(#554: 21 September 1996, 1 week)
Track listing: How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us/The Wake-Up Bomb/New Test Leper/Undertow/E-Bow The Letter/Leave/Departure/Bittersweet Me/Be Mine/Binky The Doormat/Zither/So Fast, So Numb/Low Desert/Electrolite
If Monster represented the beginning of a new journey for R.E.M., then New Adventures In Hi-Fi marks that journey’s consolidation, with improvements. The album’s songs (along with others which didn’t make the final cut) were written and recorded while the band were on the road touring Monster, mostly at live soundchecks around the United States – Charleston, Boston, Auburn Hills, Memphis, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Orlando and at home in Atlanta – with four other songs recorded in a rather lo-fi local studio (Bad Animals in Seattle).
Inevitably, much of New Adventures concerns travel and movement – such song titles as “Leave,” “Departure” and “Low Desert” adequately tell the story in themselves – but the record (or records; on one format it came as a double LP) also documents in particular the increasing frustration of Michael Stipe at the world and people around him, and maybe even with himself (“Bittersweet Me”). Certainly Stipe has rarely been more punchily direct as a lyricist than he is on New Adventures, as witness the smiling melancholia of “How The West Was Won…” or the snarl at the sponsored superficiality of chat shows (“New Test Leper”).
Equally, the band are now far more at home with the rock direction signalled by Monster; songs such as “Undertow” and “Binky The Doormat” convey much more musical power and confidence, and the steady build-up of “Be Mine” from fuzzy folk meditation to something approaching An Anthem is handled in an absolutely masterly fashion, as heralded by Bill Berry’s drums, which awaken at 3:50 and escort the song into a wholly larger, but completely logical, arena.
It is perhaps a miracle that Berry was on the record at all; he had collapsed on stage in Lausanne, Switzerland, with a ruptured brain aneurysm in March 1995, and although he recovered sufficiently to rejoin the band and help them complete New Adventures, things were, for him, decidedly not the same. So it is rather poignant that the record is introduced by his drums alone, laying out the ground for the echoey piano and dub-like disorientation of “How The West Was Won…”; some commentators at the time referred to a trip hop influence, but the song actually sounds like one of those secretions of cloistered dread one might encounter on later albums by the Clash (“Shepherds Delight,” “Death Is A Star”).
On “How The West Was Won…” Stipe muses about the induced dream of the unending frontier, and how it finally came to not very much at all – his quaking “ah”s at the end of each “and where it got us” may represent either lamentation or irony. “I point my nose to the Northern Star/And watch the decline from a hazy distance” he observes, as well as offering characteristic Stipeisms which don’t really make sense yet fit the song’s central emotion exactly (“I cross it, bless it, alkaline,” which corresponds precisely with Mike Mills’ distended, Robert Wyatt-doing-Cecil Taylor-at-16 rpm piano solo).
The song lulls the unwary listener into imagining an album of reasonably quiet contemplations. How delightfully shocking, then, to be shaken awake by Stipe’s chuckling, in-our-faces “I LOOK GOOD IN A GLASS PACK!” “The Wake-Up Bomb” is sleazy glam-rock which proves quite forcibly that Suede still had a bit of a way to go, and also efficaciously self-aware glam-rock which subsists on the knowledge that this imposed fable of music’s past could act as a metaphor for the neutron bomb, leaving structures intact but wiping out actual people.
“The Wake-Up Bomb” is just one of the best pastiches of glam-rock, and specifically British glam-rock of the period which was already, in 1996, approaching a quarter of a century ago, that I’ve heard, with its sneeringly loving references to 1973, Queen, T Rex moves and even the New Seekers (“I had to teach the world to sing by the age of twenty-one”), not to mention Stipe’s unexpected echoes of the vocal idiosyncrasies of Steve Harley (“Carry my dead bored, ‘been there, done that’ any-THIIIIIING”). By song’s climax he has had more than enough, now referring to “you lunch meat, pond scum” and magnifying his Harleyisms (the repeated coda of “Yeah, I'd rather be anywhere doing any-THIIIIIING!!!!”). The punctum element here is unquestionably Bill Berry’s tambourine from verse two onward.
“New Test Leper” (I think it’s meant to be shorthand for the New Testament) is more recognisably in the regular R.E.M. line of approach – though note Mills’ very free-ranging bass-playing throughout, and also Peter Buck’s Robin Guthrie-esque fuzz lead in the choruses, while Stipe ponders on how raw a deal Jesus would have had on daytime talk shows, culminating in an Elephant Man reference (“I am not an animal”) – those who do not fit into a securely monetised paradigm of international currency-reliant humanity (“all organised and blank”) are pitifully and often painfully excised from it. “Undertow” is rock dynamism which makes nineties U2, let alone Monster, seem relatively jejeune; the important element here is Mike Mills, whose voice immediately responds to Stipe’s pained “I’m drowning me!” as if to save him.
“E-Bow The Letter” was the audience-testing lead single from the album – much as “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?,” “Drive” and, arguably, “Losing My Religion” had been on its receding predecessors – but undaunted British record buyers placed it at number four in their singles chart, making it statistically the band’s biggest hit single up to that point. Its surface of jokey, semi-rapped reminiscences conceals a canyon of mourning – it is said that the song’s lyrics derived from a letter Stipe wrote to River Phoenix, hence the song itself can reasonably be viewed as an elegy, as underlined by the hovering background ghost of Patti Smith, alternately reassuring (“I’ll take you over there”) and menacing (“I’ll take you over”). The song incorporates some of Stipe’s saddest and most resigned words (“Will you live to eighty-three? Will you ever welcome me?,” “My loss, and here we go again”). But the two voices intermingle at the song’s modest climax, and Smith finally guides the wretched soul away from Hell (“There, there…There, baby”).
“Leave” is for me the album’s highlight. It begins with a sourly beautiful passage for orchestra, resolving, as it must, in a Picardy third, as though indicating that this represents the “old” R.E.M. Indeed the band made a recording of the whole song in this style, but in the album’s emotional context the passage signifies a goodbye to…something.
Headphone listeners should especially be warned; there follows a rude awakening. A siren starts blaring and refuses to relent – who let the Bomb Squad into the studio (Answers: nobody, because the song was recorded at a soundcheck at the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta, while the siren effect was provided by Scott McCaughey relentlessly moving the octave switch of his Arp Odyssey up and down)? “Leave” is one of R.E.M.’s most raging rock grinds, at the very least on a par with “Turn You Inside Out” from Green. It does not let up as Stipe allows his frustration to foment and explode. This wall of pressurises sound persists for over seven-and-a-quarter minutes, including a priceless moment when the song appears to end, but oh no, the siren starts up again. And if the repeated chants of “leave it all behind” don’t spell it out to you – the band have clocked and listened to…Ride! Flipping heck.
“Departure” is jocular but powerful travelogue rock, a bit like Stereolab remixing “Get Off Of My Cloud,” Stipe’s rapid-fire observations countered by undulating rhythmic traction (think particularly of Mills’ fuzz bass and Farfisa organ). “Bittersweet Me” does its best to resemble old-school R.E.M., but Stipe’s anger cannot quite be contained as securely as before; if anything, he ventures into John Lydon vocalese at many points in the song (“How easy you think of all of this as bittersweet me!”). Yet the song also includes some of his severest and most poetic jibes – the younger Morrissey would have been proud to pen “Oh, my peer, your veneer/Is wearing thin and cracking.”
As for “Be Mine,” Stipe manipulates the corniest elements of Valentine’s Day cards and suchlike in an encyclopaedic attempt to explain how strong his love is and what he would do for, and occasionally despite, it; one is never quite convinced that he is not an obsessive rather than a would-be lover or saviour. Yet the song’s architecture builds up beautifully, leaving us with an arm-waving ocean of guitar riffs and chord changes which would not have disgraced prime Oasis. This is tremendous rock music.
“Binky The Doormat” is one of the album’s most powerful and ominous rockers. Here Stipe retreats to his semi-abstract globe of imagined imagery, but none of it conceals a profound absence of self-esteem. Binky himself is an antagonist in the nice-try-but-shoddily-realised 1991 black comedy horror drama Shakes The Clown whose self-pity does not obscure the fact that he is a murderer and near-rapist. Stipe confines his concerns to the self-pity, and that is manifestly quite enough. Following the brief instrumental interlude “Zither” – recorded in a dressing room, no less - which sounds like an early draft of “Everybody Hurts,” we return to rock with “So Fast, So Numb,” which revisits the River Phoenix subtext a lot more furiously than “E-Bow The Letter,” even implying that he and Stipe might have been more than just friends (“I’ve been around, I’ve been your lover”) while damning Phoenix’s seemingly self-willed descent (“You love it, you hate it/You want to recreate it”). Meanwhile, the relatively straightahead rock of “Low Desert” finds Stipe terminally exhausted with The Road (“There's a radio tower, it's egging you on/Back to the place where you never belonged/Where the people thrive on their own contempt”).
That leaves “Electrolite,” the album’s most obviously “R.E.M.” song – musically it’s like an angular variation on “Nightswimming” (Mike Mills was again responsible for the central piano motif) - and one of the best and most acrid love songs to Los Angeles, and for the matter the twentieth century, that I know. Stipe lived in Santa Monica for two years in the nineties and was inclined to stand on Mulholland Drive – far enough not to smell the city, but close and wide enough to see its audacious ambition. Sometime around June 2006 Stipe wrote an essay about Los Angeles, some of which was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, including the following passage:
"And nowhere seemed more perfect than the city that came into its own throughout the 20th century, but always looking forward and driven by ideas of a greater future, at whatever cost.
Los Angeles.”
Underscoring that cost was, principally, the San Andreas Fault, and “Electrolite” was directly inspired by the Northridge earthquake of 17 January 1994, the worst the city had experienced since 1971, in which Stipe’s Santa Monica home was severely damaged (although technically the eruption was caused by the previously-undetected Pico Thrust Fault).
Later in the same essay, Stipe wrote:
"I name check three of the great legends of that single industry 'town,' as it likes to refer to itself. In order: James Dean, Steve McQueen, Martin Sheen [as he looks down on Hollywood, although in the song itself the actors are cited in reverse order]. All iconic, all representing different aspects of masculinity—a key feature of 20th century ideology. It is the push me-pull you of a culture drawing on mid-century ideas of society, butt up against and in a great tug-of-war with modernism/rebirth/epiphany/futurism, wiping out all that that came before to be replaced by something 'better,' more civilized, more tolerant, fair, open, and so on ... [see 'reagan,' 'soylent green,' 'bladerunner,' current gubernatorial debates]”
The song’s title comes from Stipe’s impression of seeing Los Angeles from the air while flying towards the city; the notion of a starlike phosphorescence. The performance itself is, I would say, resonant, full of signifiers of love, most notably Nathan December's patient guiro, reminding us of how Los Angeles came into being and also of the subtle percussive undertow which enhanced so many of the sunny, optimistic songs materialising on the radio from around the time Stipe was born (and of course I also think of its startling use in the Beach Boys' "Cabinessence").
But the song is also, as I intimated above, a song of farewell to the twentieth century, bearing not much in the way of hope for a twenty-first. In “Electrolite” Stipe might be bidding farewell to “the future” or that century’s idea of it; hence “20th century, go to sleep/Really deep/We won’t blink.” “I’m not scared” Stipe asserts as the song and record end. A slight theatrical pause, and finally: “I’m out of here.” As, for quite a lot of people, were R.E.M. But for them, the journey, though necessarily diverted, was nowhere near completion.
