REMtrospective, 12: New Adventures in Hi-Fi
September 26th, 2008 by Curt Holman in Listening Stack
Title: New Adventures in Hi-Fi
Released on: Sept. 9, 1996
Favorite tracks: “The Wake-Up Bomb,” “Undertow,” “E-Bow the Letter,” “Leave”
In 1997, about a year after New Adventures in Hi-Fi came out, my wife and I bought the house in which we still live. For the previous five years, we’d lived in a place with a dishwasher but no washer/dryer. Our new house had a washer/dryer, but no dishwasher — which, as far as I’m concerned, counts as an upgrade. For a couple of years we washed dishes by hand. I’d usually do it after dark while playing CDs, preferably ones with good “night music,” like Rain Dogs by Tom Waits, Stay Sick! by The Cramps, Kiko by Los Lobos and especially New Adventures in Hi-Fi by R.E.M. (Incidentally, I think Automatic for the People is also very much a “night music” album.)
Something about the repetitive action of scrubbing and drying the dishes and listening to the rolling, cascading melodies of the album – most especially three-song sequence of “Undertow,” “E-Bow The Letter” and “Leave” – would put me in something close to a trance-state. Many of the songs on New Adventures have striking powers of accumulation: they build and build and CREST, and then build and build and build and CREST HIGHER. I find myself more prone to “get lost” in New Adventures than any other REM album. I can’t say whether it’s “better” than Murmur or Document, but it’s the one that interests me the most. You can keep diving into it without striking bottom.
That might be partly because, at 65:33 minutes, New Adventures in Hi-Fi is REM’s longest album, and contains “Leave,” the band’s longest song to date. Incidently, the band’s subsequent album, Up, is a close runner up at almost exactly one minute shorter, and their most recent, Accelerate, is their shortest album at 34 minutes. In their recent “Fresh Air” interview, Peter Buck talked about how, in the CD age, bands tend to overstuff their albums just because CDs can contain more music than LPs – and he acknowledged that REM was guilty of that practice at times.
I completely agree with him about CD “inflation,” but New Adventures in Hi-Fi does not strike me as an overlong or “fat” recording, however. Maybe a couple of tracks feel inessential, like “Low Desert,” which seems like an elaboration of the “Undertow”/“Leave” musical ideas, without the same punch, or maybe the S&M-themed “Binky the Doormat.” Most of the songs, however, have the dramatic intensity to justify their unusual length, and have enough diversity to make the album diverse and surprising.
That also might have to do with the circumstances of the songs’ recording: many of New Adventures in Hi-Fi’s songs were recorded at sound-checks and during live performances. I hear an immediacy and an excitement in Stipe’s vocals and the band’s musicianship that doesn’t seem as present in Monster, and is muted by the overall style of songs in Automatic for the People. Because Automatic was so “mellow” and Monster so “fuzzy,” New Adventures almost sounds like a straight-ahead reintroduction of REM as a rock band. I particularly like Berry’s drums in “Leave,” Mills’ bass-line in “E-Bow” and Buck’s guitar licks in practically all of them. And while I’m no fan of metal machine music, New Adventures integrates weird mechanical effects (the klaxon of “Leave,” the mechanical snap, crackle and pop of “Undertow”) remarkably well – they’re like other instruments.
The cover art strikes me as unusually pertinent here. New Adventures depicts a black-and-white Ansel Adams-y photo of a desert, with scrub-brush in the foreground, hills in the middle distance and fluffy clouds nearly filling the sky. It could be kind of a visual prologue to the album’s first track, “How the West Was Won and Where it Got Us,” and many of the subsequent lyrics seem to push visual imagery (or other senses) more than usual. Most of the other albums don’t seem to have such direct correlations between the covers and the content except Orange. I mean, Green. In some ways, New Adventures could be the band’s “Western” album, starting with that song and ending with “Electrolite,” a big-hearted ditty about looking down over Los Angeles from Mulholland Drive.
Patti Smith sings back-up on “E-Bow the Letter” and is probably the band’s most famous guest musician to date (with all due respect to Kate Pierson, KRS-One, Peter Holsapple and anyone else I may have overlooked). Stipe and Smith are clearly mutual fans, with Stipe singing back-up on some of Smith’s albums. I suspect Smith’s influence might extend to more than just backing vocals. Stipe reportedly said that the opening sentence of “New Test Leper” (“I can’t say that I love Jesus / That would be a hollow claim”) was inspired by Smith’s “Gloria,” by having “Jesus” in the first line.
And I can imagine Smith singing “How the West Was Won,” “E-Bow” and the verses of “Departure” much in the same way that Stipe does. She frequently has a incantation-like, almost ritualistic way of punching the syllables in her songs, like Stipe does with the breathy verses of “How the West Was Won,” and also kind of a beat-poet way of half-speaking/half-singing other tunes, like Stipe does with “E-Bow” and “Departure.” The band’s sensibilities are rather different – REM tends to be exciting but often has inscrutable meanings, while Smith, despite her surreal imagery, tends to be far more direct and nearly ecstatic. I hear a cathartic quality in New Adventures in Hi-Fi that’s uncommon. (I’m a big Patti Smith fan, as you can tell – I can imagine doing a Patti Smith album retrospective in the far future.)
“The Wake-Up Bomb” is a great REM rave-up, and offers some rare self-deprecating humor. Stipe seems to be in a comparably nostalgic mood as he was in Automatic songs like “Nightswimming</i>, but makes fun of his teenage sense of style and pretension (“I had to teach the world to sing by the age of 21 … I threw up when I saw what I’d done”). I liked rediscovering “So Fast, So Numb,” which has a honky-tonk piano thing going and reminds me just a little of The Rolling Stones.
When REM entered its “middle period,” reviewers would frequently point to certain songs on the latest albums and claim they sounded sort of like early REM. “Bittersweet Me,” however, sounds exactly like early REM. It could fit right in with the end of side one of Murmur, only mixed slightly differently. In retrospect, it seems particularly appropriate that New Adventures in Hi-Fi includes such spirited tribute to the bands’ early sound, because the album was drummer Bill Berry’s last, following by all accounts and amicable break-up in 1997. In that year the band parted ways with long-time manager Jefferson Holt and producer Scott Litt, who had worked on all of REM’s albums going back to Document. So many changes marks an unmistakable end to REM’s “middle period,” and Berry seems to have taken some essential part of REM’s spark when he left.
But with New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Berry went out on a high note.
Click here for Monster.
Send to a friend:
Leave a Reply