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 This expanded edition offers a digitally remastered version of the original album as well as a newly produced bonus DVD. There you'll find a 5.1 surround mix that recreates the performances' live ambience with stunning clarity, as well as a previously unreleased, 1996 documentary featuring song clips and insightful interviews with the band members and an album of still photographs.
New Adventures In Hi-Fi for me is one of their strangest records.
strange, in a way that it's hard to get in to the album...
it doesn't quite feel as a whole, but more as several unrelated
songs put together.
most likely it's because some of the tracks were recorded live
during the Monster tour, others in the studio, dressing rooms
or during soundchecks.
the result is a rather fragmented album, with a lot of different
styles. most of the live recorded songs are more the rock type
kinda tunes like on the Monster album, the studio tracks however
are in a more slower mood, kinda like their last couple of albums.
AMG snippet:
"How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us" opens the album with a rolling, vaguely hip-hop
drum beat and slowly adds on jazzily dissonant piano. "E-Bow the Letter" starts out as an
updated version of "Country Feedback," then it turns in on itself with layers of moaning guitar
effects and Patti Smith's haunting backing vocals. Clocking in at seven minutes, "Leave" is the longest
track R.E.M. has yet recorded and it's one of their strangest and best -- an affecting minor-key dirge with
a howling, siren-like feedback loop that runs throughout the entire song. Elsewhere, R.E.M. tread standard
territory: "Electrolite" is a lovely piano-based ballad, "Departure" rocks like a Document outtake, the
chiming opening riff of "Bittersweet Me" sounds like it was written in 1985, "New Test Leper" is gently
winding folk-rock, and "The Wake-Up Bomb" and "Undertow" rock like the Monster outtakes they are.
New Adventures in Hi-Fi may run a little too long -- it clocks in at 62 minutes, by far the longest
album R.E.M. has ever released -- yet in its multifaceted sprawl, they wound up with one of their
best records of the '90s.
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