool as it is, was not radio-ready either.
This album is just so rich in contrasts, and hooks pop up to enliven songs in unexpected ways. That dissonant piano to punctuate the end of the chorus of the kinetic "So Fast, So Numb" always gets me going (and it also became a live favorite over the subsequent years), and the sympathetic backing vocals really lift it up, too. "New Test Leper" is a marvel, not only for the incredible, insightful lyrics and vocals, but for all the little instrumental flourishes—the descending bass riff, the tremolo guitar, the feedback—that never overwhelm the song or make it feel too tightly packed. "Be Mine" is captivating from beginning to end, from Peter Buck's scraping guitar rhythm rising and falling to the E-bow solo that perfectly complements the bittersweetness of Michael Stipe's twistedly romantic devotion.
Whatever intangible attributes might separate one's personal definition of "pop" from "rock"—the sheen, the length, the structure, the attitude, the instrumentation—this record falls pretty clearly on the "rock" side. Underscoring R.E.M.'s potency as a live unit, this is a supremely satisfying effort, and I understand why songs like these would be more fun to play on the road. It makes me surprised that more bands don't take this live/studio hybrid approach to capture their slightly-out-of-control energy in all its shaggy glory. I love how "Undertow" is driven by the laid-back smarm of Mills's bassline. I like the big riff at the heart of "Departure." I even enjoy the two-minute mental beach vacation of "Zither." In music, both in macrocosm and with R.E.M. in particular, my tastes gravitate toward the poppy end of the spectrum, so it's remarkable that I find so much to connect with here, their most straight-ahead rock and roll record. In fact, thinking about it now, "How The West Was Won" and "E-Bow" might be the only two songs on the record that don't do anything for me.
I'm badly overrunning my allotted word count on this entry (and then using even more to acknowledge it—vicious circle!), but maybe I can excuse it as some sort of tribute to their longest-ever record. I agree, essentially, with what you say about the songs above, especially regarding "New Test Leper" and "Be Mine," so I won't expound on them any further. But I can't let a discussion of New Adventures In Hi-Fi go by without talking about one of my dark horse favorites in the entire R.E.M. canon: "Low Desert." It's easy to overlook, coming as it does as the next-to-last song on a long record, and rather than making a big declaration of its presence, it insinuates itself in a much more low-key way. There's a growl to it that I don't normally associate with R.E.M.; a lascivious brew of glam and Southern rock that swaggers and struts very effectively. It's also the song that pairs best with the album cover art. Good, good stuff. An adventure well worth taking.
Well worth taking; I heartily agree, and 1996 was also a year of new adventures for me in my personal life: I had switched jobs at the end of 1994, but now I moved full-time from proofreader to graphic artist; I had honed my guitar-playing and performing skills over the past few years enough that I now felt comfortable playing full coffeehouse gigs a few times a month (and "Be Mine" became one of my favorites to play); and I finally ventured out into the gay nightlife and started having relationships again. I had a boyfriend with me at my beloved Final Vinyl used-record shop for an album-release party for New Adventures In Hi-Fi, at which I won the limited edition CD package in a trivia contest. And as that album's campaign (and that relationship) ended, I found myself moving from New Jersey to Pennsylvania: a definitive departure from my youth.
And now R.E.M. was forced to grow and change as well. After the album's "sad parade" on the charts came to an end, their drummer, Bill Berry, announced in 1997 that he was leaving the band—having suffered a brain aneurysm on the Monster tour, he decided to reassess his priorities in life and take up farming. His only condition to his bandmates was that they promise not to break up just because he was leaving. They heeded his wishes and decided to stay together as a threesome. Bryce has already offered a preview of the results of that decision, and I will weigh in at length in our next post.