New Adventures in Hi Fi?

eviscerate me to that album - i will go quietly and mourn for a time never to be seen again, for a love never to be felt.

Oh, man! I bet Stipey and co. have sleepless nights over that one.

I'd take Monster over New Adventures. I don't know why I've never really got into NIAH, but Monster is almost always the one I have in my walkman. I like that it's a bit messed up and wrong. Great guitar sound as well.

Uh, drummer. Guitarist = Andy Summers, bassist = oh, I think we all know by now.

Always liked 'Bittersweet Me' and 'Electrolite' OK. Maybe it hasn't really improved that much. We'll see.

Also from these sessions - a cover of Vic Chesnutt's "Sponge" that's probably my favorite R.E.M. track post-1992.

But, yeah, up to about track 10 this is my favorite overrated underrated REM album, after Life's Rich Pageant.

I'd cut "Suspicion", "At My Most Beautiful" and...maybe "Walk Unafraid"? Maybe only 2 need to be cut.

I love "Parakeet".

x-post: "The Michael Stipe Band" is ridiculous. It's Buck, Mills, and Stipe, minus Berry. They have a great regular band w/ McCaughey and Stringfellow and Bill Rieflin is actually a stronger drummer than Berry was.

Bullshit.

I think the rockers sound fantastic - the opening racket of "Departure" might be what Buck was looking for on Monster but never quite finding. OTM on Low Desert's lyrics. "A road owl hit your windshield..."

I dunno. The whole package works, and it does deliver a consistent mood without sounding the same throughout. It's hard not to hear it as Berry's swan song though, or wonder what might have come next if he hadn't bowed out (and I'm speaking as a general defender of Up and to a lesser extent Reveal).

It's hard to believe this is now almost ten years old.

"Reveal" is also underrated, I think. Good songs all throughout, even the weird stuff like "Beachball" works.

agreed on the lyrics here. great stuff. contrast that with, say, "imitation of life," which came on at the gym the other day. aaargh. stipe's "greatest thing since bread came sliced" line. wtf is that? add mill's blander than bland songwriting/arrangement (i assume it's him, since it was such a big deal when his songs started getting more prominent around out of time. sounds like him even it's not.) and buck's surliness/seeming disinterest in being in a band (look at him, he constantly looks pained) and the result is a severely damaged legacy.

That's just nuts. They sure have done a lot of work and toured around the world relentlessly for someone disinterested in being in a band.

Stipe being silly.

And the noise/feedback stuff he does is kind of mediocre in terms of the heavy/psych guitar tradition.

It's such a relief when "Zither" comes on!

I think my favorite recent instance is when he sings "Leaving was never my proud" in "Leaving New York." That's fucking hilarious.

'e-bow the letter', 'bittersweet me' and 'leave' are also fantastic.

i relentlessly get out of bed to go to work five days a week. doesn't mean i enjoy it.

yr not rich. rem is.

i don't see it. especially from buck -- distant, never looks like he's having fun. seems like a guy who'd tell you not to look at him even as he's playing an instrument in front of you.

probably think they are making good records

the first two words are the key, huh? they say it every album they put out -- "best we've ever done" bullshit. they have to say it. press laps it up and spits it out verbatim cuz, well, it's r.e.m. for godsakes and they got to sit in the same room or on the same phone line with them for 25 whole minutes! all to themselves!

based on buck's prior goal of making an album as good as astral weeks (this long after they'd already put out murmur and reckoning, which he didn't think measured up), i can't see how he thinks they are getting any closer.

i guess i'm just amazed by how much it seems berry was the pivotal member keeping all their worst attributes (stipe's attentionwhoring, mills' cheesiness, buck's...i dunno, surliness? personality?) in check. if the rumor is true and he's back in the studio with them...well, just please let it be true.

On Up:
I think the songs are our best group of songs

On Reveal:
It might be the best record we've ever done.

On Around the Sun:
as good a group of songs as we’ve ever done

Buck said basically the same thing about New Adventures, but at least he got it right that time.

i kno

I love about half of this album and usually end up skipping most of the other part.

Will you show me something that nobody else has seen?
Smoke it, drink - here comes the flood!
anything to thin the blood.

awesome!

this is still the REM album i enjoy the most. even more than green or murmur or automatic. i hardly listen to them anymore, except for tracks off new adventures. e-bow, electrolite, how the west was won, bittersweet me. all some of their best.

So very classic. I just lost an auction on ebay for a sealed vinyl copy. =(

Also, my best friend bought this cd for me on my 16th birthday. Even more classic!

Still an excellent album.

'binky the doormat' ... best song about a doormat ever.

WORD!

I downloaded this on the recommendation of ILM yesterday-- some pretty good stuff on this, but good God, the "rockers" are incredibly painful ("The Wake-Up Bomb" for example).

OOoohhhhhh the wake up bomb.

This is my favorite REM album, bar none.

i think it just might be one of their best. certainly their last really good record.

It's way below their best early to mid-career work, but it's half a terrific album and yeah, it's "certainly their last really good record."

way below their best early to mid-career work

strongly disagree w/this, I think these songs are some of their best

half a terrific album
I would say 2/3 terrific 1/3 good to decent, which considering the length is impressive. Still their longest release by far and quite varied, it's almost like their version of Sandinista.

Great album. Will it also take six years that people will discover how phantastic "Reveal" is?

OTM! Reveal is also excellent.

The end of a really bad period for R.E.M. It wasn't as bad as "Monster", but still had the same weaknesses. They would get better on "Up" and really good on "Reveal".

oh my peer your veneer is wearing thin and cracking
the surface informs the underneath -- the underneath is lacking

my favorite r.e.m. lyric!

i couldn't taste it. i'm tired and naked
i don't know what i'm hungry for. i don't know what i want anymore

"Bittersweet Me" is my favorite forgotten R.E.M. singer. I love when bands crank out singles that on first listen sound effortless and dull but are in fact distillations that they couldn't have written at any other poitn.

*single

Stipe should legally change his name to "Bittersweet Me".

am i a bad person if i say this is my favorite r.e.m. album? i recognize it's not their best, not by a longshot, but i've probably listened to it more than any of their other albums.

i am already dying for the NAiHF reissue. the monster tour seems to have curated their last great songs. "electrolite" is a high quality "all of my love" level sign-off and i am eager to hear whatever else they demoed to get to this

I am never eager to hear demos, especially for albums as long as Hi-Fi, which I hasten to say I love.

austin, this is my favorite r.e.m. album

murmur and monster hot on its heels

from what I remember this is the era when the Brits took to R.E.M. hard, embracing this and Up.

bill's final tour. the secret ingredient pre-retirement. capture the fleeting magic

so many bangers on this. undertow, leave, bittersweet me, etc. etc.

"e-bow" was my favorite rem song of all time for a while, maybe it still is. "low desert" vastly underrated or at least undermentioned

prob my favorite set of r.e.m. music videos comes from this record too

"Be Mine"'s verse chords bears= an uncanny resemblance to Collective Soul's "Shine."

i wrote this very lengthy r.e.m. overview on my blog some years back and it remains one of the most looked at entries on the blog. here's what i said about new adventures:

Motherfruggit, I don't care: this album kicks butts with no prejudice. A boxer or your grandma get the same treatment: a swift kick in the hiney by some of the band's most original material ever. The problem is: everybody hates on the darn thing because it's rumoured to be the album that made Bill Berry have an aneurism and say, "Hey dudes, I'm a farmer now." But, as a final sendoff for the band's original lineup, they basically made an update of Document or Green. It rocks a little, it folks a little, but mostly, it entertains a lot. Go ahead and deny it, like everybody else in the world. Call it too long, call it boring or whathaveyou. I call it a creative rebirth. The more rockin' Monster sound hasn't gone away, but with the sonic chances they took on that album, they must have picked up a new flair for studio knob-twiddling because the dynamics and layers achieved on this album sound like no other R.E.M. album before it. Honestly, this is the first R.E.M. album that doesn't sound like every song was just recorded live in the studio — irony supreme, as it was notoriously recorded in pieces amongst makeshift studios and soundchecks during the Monster tour. They've finally gotten a handle on how to properly overproduce an album. It's a weird one, too. I mean, seriously, the single was 'E-Bow the Letter.' Good song, sure. But that's one weird thing to try and get into the top 40 (even though, wow at the balls it took to release that as an a-side; the hook is "Aluminum tastes like fear" ferrchrissakes!). Highlight: 'Leave.' Only the longest and best song they ever did. Yeah, it's that good. (4.5 stars)

i was drinking heavily at the time, so that's why it's so obnoxiously written. sorry.

i'll ply the tar out of your feathers
i'll pluck the thorns out of your feet

it's maybe the ideal "made on the road" record, it's full of hills and valleys and weird roadside attractions, seems to reflect the landscape they were traversing

LEEEEAVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVE
LEEEEAVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVE

otm. And the landscape and attractions merge with the films in Stipe's head since childhood, hence the not-quite-there-ness of "How the West Was Done..." and "Departure" and "Bittersweet Me."

xpost

Thanks guys, I have listened to more R.E.M. in the last week than in the preceding decade

move across, candyloss
i move like a tank

*candyfloss
blue in the face from navel gaze
you set yourself on fire

Holy shit it's a Wednesday morning and I'm on my way to work and "Electrolite" came on and now I'm crying.

> am i a bad person if i say this is my favorite r.e.m. album?

Absolutely not.

from what I remember this is the era when the Brits took to R.E.M. hard, embracing this and Up.

Happened a bit earlier, Out of Time was everywhere the summer of 91 and AFTP was huge, 7x platinum. Didn’t tour them of course so the Monster tour was a big deal. I went to get tickets for the Glasgow show and the queue snaked all around the inside of the SECC and out. In end didn’t matter as show was cancelled following Bill Berry’s aneurism.

One reason why I get down on post-Bill REM is that I wasn’t done with the New Adventures formula; the monochrome artwork and the sense that this was a band who were aware they’d been around a while but were just going to keep on doing what they do best, which is what Hi-Fi sounds like.

Not that I was hoping for endless xeroxed variations on this exactly but after this album you hear them trying things out, with different influences becoming much more explicit; obviously they felt they had to do this and some of this was a success but I suppose i selfishly felt that New Adventures was a platform for REM to move forward...obviously this went out the window after Bill left

It’s still their most mature album; one can only wonder what might have come as a 4 piece

yeah agreed, there's a world where this is the base for four more amazing albums that don't sound the same but have this in their DNA, the way murmur is for the 80s stuff

I’m a terrible musician but “Be Mine” is about the only song I’ve been able to play half-competently on guitar. Love it and the album so much.

Tasty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWlINyu1COw

It already sounds like an album full of outtakes to me; can only imagine what the bonus disc is like…

this album features stipe's best writing, imo

some of my favorite lyrics ever

"Bittersweet Me" and "New Test Leper" are next-level Stipe, yes.

Surprised to hear that pov; I think both are very clumsy songwriting (in different ways).

I don’t really remember the lyrics but “new test leper” musically is great, it reminds me of “try not to breathe”.

This album eventually grew on me - love it quite a bit now and it may be the last one that I enjoy without qualification. (I kind of like Up too, and only select tracks on everything after that.)

it was the first “new release by a band I like” I bought so I listened to it a lot out of perceived duty. it did take more than a few listens to open up for me, yeah. So long!

^Same here. I was 10 years old and my mom was cool enough to buy it for me at Blockbuster Music the day it came out. I must have listened to it hundreds of times, but a lot of it went over my head at the time. I tried transcribing the lyrics to "E-Bow the Letter", definitely misheard a lot of it (I remember thinking "fields of poppies, little pearls" was "I feel to pop his little pearls" lol)

I feel to pop his little pearls

i.e. how Stipe would've written the lyric in the Murmur era.

I love this album.

until today i thought that line was "she was the poppiest little pearl"

This record consolidated their stylistic journey from Document to Monster, and I prefer it to any of the records from that era.
Though it's long, and there are maybe five songs on here that are "just OK", I've never been inspired to sequence a cut-down version of this. There's an ease and casualness that completely got lost after Berry left, whereupon it sounded like every chord change and sound choice had been painfully negotiated and second-guessed.
I love the Mills/Stipe interplay on the chorus of "Binky the Doormat", it's a revelation when they finally sing together at the end of the song.

Mike Mills b-vox was always one of their best secret weapons.

feel wrung-out from writing about this record but it is so fucking great

Well *that* sent me straight to p4k but I suppose it’ll be the Sunday review?

not sunday, but you'll have to wait a bit

“electrolite” sounds incredible on the remaster!

okay y'all got me to order the vinyl :)

About 70% of this album is great, the other part (the part that sounds like leftovers from Monster), is horrible garbage. I do wish they had sequenced the album in such a way that all those shit tracks were isolated to 1 side of the vinyl, but oh well.

Monster sounding shit:
- Wake Up Bomb
- Undertow
- Departure
** not quite as shit but still want to skip **
- Bittersweet Me
- Low Desert

oh come on

the supposedly monster-y material on this record has always failed to sound much like anything on monster imo, they're mostly just hypercharged r.e.m. jams. "departure" and "undertow" feel almost document-y to me?

and "bittersweet me"... maybe the best rock song they ever made

those songs all rule, good god! Wake-Up Bomb maybe the closest to sounding forced or obligatory but still manages to rule.

i don't think the album works without these tracks tbh --- too consistently shaded. to my ears, the rockier tracks add a lot of texture and lift, while still belonging somehow to the same universe. much moreso than the way, for example, "Ignoreland" drops into the Automatic tracklist.

I absolutely despise distorted guitars. Bittersweet Me would have been more tolerable to me without that one layer of distorted guitar. Sounds like a few different guitar parts layered, but the super distorted layer is just off-putting to my ears. Anyway, I like moments in Bittersweet Me, but it's not a song i'd ever want to play. It's definitely the best of the shit tracks I mentioned.

r.e.m. is a rock band

Those tracks improve on the Monster template, mostly by being faster("Low Desert" is nothing special, but listenable in context). The record is really a rethinking of the styles they tried from 87 to 94.

this is all well and good, but "leave" is still the high water mark. in an alternate timeline it's their "like a rolling stone."

my dumb take on this era is that it's the most fully indulgent of michael's tics. i'd forgotten how influential they were on me as a queer teenager!

xp ":leave" was always one of my favorites

"e-bow the letter" sounded kind of unpleasant and indulgent to me then. i like it better now but i still don't get what everyone loves about it. could be that i've never been into patti smith.

his cutest era!

"e-bow" is like no other song ever made

speaking of e-bow, every e-bow part buck plays on this record is the most gorgeous part of the record

"Leave" was my fav for a long time but now it feels like a little too much to me. Overwrought or something. Still hits hard but I need to be in the right space for it

just to keep bringing more songs into the discussion, I love the piano in "So Fast, So Numb," especially that little fill that comes after the chorus.

the range of guitar noise on this album impresses me: a fusion of OOT and Monster's sounds.

the videos from this record have aged well but dare i call them a smidge pretentious itt? lol

i like that they tapped jem cohen for "how the west was won" and "e-bow," his style of blurry nighttime photography of public places that are uncannily empty etc. nails exactly what those songs feel like

the "bittersweet me" video, on the other hand, is hilarious

“electrolite” sounds incredible on the remaster!

― j.o.h.n. in evanston (john. a resident of chicago.), Tuesday, November 2, 2021 7:04 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

man you are not kidding

I love the use of space in "Bittersweet Me." Stipe gets room to preen and make demands.

i like that they tapped jem cohen for "how the west was won" and "e-bow," his style of blurry nighttime photography of public places that are uncannily empty etc. nails exactly what those songs feel like

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, November 3, 2021 3:14 PM (thirty-five seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

this was like such a huge vibe for me in my troubled teens and early twenties. i don't think i realized it probably came from these videos until now!

"bittersweet me" does have a sense of humor about it all, true.

xp "electrolite" was always my favorite song on this. i don't think i've ever seen this video though - wow, jeez, it's great. how many videos did they make for this haha.

i think i've had 4 or 5 different favorite songs on this tbh.

now deciding which physical media package to buy. i would love to crank the cd of this in the car but i'm not likely to have a car with a cd player for that much longer.

"electrolite" is my favorite "we couldn't settle on one idea for this music video so we went with all 4-5 treatments we came up with" music video

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

rem is unquestionably better than u2 in all respects imo

but U2 is one of those bands that sucked so hard, so incredibly bad, sucking so badly, from the mid-90s on that it's just like fuck you U2, i don't even care that you used to be good, because you suck so badly now, and the fact that you keep going and making money, i mean come on, fuck you, fuck you bono, fuck you edge, fuck you larry mullen, fuck you other guy, you're all rich, fuck you

really there's no end for the hatred for U2 because they're so well off and they suck so badly

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.

― brotherlovesdub, Wednesday, November 3, 2021 2:17 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

severe counterpoint: peter buck's distorted guitar tone 94'-'96 is one of the greatest tones of all time

u2 aren't worth loathing to that degree until you get to the 00s

I dwell on Stipe's "I'm an equal opportunity lech" line shared during the Monster promo cycle and how it retrospectively changed R.E.M.'s catalog and my life.

Out of Time remains a special time. Imagine your mainstream blockbuster the album with that second side and "Low" and "Near Wild Heaven" besides.

i encountered 'where the streets have no name' somewhat recently, and what used to sound profound about it was so transparently hollow now... did bono turn into something that spoiled their whole catalog, or was it always there and everyone just bought the chintziness at the time because they needed it?

Pet Shop Boys as usual opened up the song's vistas by queering it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt2j79pca7c

haha i didn't know about that

U2 is a hell of a live band

I can't really think of a band that went mainstream on their own terms in a more real way than REM

it's pretty simple to me, U2 (or at least bono) just believed their own hype to the point that it all fell apart. where the streets have no name is a killer song if i step back and think about it against any objective criteria, but i can't have an emotional relationship with it or anything else U2 has done.

r.e.m. maintained just enough healthy skepticism to dodge this effect, at least for me.

I can't really think of a band that went mainstream on their own terms in a more real way than REM

I think 10,000 Maniacs were there with them, though obviously didn’t get as huge.

The funny thing is that R.E.M. were playing Spring Break to drunk college kids from the beginning, they always wanted to be huge, they just dragged the world a few notches over to align w/them for a little while.

We are plainly in the minority.

As far as obnoxious prats go, Bono's a better frontman than most. R.E.M. said at the time they and U2 were the Biggest Bands in the World that while they had mad respect for U2 they had no interest in that kind of pressure and scrutiny; Peter Buck also said they'd rather U2 did this rather than Bon Jovi.

(xpost)

if you listen to early U2 and then early REM, Bono's honking, foghorn vocals are almost the antithesis of Stipe's mumbly, indecipherable vocals. I guess they were both very earnest in a kind of uncool way, even when they both did the ironic glam-rockstar thing in the mid-90s they both managed to be ironic in a sort of earnest way (though REM did it much better imo)

idk achtung baby/zooropa is absolutely u2's peak & the least obnoxious & most compelling bono ever was, while monster was a relative low for rem & characteristically stipe's version of the semi-ironic glam thing is much weirder and more subdued, but it's not really him at his best

ehhh disagree

this is doubling back but i actually think what works about the Monster and NAIHF "rock" songs is that most of them are not actually "rock" songs and maybe not even trying to be. yeah they have loud guitars, sometimes with a wall of tremolo effect and stuff... but they're almost being used more like the strings on Automatic, for a blanket of atmosphere. this is a band whose origins were playing frantic sweaty college art kid dance parties; they definitely know how to play energetic, propulsive, nimble rock music. but i really think they weren't interested in that by the 90s. instead they were making loud, electric chamber music.

obviously there's all the talk of putting down the mandolins and breaking back out the guitars and all, but i still think that shift is there. and it's maybe why the gritty rock textures on NAIHF feel of a piece with the rest of the record, for me. or maybe Buck (and Berry?) really were trying to rock, but had gotten bored of their punk and new wave records, and wanted to be in an imaginary 70s glam arena band, idk.

i like achtung and zooropa and especially passengers but bono’s “baby’s first irony” act is the worst thing about them

i know wishing u2 had a less godawful lyricist is missing the point of u2 yet

dc otm

Bono's lyrics on AB and Zooropa are best-ever, though. He never tried again.

but they're almost being used more like the strings on Automatic

I think Star Me Kitten is the song on Automatic that sounds most like a pointer towards Monster despite being one of the least rocking things on the album, with the gauzy wall of sound and the sexual frankness

I definitely feel like the reason Monster works so well is the production/sound of the thing, it's not the same at all as New Adventures In Hi-Fi 'live in the studio'/recorded at soundchecks thing - Monster reminds me of a bit in the Simon Reynolds Glam Rock book where he talks about glam sounding ragged and rough-hewn but not in a rootsy, naturalistic way, in an artificial plastic way Live versions of Monster songs usually sound a little underwhelming to me, the same with those remixes on the re-release that made them sound more like trad REM songs. I feel the same way about The Wake-Up Bomb, it could have sounded great on Monster but the New Adventures version kind of falls flat

Bono's lyrics on AB and Zooropa are best-ever, though. He never tried again.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, November 4, 2021 6:35 AM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

they're his best. grading on a curve

I think Mumur's arrangements & orchestration of the instruments (that may be the same thing) are what makes it timeless. Reckoning and Fables are both a little more straightforward "rock band" albums where Murmur reminds me of the first two Gang of Four records, where the instruments and vocals are kind of all going off in different directions sometimes while still maintaining cohesion.

Think about the first minute or so of Pilgramage (or heck the last minute or so) there's nothing even close to that on the next two

That's a sharp way of putting the Go4 influence in context. Also: bass lines! The only other contemporaneous Amerindie band with comparable ones is The Minutemen.

Monster makes me imagine introverted teenage Michael Stipe in the 70s living out his fantasies and desires through these sexually ambiguous glam rock records, and this is how they bridge the gap between mumbly early REM and the fact that they were now literally the biggest band in the world, pretending to be a rock star while also being a literal rock star - I love the way it's exhibitionist and introverted at the same time, it reminds me of Morrissey with the focus on the idolizer imagining themselves as the idol or maybe becoming the idol.

"Finest Worksong" is the height of Go4 worship, so great

Also the song title is very Minutemen

ah yes bass lines. Mike Mills is so underrated in that band. as is Bill

the three four descending bass notes right before Stipe starts singing Worksong are *so Mike Watt*

The feedback at the start of the third verse of New Test Leper is my shit.

soref post upthread (re: Monster) very interesting & OTM

yeah great post soref! i like The Wake-Up Bomb as-is, but would definitely be interested in a more artifical, shiny, Monster-type version of it. lyrically it feels VERY appropriate for that album as well.

https://i.imgur.com/3kgJcTN.png

still wish Lady Gaga had gone with my "climb atop David Howell Evans's shoulders shrieking 'I'm on The Edge!'" music video treatment

I think I also just find something off-putting about Wake-Up Bomb's positioning on the album as the second track after How The West Was Won, although they do something similar with the first two tracks on Up - slow, low key, atypical opening song with Airportman, then swaggering suggestive rock song with Lotus. I think Lotus was the last time they did anything in the same style as Monster? I'm not that familiar with the last two albums so maybe I'm forgetting something on one of them.

and think it really works with those two tracks on Up, so idk why it doesn't quite come off for me on New Adventures

zach i'm stealing that for the memes thread.

up fucking rules.

hmm

just got the vinyl, playing it now

WOW, they did such an amazing job on this, hats off to Kevin Gray who remastered and cut the vinyl

modern vinyl can be such a crapshoot, but I tell ya what, when they hit it out of the park nowadays it's as good as vinyl has ever sounded. this sounds huge and i'm noticing little things in the mix i never heard. dead quiet, no bullshit black vinyl, high quality plastic sleeves, A+

especially noticeable during the quieter stuff, new test leper really blew me away

anyway if you've been thinking about the vinyl i would definitely pull the trigger on this. on the bad and hated hoffman boards, praise for the new pressing/master seems almost universal which is rare

thanks for the heads up! buying now

Listened to this quite a bit during my final year of high school in 1997. Returning to it today, it's definitely patchy, but that said, Electrolite could be one of their best songs. I'd completely forgotten about it.

wow, did not realize the original had become one of those $200 records for some reason. tempted to shine mine up, sell it off, and grab the new one, but it's not really how i relate to my stuff.

I fucking love this record.

ty for the nudge ums, i hedged and bought the package with both the vinyl and cds

aluminum, it tastes like fear

idk why i thought this album had a bad reputation (must have missed ivy's p4k review lol), but i listened for the first time ever today and it might be my favorite post-reckoning r.e.m. album? combines the best aspects of automatic and monster with fewer clunkers and higher highs

like "undertow" in particular sounds to me like they're subconsciously saying, "sorry about monster we have actually figured out how to use feedback now"

it's always been one of my favorites, i think it has a pretty strong cult following

It got great reviews on first release, did better business in the UK, and has never gone away.

my parents had out of time, automatic, and monster on cd, but not this one. maybe that's what tricked me

Wake Up Bomb and Undertow feel like they've fully realised their straight-up glam side whereas Monster is this weird, slightly stunted mix of things (not a criticism).

Hi-Fi was the first R.E.M. CD my mum didn't have so I get believing that this one was where things fell apart. I only knew about it when I was little through my uncle's CDs (ditto the next two).

yeah this always had a positive reputation but it was definitely the first R.E.M. album in awhile that didn't make any radio impact iirc. It didn't have big singles, it's entirely stellar deep cuts. Classic album.

R.E.M. from this point on did benefit from the way the UK singles chart's infrastructure changing though - lengthier gaps between radio and physical and crucially having built a dedicated enough fanbase helping contribute to the new climate of first week peaks and front-loaded sales (and the marketing and managing that pushed this change). Hence, E-Bow being their highest charter to date, despite probably having not been played on the radio since (and, if they could help it, probably not too much at the time either).

I've always wanted to call a song "E-Bola, The Virus" but never got around to it

I enjoy Monster now, but, when E-Bow came out as the first single, it was such as relief to have "the old REM" back. And "Electrolite" is so pretty.

These days I think New Adventures is very listenable but is also kind of... their first boring record? Almost everything sounds like another, older, better song.

I always thought "Low Desert" was an intentional Stone Roses' Second Coming pastiche -- the swampy riffing and the "hey heys".

Every good band releases one of these variety packs a couple times in their careers: a summa of what they do best (think Tattoo You, Lil Wayne's Funeral, any number of Yo La Tengo albums).

I adore this album. Well, except for “wake up bomb” and “bittersweet me”.

Do I think The Cure’s Wish might be one of these?

* I think, that should’ve said.

I was thinking the same thing ha. That's the first album with no genuine new territory covered (for all that there are shoegaze guitars and beefy dance-via-baggy rhythms on some songs). Rather it's a this-is-us-and-we're-top-of-the-mountain record.

it's a record of synthesis, not evolution. the fact that it was all recorded while on the road, and they were playing selections from all over their catalog, probably contributed to that (and also gave them an idea of the kinds of experiments that worked and did not)

Do I think The Cure’s Wish might be one of these?

― piscesx,

Why I love it best.

Adore NAIHF, loathe Wish

despite a half decade of the most intense Cure fandom preceding it