Product Description

In the wake of the raging, guitar-fueled MONSTER, R.E.M. has made an album dominated by disconsolate ballads and acoustic instrumentation. NEW ADVENTURES has a stately, elegiac feel. It's punctuated by a few all-out rockers, but the overall mood is dusky and introspective. Michael Stipe's stream-of-consciousness imagery has developed into an incisive, poetic style of great power and resonance, from the religious overtones of "Undertow" (which reveals a Can influence) to the breathless travelogue of "Departure".
The opener, "How the West Was Won And Where It Got Us", sets a dark tone, with an eerie organ backdrop and a mournful piano providing a staccato riff. Punk goddess Patti Smith guests on "E-Bow the Letter", a wordy ramble that finds Stipe questioning, and ultimately denigrating, "this fame thing". A similar theme is explored on "The Wake-Up Bomb", a MONSTERish raveup that attacks celebrity star trips.
NEW ADVENTURES is loaded with musical surprises, including a zippy synthesizer that sparks "Leave", a campy instrumental called "Zither" and various discordant touches throughout. Lyrically and musically, R.E.M. stands its ground throughout, remaining as fresh and innovative as ever.

Track Listing

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32059 in Music
• Released on: 1996-09-09
• Number of discs: 1

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

Woefully Overrated
Having recently re-visited REM's entire back catalogue - I have to say that i reckon this album is due a re-think in terms of rating!!
It groans under the pedestrian weight of its own pretentiousness - and songs such as E-Bow the Letter are sooooo mind numbing I can't believe its the same band that could produce such beauty as Swan Swan H and such positivity as I Believe!!
Its only redeeming feature however IS Electrolite. Beautiful. Wonderful.
I can hear you all now screaming "What about Around The Sun!! Or Up?!?! Or Reveal (another overrated one)"... But they all have something that this doesn't - live.. they translate - ESPECIALLY Around The Sun... this one is for bargain bins and evenings with your friend who smoke pipes and wants to discuss symbolism and Styp-ean meaning.......

REM's White Album?
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...
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.