New Adventures in Hi-Fi

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Product Details

Artist : REM
Binding : Audio CD
EAN : 0093624632023
Label : Warner
Number of Discs : 1
Product Group : Music
Release Date : 1996-09-09
UPC : 093624632023

ASIN : B000002N9S

Track Listings for

Disc-1
1. How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us
2. Wake Up Bomb
3. New Test Leper
4. Undertow
5. E Bow The Letter
6. Leave
7. Departure
8. Bittersweet Me
9. Be Mine
10. Binky The Doormat
11. Zither
12. So Fast So Numb
13. Low Desert
14. Electrolite

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review

New Adventures, despite its studiocentric title, is a snapshots-from-the-road record in the tradition of Neil Young's Time Fades Away and Jackson Browne's Running on Empty. Like them, it captures a where-am-I-and-why ambience, even with its concert and sound-check material reworked in post-tour sessions. This is very much a transitional album, its feel somewhere between the chamber-folk sweep of Out of Time and Automatic for the People and the distortion-pedal party that raged on Monster. It's the work of a band pretty near its peak consolidating familiar sounds and styles while tinkering with the edges. --Rickey Wright

Customer Reviews

REM's White Album? (2008-04-21)

How do I give this 4 1/2 stars? 4 is too low, but it's not as perfect / fun as Automatic or Monster...There's every REM mood of this stage of their career here, but I don't see that much point in Leave, Zither, or Low Dessert. As so many say about the White album, a shorter version would have concentrated the greatness of the rockers (Wakeup Bomb), rock ballads (Bittersweet me), love songs (Be Mine), incisive scenario-songs (New Test Leper)... and the perfect album- and show-closer Electrolite.I'd probably recommend it behind 3 or 4 of their other albums, but it's only in comparison to those and other absolute classics that it appears imperfect.

Taking me over... (2008-02-27)

By 1995 R.E.M. were tour weary. They had visited every corner of the globe supporting the criminally under-rated Monster and suffered Aneurysms, hernias, and cancelled concert dates and they could be forgiven for being very tired. Rather than resting on their laurels though they wrote and recorded throughout the tour, at sound checks and in front of audiences, and then jumped right into the studio to record a few more tracks and clean up the ones they already had. The result was New Adventures In Hi-Fi. A traveller's tale written by weary hobos, that remains my favourite album by the boys from Athens, GA.In a sense New Adventures was a grab bag of styles that R.E.M. had previously (and even, to some extent, more recently) employed and it has next to no weak spots. E-Bow the Letter was as bloody-minded a lead single as anyone has ever released and is one of the finest songs in the band's canon. A vocal by Stipe's hero Patti Smith than may only be described as vampiric underscores the overall atmosphere. Elsewhere the glam stomp of The Wake Up Bomb and thumping self-pity of Bittersweet Me could have been singles from Monster and the beautiful Electrolite and lonely Low Desert could have been high points on Automatic For the People.Sonic experimentation is also the order of the day with the synth-ladened Undertow and Leave book-ending E-Bow the Letter. Leave in particular is a harsh, difficult listen. Its starts with a slow and quite pretty introduction before descending into a morass of whooping sirens and some of the best vocals Stipe has ever laid down, shored up by what may be Buck's best guitar work. Leave is my favourite R.E.M. track by quite a long stretch and you sense that it could have gone so horribly wrong elsewhere.Its worth noting that this is the last album recorded with Bill Berry on drums although its the loss of another mainstay that, in retrospect, is more keenly felt with New Adventures' passing. This is the last album R.E.M. have released to date with long term producer Scott Litt who presided over much of their late 1980s and early 1990s purple patch and its no co-incidence in my mind that New Adventures is their last truly great album to this point. Its hard to imagine how New Adventures would have sounded with Pat McCarthy's uninspired production but I'll bet that we would not have seen tracks as deliberately obtuse and challenging as these and that would be a sad state of affairs.

The many moods of Stipe (2007-07-21)

New Adventures in Hi-Fi is the R.E.M. cut off point for many people, although some people will tell you Monster, others Up. (Am I alone in thinking Reveal was where they started to sound like they were struggling a little?)To me this is in many ways the definitive R.E.M. album. Bittersweet Me and Binky The Doormat jangle like nothing since the days when you couldn't understand a word Stipe was mumbling about. The distortion driven R.E.M. of Monster is present here in the shape of Departure and the glam stomp of The Wake-up Bomb, which also gives Stipe a chance to leave the sensitive outsiders who populate most of his songs behind a while and 'get high in his low ass bootcut jeans' as an egotistical, delusional megastar. New Test Leper repeats Automatic for the People's neat trick of having a largely acoustic number swim through a moat of feedback at the song's bridge. Leave foreshadows the band's love affair with synths that would blossom on Up. All great.Stipe's lyrics are as lushly melancholic and literary as ever, the final two songs, Low Desert and Electrolite, in particular could come from the pages of Raymond Carver. The fact that the album was recorded on the road meakes it inevitable that things sound a little off the cuff, but there's depths here most bands would give their skinny jeans to come close to.

a sublime piece of material (2007-05-04)

i give this work full marks, because although i would prefer it without the 2 rockers - so fast so numb and wake up bomb, and the pointless instrumental zither, it has slices of material which are definately their best ever nuggets of work, i am referring to the likes of new test leper,undertow,e-bow the letter. this lp has great melodys, dark overtones of sublime creedance, monumental production values and off the cuff lyrical stipeness, and of course ludicrously good backing vocals courtesy of the belter of rock that is mike mills. a beautiful pledge

The Last REM Album Worth Owning (2007-03-13)

With the benefit of hindsight, New Adventures in Hi-Fi has the best album REM ever made lurking somewhere within it, making it a little akin to The Clash's triple-LP opus Sandinista. Well over half of the songs are absolutely brilliant, and they connect the darkly rich melancholy of Automatic for the People with the volume of Document (most of the guitar sounds on this album harken back to REM circa 1987, rather than the immediate predecessor of Monster), and the mystique of Murmur (Stipe's vocals and lyrics are by far the least fathomable of any REM album after 1985). Had the ten best songs been sent off to a studio then this could easily have become a brilliant synthesis of all of REM's various approaches from the fumbling jangles of Chronic Town right through to the confidence and wistfulness of Automatic for the People (we'll forget that Monster was ever recorded), a kind of a crowning glory of one of the great bands. Unfortunately, specific circumstances within the band rather put paid to that idea, so we end up with 14 songs arranged in an incongruous manner, poiting toward the increasingly slack quality control of every album REM have produced ever since. The Wake-Up Bomb (the only thing here that truly sounds like a Monster off-cut) is complete rubbish, Leave goes absolutely nowhere and its ravey car-alarm sound is woefully inappropriate, Zither is pointless (if pleasant), Bittersweet Me is poor. Moreover, there is a generally "bitty" feel to the affair that reveals a band in the grip of a rapidly deteriorating comprehension of their purpose as they face up to being the biggest band on the entire planet (as they were at this point), rather than a fairly cultish indie concern. Again, this confusion would be further evidenced in the synth-y direction of Up, Reveal and Around the Sun, all of which sound predominantly like stabs in the dark, and none of which are much worth bothering with.

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