100 favourite albums: # 5: New Adventures In Hi-Fi - R.E.M.

Like, I suppose, many people, I don't have an entirely easy relationship with popular taste and received opinion, particularly when it comes to fields in which I have any kind of significant investment, one of which is certainly that of popular music. Of course, there are endless, endlessly narrowing niches each with their own standards of taste and opinion; the niche within which the Beatles are regarded as great is not necessarily the same as that in which the Arcade Fire are saving indie music, for example. But the point is that, within each such 'niche' (an inaccurate word, but it'll do), fluid and permeable and impossible to define though their various ostensible boundaries may be, there will generally be certain orthodoxies; whether founded on intrinsic qualities or culturally ingrained values and responses or more likely some combination of the two, there are widely accepted beliefs about the relative quality of whatever texts/streams/etc may fall within and outside that niche, and having found oneself inhabiting a particular niche in a particular context, one generally accepts many of the foundational assumptions of that niche (for example, thinking about sandstone alternative music and fully believing, because feeling and living and breathing, the greatness of the Velvets, the Smiths, the Pixies - and, very possibly, R.E.M. too)...it's kind of chicken and egg in that respect, I suppose.

(Wordy much?)

Anyway, so: New Adventures in Hi-Fi is definitely my favourite R.E.M. album, and has been for some years; I'm not sure about this, but I wouldn't imagine that it'd be a particular pick for that title by others, either amongst particular fans of the band or when it comes to the wider listening public (again, just a guess, but I imagine that Automatic for the People, Murmur and Out of Time are the big ones in that respect). Likewise, while obviously heaps of these albums that I've been listing in my top 100, and particularly at the very upper end, are frequent entrants in similar lists, I don't think that's true of New Adventures at all.

...all of which, of course, makes me particularly wonder what it is about the album that has made it into one of my favourites, but to be honest, there's really not particularly far that I can take it. I certainly don't have any particularly strong personal associations with it; I had a copy of it for years before it began creeping up on me, and even then only very incrementally and at long intervals, and when I listen to it, it doesn't seem as if there's anything outside of the music itself that causes it to strike such a chord with me.

Well, there are at least two ways of pushing that last thought, both important here. First, the music itself is plenty compelling; well, that speaks for itself. And second (and relatedly), it can only be that it only seems that the way I feel when I listen to New Adventures is referable entirely to 'the music itself', because of course music always does refer to other things, at the very least on the abstract (but nonetheless meaningful) level on which everything always refers to everything else, but (as a matter of lived experience / personal impression), more so than much else that makes up that 'everything'. To put it another way, 'music itself' is always 'music and then some'.

For me, the title and cover of the album go a long way to summing up my impression of the album of itself (again, chicken and egg questions come into play, of course). New Adventures is a sprawling, abstract, downtempo modern rock record, and all of that is legible on its face (so to speak). There's something very elegant about it, something that conveys a sense of clean lines and uncluttered spaces, but there's also a sense of volume and of texture to its songs; it's an album dominated by guitars and, to a lesser extent, by Stipe's by now pleasingly worn-in voice, and it sounds very much all of a piece, but as we all know, there's not a lot that guitars can't do, even when, as here, used relatively traditionally, and the little bits of organ, piano, and various types of other keyboard and synthesiser instruments (to name just a few) weave in very aptly, often lending a sense of mystery to the songs they touch.

Like most great albums, it has more than one great song on it; indeed, by my count, there are three. There's "E-Bow the Letter", which is to "The One I Love" or "Losing My Religion", say, as this album is to Document or Out of Time, that is, the single which sounds different from anything else on the album and yet encapsulates so much of what makes the album itself what it is; then, buried in the album's mid-section, the epic love song "Be Mine", and finally (in fact, the last song on the album), the endlessly graceful, endlessly cryptic "Electrolite". But while those three stand out, there's not a weak song on New Adventures; really, it's all good, but of the others, the ones most likely to leave me wide-eyed and short of breath are the driving, surging rockers, amongst which "Leave" stands out not only for its 7-minute length but also for its sheer urgency and unerring combination of toughness and tenderness.

Anyway, I didn't mean to write a manifesto, nor to ramble as much as I have, and there's no real particular reason why this album ought to've triggered all of the above, but whichever way you cut it (and there are many, which is hardly surprising given the complicated mix of apparently immediate impressions and more critical responses which make up each individual experience of any music), I think that New Adventures in Hi-Fi is nothing short of a masterpiece. As we're so often reduced to saying, there's just something about it.