The road, its lure. Its dreamy images of longing, escape, running away and running toward, physical locations and ourselves. The groaning American highway and its place in literature and music, the open haunting vistas of the West.
The road finds a dominant place in R.E.M.’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, a staggering achievement that would mark R.E.M. at both its arena rock and creative peak, and also signal an end of sorts (drummer Bill Berry left the group after the recording of the album) for a quartet that had assembled two decades earlier.
It's no surprise that New Adventures was largely written on the road, during a tour in support of Monster, arguably R.E.M.’s deepest exploration into straight-up rock and roll. Many songs found on New Adventures were worked out and even recorded during live sound checks for the Monster tour. The result is a loose and experimental tour de force by a band firing on all of its cylinders. There's a feeling of floaty exuberance, wistful sadness, and dark yearning on many of its tracks, expressions that only the manically evocative voice of Michael Stipe can cohesively illustrate.
New Adventures in Hi-Fi is part of a reissue series put out by Warner and includes the original CD release in addition to a DVD-A version that contains a 5.1 Surround album mix, photos, and a brief documentary/promo film put together during New Adventure’s recording in 1996.
The album kicks off with "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us," but it's almost a shame that REM couldn't reclaim the magically odd single "Drive," which opens the somewhat overrated Automatic for the People. Nonetheless, How the West Was Won is stark, strange, dissonant. Stipe's vocals are clear, as is the production, a marked change from the fuzzed-up operation that was Monster. There's a loose but tight immediacy to the performance that very closely resembles the feel of a great band putting its claws into you during a live show. There’s a road feeling, too, of setting out into the West and searching for something: redemption, meaning, the end of all things.
Article comments
1 - Tim Jarrett
Nice. This has always been one of my favorites of the Warner Bros. era R.E.M. albums.
2 - Eric Berlin
Thanks Tim. Just last night, as I was finishing off this piece, I realized that New Adventures is my favorite late-era or Warner-ear R.E.M. album. The early favorite is much harder, but probably between Murmur and Life's Rich Pageant.