Customer Reviews
REM's White Album? - By: J. H. Bateman, 21 Apr 2008 
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 pointin 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)... & the perfect album- & show-closer Electrolite.
I'd probably recommend it behind 3 or 4 of their other albums, but it's onlyin comparison to those & other absolute classics that it appears imperfect.
Taking me over... - By: Phil Hattie, 27 Feb 2008 
By 1995 R.E.M. were tour weary. They had visited every corner of the globe supporting the criminally under-rated Monster & suffered Aneurysms, hernias, & cancelled concert dates & they could be forgiven for being very tired. Rather than resting on their laurels though they wrote & recorded throughout the tour, at sound checks &in front of audiences, & then jumped right into the studio to record a few more tracks & 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 & it has next to no weak spots. E-Bow the Letter was as bloody-minded a lead single as anyone has ever released & is one of the finest songsin 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 & thumping self-pity of Bittersweet Me could have been singles from Monster & the beautiful Electrolite & 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 & Leave book-ending E-Bow the Letter. Leavein particular is a harsh, difficult listen. Its starts with a slow & quite pretty introduction before descending into a morass of whooping sirens & 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 & 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 & early 1990s purple patch & its no co-incidencein 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 & challenging as these & that would be a sad state of affairs.
The many moods of Stipe - By: J. Jenkins, 21 Jul 2007 New Adventuresin Hi-Fi is the R.E.M. cut off point for many people, although some people will tell you Monster, others Up. (Am I alonein thinking Reveal was where they started to sound like they were struggling a little?)
To me this isin many ways the definitive R.E.M. album. Bittersweet Me & Binky The Doormat jangle like nothing since the days when you couldn't understand a word Stipe was mumbling about. The distortion driven R.E.M. of Monster is present herein the shape of Departure & the glam stomp of The Wake-up Bomb, which also gives Stipe a chance to leave the sensitive outsiders who populate most of his songs behind a while & 'get highin his low ass bootcut jeans' as an egotistical, delusional megastar. New Test Leper repeats Automatic for the People's neat trick of having a largely acoustic number swim through a moat of feedback at the song's bridge. Leave foreshadows the band's love affair with synths that would blossom on Up. All great.
Stipe's lyrics are as lushly melancholic & literary as ever, the final two songs, Low Desert & Electrolite,in particular could come from the pages of Raymond Carver.
The fact that the album was recorded on the road meakes it inevitable that things sound a little off the cuff, but there's depths here most bands would give their skinny jeans to come close to.
a sublime piece of material - By: David W. Sharp, 04 May 2007 i give this work full marks, because although i would prefer it without the 2 rockers - so fast so numb & wake up bomb, & the pointless instrumental zither, it has slices of material which are definately their best ever nuggets of work, i am referring to the likes of new test leper,undertow,e-bow the letter. this lp has great melodys, dark overtones of sublime creedance, monumental production values & off the cuff lyrical stipeness, & of course ludicrously good backing vocals courtesy of the belter of rock that is mike mills. a beautiful pledge
The Last REM Album Worth Owning - By: wj_gibson, 13 Mar 2007 
With the benefit of hindsight, New Adventuresin Hi-Fi has the best album REM ever made lurking somewhere within it, making it a little akin to The Clash's triple-LP opus Sandinista. Well over half of the songs are absolutely brilliant, & they connect the darkly rich melancholy of Automatic for the People with the volume of Document (most of the guitar sounds on this album harken back to REM circa 1987, rather than the immediate predecessor of Monster), & the mystique of Murmur (Stipe's vocals & lyrics are by far the least fathomable of any REM album after 1985). Had the ten best songs been sent off to a studio then this could easily have become a brilliant synthesis of all of REM's various approaches from the fumbling jangles of Chronic Town right through to the confidence & wistfulness of Automatic for the People (we'll forget that Monster was ever recorded), a kind of a crowning glory of one of the great bands.
Unfortunately, specific circumstances within the band rather put paid to that idea, so we end up with 14 songs arrangedin an incongruous manner, poiting toward the increasingly slack quality control of every album REM have produced ever since. The Wake-Up Bomb (the only thing here that truly sounds like a Monster off-cut) is complete rubbish, Leave goes absolutely nowhere & its ravey car-alarm sound is woefully inappropriate, Zither is pointless (if pleasant), Bittersweet Me is poor. Moreover, there is a generally "bitty" feel to the affair that reveals a bandin the grip of a rapidly deteriorating comprehension of their purpose as they face up to being the biggest band on the entire planet (as they were at this point), rather than a fairly cultish indie concern. Again, this confusion would be further evidencedin the synth-y direction of Up, Reveal & Around the Sun, all of which sound predominantly like stabsin the dark, & none of which are much worth bothering with.
