Where It Got Them: R.E.M.’s ‘New Adventures in Hi-Fi’ Turns 30

R.E.M.’s 10th album, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, was their last great one and their last album with Bill Berry, which may not be unrelated events. 

It was the product of what was alleged to be the most expensive record contract in history at the time, to the tune of $80M, and it was also their first major-label album without any hits. Depending on how you look at Monster — the multiplatinum launchpad of an extraordinarily successful extended tour or the most returned/resold album of the CD era — you might even say it was R.E.M.’s first flop, despite extraordinary critical acclaim (near-perfect ratings from both Rolling Stone and a very fledgling Pitchfork in 1996), a sterling reputation among fans, and apparently seven million units sold worldwide.

The band themselves consider it to be their apotheosis, and Berry suffered an aneurysm on the Monster tour where it was largely laid down at soundchecks, and both of those points make good reasons for him to have retired subsequently. At 65 minutes, it’s also R.E.M.’s longest album, so there’s enough of it to be all these things.

It’s not hard to see why the band or their devoted would flirt with the idea that New Adventures in Hi-Fi is their best album. For one thing, it starts with “How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us,” R.E.M.’s most downright elegant song. From the opening moments of its spare percussion leading into Michael Stipe’s sexy, crawling, syllable-by-syllable enunciation (a few years before it became an irritating tic on the band’s nadir Reveal and moments of self-parody like “She Just Wants to Be”) to the bluesiest, most contrapuntal guitar Peter Buck ever laid down and distant bleating synth sustains all tied together by Mike Mills’ gorgeously staccato, unforgettable piano line. Not only is it one of their greatest album openers but it should be in the conversation of greatest album openers by anyone.

The way such a stark, black-and-white photograph of a song matches the austere album artwork and leads into the glam-packed “The Wake-Up Bomb” (“practice my T-Rex moves and make the scene”) is something to behold, too. This is an album aware of its size, trying to encompass the languidity of Automatic for the People and trash-rock of Monster in its first two songs, with Stipe even murmuring Byrne-like on the latter: “I had to write the great American novel.” Only the Automatic-esque waltz “New Test Leper” spoils this gigantesse over the first six songs, which continue through the oceanic “Undertow” with its huge, chiming choruses (which go, in typically self-effacing Stipe fashion: “I’m drowning me”), the funereal sweep of the starstruck Patti Smith duet “E-Bow the Letter,” and the absolutely cinematic “Leave,” the longest R.E.M. tune at seven-plus minutes, which finally begins with a jarring, unceasing car alarm after just one.

 

VIDEO: R.E.M. feat. Patti Smith “E-Bow The Letter”

Most of the choices for singles on this album don’t make any sense; had Warner Bros. gone with “Leave,” and given it a big-budget video with perhaps some kind of neo-noir storyline, it would be remembered as an event single to compete in historical space with “Sicko Mode” or “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version)” or “Black or White.” Well, maybe not — all those songs went to number one and cemented their auteur’s too-big-to-fail moment, whereas R.E.M. was following up a notorious clogger of used bins. But their imperial phase would have gone out with a bang, and hey, Warners put up $80M at least believing it was the auteur’s too-big-to-fail moment. Except for Michael Jackson, event singles didn’t really exist yet in 1996, so I don’t know why “E-Bow the Letter” was picked as the first single instead. Fans love it, the band was beside themselves to work with Patti Smith, and their label clearly believed in them. But they were still sending a five-and-a-half minute dirge to radio with a nonsensical title named after an obscure guitar effect device, and it did as well commercially as you could imagine if not slightly better. It was followed by “Bittersweet Me” and “Electrolite,” a boilerplate rocker and a “Nightswimming” retread, perhaps for those reasons. Good songs, especially the latter, but if there was any chance this album was going to preach to the unconverted, they missed it. And that wonderful album opener was the final single attempt, definitely too slow and subtle for radio. “The Wake-Up Bomb” probably would’ve done just fine considering the options, though “Bittersweet Me” has a subtle disco pulse I did not remember.

 

VIDEO: R.E.M. “Bittersweet Me” 

The problem with the second half of New Adventures in Hi-Fi is the pacing; they already used up all the world-conquering stuff so the record’s hindquarters are spindly and knobby-kneed, or as “Bittersweet Me” actually puts it: “I don’t know what I’m hungry for / I don’t know what I want anymore.” The moderately urgent “Departure” is sequenced perfectly after “Leave,” but after that, the album struggles to match its established sweep. “So Fast, So Numb” and “Electrolite” are good songs without much heft to them, and relegating “Binky the Doormat” and “Zither” to deserving B-side status might have let “Low Desert” be the interesting little Zep-Pearl Jam workout it is, instead of track 13 on a 14-track album that even those of us who love it find a little tiring.

Only the lovely “Be Mine” picks up what the album’s first half puts down and is elephantine enough to fill its beaming light (“I want to be your Christmas tree,” sings Stipe). In short, Hi-Fi was their best attempt to make a U2 album, and like The Joshua Tree or Achtung Baby they also front-loaded the thing and didn’t know when to quit. That doesn’t mean “New Test Leper” or “Bittersweet Me” or “Low Desert” or “So Fast, So Numb” aren’t good songs. But they get samey in a bad way: do you need to hear both “Nightswimming” and “Electrolite” at an R.E.M. show?

So when the band say they were at their peak, I believe they mean they couldn’t get much higher. Berry, always their bullshit detector, wanted out, and Up, their first bullshit album followed close behind. I really dig the sound of Up and wish it went further — the Eno-y “Airportman” and funky “Lotus” later those ambient sounds and drum machines dazzlingly, but most of the actual songs simply weren’t up to “Daysleeper” or “At My Most Beautiful.” Reveal was much worse, another kaleidoscopic bag of sonics they struggled to stretch cohesive songs over, and by 2004’s Around the Sun virtually no one felt anything worthwhile was resulting from these explorations.

 

VIDEO: R.E.M. “Electrolite”

Back-to-basics moves get worse than 2008’s Accelerate, which was half-riveting with welcome punk-jangle on “Horse to Water” and “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” and 2011’s Collapse Into Now ended a streak of okay-to-awkward albums with one of their least coherent. As always, the marble-mouthed approach worked best on a silly rocker, and “Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter” featured Peaches.

Up’s best moments were the band’s last stab at grace, though, and New Adventures in Hi-Fi was the last time an entire R.E.M. album could be accused of having it. I’m still glad its Berry-free successors exist for the cherry-picking, and R.E.M.’s incredible career doesn’t need them cordoned off to secure the band’s legacy.

It’s simply truth-telling to mark New Adventures in Hi-Fi as their last great start-to-finish triumph, in a similar way to the break from the Replacements’ career to Paul Westerberg solo, or Talking Heads to David Byrne. In that sense, the Michael Stipe solo debut we’ve been hearing promised/threatened for decades now has already been here.

The West was already won, and where it got him was pretty far. Like its zoomed-out cover, R.E.M.’s 10th album is sprawling survey of all the terrain they managed to conquer, and it’s a beautiful view.