New Adventures In Hi-Fi
Artist: REM
Released: 1996
I was in Vienna recently and found myself at the Austrian equivalent of a college bar. Sure, the beer was better, it was cleaner, and it stayed open until 5 AM, but the general atmosphere wasn’t far removed from an off-campus watering hole. Like the sorority sisters whose pledge class theme song gets played on the jukebox, the majority of the bar’s patrons were singing along to every song. Of course, with the US’ cultural hegemony being what it is these days, nearly every track was English. Kanye West, Gwen Stefani, Bon Jovi, and, um, Survivor were sung with gusto. What was mildly surprising, however, was the presence of three REM songs, by far the most of any one artist that evening.
REM, while still an immensely popular band in most of the western world, has seen their popularity plummet in the US. The band’s most recent effort, Around the Sun, didn’t even manage to go gold – a sales threshold that they had once been able to reach within the first few weeks of a release. The beginning of the end for REM as a “hits” generating band can be traced to New Adventures In Hi-Fi. Written and recorded while on the road in 1995 and 1996, NAIHF was the follow-up to their most commercially successful album, Monster, which sold over five million copies in the US alone. Unfortunately, NAIHF was preceded by two poorly chosen singles (the great “E-Bow the Letter,” and the not-so-great “Bittersweet Me”) and sold just under two million copies before disappearing from the charts.
The relative failure of NAIHF obscures the fact that it’s one of REM’s most underrated albums. Seeking to move beyond Monster’s effects-pedal motif, the album finds the band embracing an eclectic style of song. The big guitar sound remains on tracks like “Wake-Up Bomb” and “Departure,” but the acoustic approach of Out of Time and Automatic For the People returns with “New Test Leper” and “Electrolyte.” A track like “Leave” finds REM combining a vintage synthesizer and churning rhythm to create something wholly different from the rest of their catalog, while “How the West Was Won” takes a Nick Cave/Tom Waits groove and imbues it with the Southern gothicness of their earliest albums.
Back to that bar in Vienna. After “It’s the End of the World…,” I told one of my drinking companions, who originally hailed from Macedonia, how surprised I was to hear three REM songs that evening. She said, and I paraphrase, “C’mon, REM is on the radio all of the time. Of course everyone knows their songs.” For a moment, I thought it was 1993 all over again.
Released: 1996
I was in Vienna recently and found myself at the Austrian equivalent of a college bar. Sure, the beer was better, it was cleaner, and it stayed open until 5 AM, but the general atmosphere wasn’t far removed from an off-campus watering hole. Like the sorority sisters whose pledge class theme song gets played on the jukebox, the majority of the bar’s patrons were singing along to every song. Of course, with the US’ cultural hegemony being what it is these days, nearly every track was English. Kanye West, Gwen Stefani, Bon Jovi, and, um, Survivor were sung with gusto. What was mildly surprising, however, was the presence of three REM songs, by far the most of any one artist that evening.
REM, while still an immensely popular band in most of the western world, has seen their popularity plummet in the US. The band’s most recent effort, Around the Sun, didn’t even manage to go gold – a sales threshold that they had once been able to reach within the first few weeks of a release. The beginning of the end for REM as a “hits” generating band can be traced to New Adventures In Hi-Fi. Written and recorded while on the road in 1995 and 1996, NAIHF was the follow-up to their most commercially successful album, Monster, which sold over five million copies in the US alone. Unfortunately, NAIHF was preceded by two poorly chosen singles (the great “E-Bow the Letter,” and the not-so-great “Bittersweet Me”) and sold just under two million copies before disappearing from the charts.
The relative failure of NAIHF obscures the fact that it’s one of REM’s most underrated albums. Seeking to move beyond Monster’s effects-pedal motif, the album finds the band embracing an eclectic style of song. The big guitar sound remains on tracks like “Wake-Up Bomb” and “Departure,” but the acoustic approach of Out of Time and Automatic For the People returns with “New Test Leper” and “Electrolyte.” A track like “Leave” finds REM combining a vintage synthesizer and churning rhythm to create something wholly different from the rest of their catalog, while “How the West Was Won” takes a Nick Cave/Tom Waits groove and imbues it with the Southern gothicness of their earliest albums.
Back to that bar in Vienna. After “It’s the End of the World…,” I told one of my drinking companions, who originally hailed from Macedonia, how surprised I was to hear three REM songs that evening. She said, and I paraphrase, “C’mon, REM is on the radio all of the time. Of course everyone knows their songs.” For a moment, I thought it was 1993 all over again.
posted by Alan @ 11:10 PM
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