R.E.M. - Perfect Circle

NEW ADVENTURES IN HI-FI (1996)

That Wednesday in March, when Bill Berry collapsed on stage at the Patinoire Auditorium in Lausanne, it seemed for R.E.M. that the end had truly come, and in the most tragic of ways. The drummer, rushed to hospital, was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm. After undergoing a craniotomy, Berry survived — and without suffering any damage that might compromise his bodily or cognitive functions, as a relieved statement from Warner was quick to point out, adding that he would be able to "pick up the drumsticks again within the next two or three weeks." A forecast that would prove far too optimistic, though. The band, already worn down by other misfortunes (Mills had to undergo intestinal surgery, Stipe was dealing with an inguinal hernia), was forced to cancel all the remaining dates of the "Monster" tour, which would only resume on May 15th, in Mountain View, California.

Further complicating matters was the unexpected split from the band's longtime manager, Jefferson Holt. The reasons, as a terse statement from the band put it, would remain confidential and were never disclosed.

And yet, right at the hardest moment, the band pulled itself back together, rediscovering the deepest reasons for staying together. That's how the idea for an on the road album was born, written mostly during the tour and recorded between soundchecks, before being finished off in the studio in Seattle under the supervision of trusted producer Scott Litt. All without much in the way of studio trickery: a bare-bones eight-track setup was enough for the recording. Hence the self-deprecating title of the album, "New Adventures In Hi-Fi." A title that also carries a clear nod to the underlying concept: the journey, echoed too in the striking black-and-white cover, a desert landscape photographed by Stipe straight from the tour bus.

Rather than attempting yet another change of direction, the album sets out to sum up every facet of the R.E.M. sound, ending up as a kind of anthology of four decades of American popular music. Its fourteen tracks draw on the most disparate genres, from roots rock to folk, from country to blues, from rock'n'roll to hard rock. But what might have seemed like an overambitious gamble — holding together such a Babel of disparate sounds — turns out instead to be a stroke of genius.

The journey is the literary device used to tell stories of (extra)ordinary humanity, of new kinds of losers and lives lived on the margins, suspended between everyday gloom and sudden flashes of illumination. Stories once again cloaked in a veil of melancholy and disenchantment, as if, by the middle of the decade, the euphoria of the new Clinton era was already slowly fading. Back looms the specter of blind, hollow progress, of a Western society unable to rise to the challenge of fairer, more sustainable development. The elegant ballad "How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us" wryly comments on the decline of the American empire through another collage of surreal images.

Blood from a stone, water from wine

Born under an ill-placed sign

A stroke of bad luck, wrong place, wrong time

This flyer is out of line

The story is a sad one, told many times

The story of my life in trying times

Just add water, stir in lime

How the West was won and where it got us

Once again Stipe turns to religious imagery to capture the present: the biblical passages about water drawn from rock (the Book of Exodus) and blood turned into wine are overturned, as if to underline an ominous omen. Nature has ended up out of place, and lime — a symbol of concrete overdevelopment — blurs the landscape, while, as the following line puts it, even a canary can end up trapped in a uranium mine (“the canary got trapped in the uranium mine”) and die from the toxic fumes (“now the bird has died”). The anger over ecological devastation that had fuelled so many other R.E.M. songs ends up dissolving into a weary resignation in the face of humankind's incurable folly. A sense of disenchantment sharpened by the detachment with which Stipe delivers the song, underpinned by a slow-funk beat, minimal guitar textures and a steady piano accompaniment, which then opens out into a virtuoso solo in the style of Thelonius Monk and the Bowie of “Aladdin Sane”. At times, the atmosphere also evokes certain Morricone-esque western landscapes, acknowledged in the credits, which cite “Ennio's whistle” (that is, the two-note melody from the main theme of the film “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, directed by Sergio Leone).

THE WAKE-UP BOMB

Who knows when and how Michael Stipe's passion for glam first took root down in Athens. The fact remains that even in the American Deep South, the “lipstick rock'n'roll” of Marc Bolan and David Bowie won converts. The B-52's themselves, after all, had drawn on the eccentric, riotously colourful aesthetic of that era. Stipe, who in 1998 would go on to produce a film about the glam era itself, “Velvet Goldmine”, had already scattered clues to this passion over the years, from the ironic nod to David Essex's “Rock On” in “Drive” to the Ziggy-esque “No, no, no, you're not alone” of “Everybody Hurts”, from the Mott The Hoople reference in “Man On The Moon” to the full-on embrace of that sound on “Crush With Eyeliner”. Now, “The Wake-Up Bomb” is a new tribute delivered in a blaze of riffs. Recorded live (like three other tracks), the song acts as a link to the previous “Monster”, whose raw, rocking spirit it retains. And the narrator, in the end, could easily join the gallery of deluded egomaniacs populating that record. Except that Stipe uses him for a new piece of autobiographical reflection, once again resolutely distancing himself from the figure of the rockstar and all the self-obsessed excess that comes with it.

I look good in a glass pack

I look good and mean […]

I get high in my low-ass boot-cut jean

I like being seen

I look good with my drink-eat-no-sleep

Take-a-leap longevity

I get high on my attitude, latitude, 1973

I’m in deep

The portrait, then, is that of a cocky, ultra-narcissistic glam-era poseur, who entrusts the keys to his success to image alone. But boundless egocentrism and excess can grow tiresome in the long run. So in the following lines the arc is completed, from rockstar to puppet, moving on stage with studied, mechanical gestures, having already tried everything and lost all stimulation.

My head’s on fire and high esteem

Carry my dead, bored, been there, done that, anything

Oh, the wake-up bomb

My head’s on fire and high esteem

Get drunk and sing along to Queen

Practice my T-Rex moves and make the scene

Carry my dead, bored, been there, done that, anything

After all, it's the inevitable path for every rockstar, especially for those who lived the glam intoxication of the Seventies to the fullest.

NEW TEST LEPER

What shines through once again, however, is the band's extraordinary skill in crafting sumptuous ballads with the barest of ornamentation. The desolate folk-rock of "New Test Leper" offers precious confirmation of this, with Stipe letting another one of his tender psalm-like melodies glide over a soft blanket of jingle-jangle guitars and electric textures. The strongly narrative lyrics tell the harrowing story of a leper (another figure inspired by the New Test[ament]) invited onto a talk show and soon forgotten in a corner.

I can’t say that I love Jesus

That would be a hollow claim

He did make some observations

And I’m quoting them today

“Judge not lest ye be judged”

What a beautiful refrain

The studio audience disagrees

Have his lambs all gone astray?

Call me a leper

The guest of the trash-TV show, who might even be an AIDS sufferer, the new leper, quickly becomes an embarrassing piece of social waste to be hidden away or disposed of. And so he grows aware that he has fallen into a trap.

I thought I might help them understand

But what an ugly thing to see

“I am not an animal”

Subtitled under the screen […]

When I tried to tell my story

They cut me off to take a break

I sat silent 5 commercials

I had nothing left to say

The talk show host was index-carded

All organized and blank

The other guests were scared and hardened

Another indictment of television's falsity and the hypocrisy of a self-righteous society, always ready to brand new lepers. Like AIDS patients.

For Mike Mills it's the most beautiful song on the whole album.

E-BOW THE LETTER

And in the end, the long-awaited encounter finally happened. Michael Stipe at last shares the microphone with his lifelong muse, Patti Smith, on a mesmerizing, hallucinated ballad, sarcastically dubbed by Buck "a folk-rock whinge", which nonetheless would surprisingly become the album's first single (and would, just as unexpectedly, climb the British charts, though not the American ones).

The title refers to the e-bow, that peculiar device which generates a magnetic field and, when brought into contact with the guitar strings, produces a variable, unlimited sustain, a bowed, cello-like tone and a rich palette of timbral colors for notes and their overtones. Buck puts it to masterful use, with enveloping guitar tails that wind their way into a haze of mellotron, moog and electrified sitar. It's an almost "art rock" atmosphere well suited to the magical interplay of the two voices: Stipe's is subdued and drawling, almost à la Dylan, while Smith's is feverish and spectral. A "letter never sent", written on a bus at 4 in the morning, which turns into a new stream of consciousness: Stipe addresses Smith, entrusting her with a kind of countermelody.

Look up. What do you see?

All of you and all of me

Fluorescent and starry

Some of them they surprise

The bus ride. I went to write this, 4:00 a.m.

This letter

Fields of poppies, little pearls

All the boys and all the girls

Sweet-toothed, each and every one a little scary

I said your name

Look up. What do you see?

Stipe's mantra flows on like a river in spate, amid freely associated images and recurring autobiographical obsessions - "this fame thing... this celebrity thing... I don't get it", along with the fears of adolescence, feeling different, the escape into artificial substances - until Patti Smith finally joins him in a spine-tingling refrain.

I'll take you over

I'll take you there

Aluminum, it tastes like fear

Adrenaline, it pulls us near

Smith delivers the first two lines, Stipe the other two. But more than the words, what counts is the pathos, the chemistry. The collaboration with the high priestess of new wave, still reeling from the loss of her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith, who died in 1995, would continue throughout 1996: Stipe followed her for her entire tour, capturing her in a series of evocative black-and-white shots that would go on to form an exhibition and the book "Two Times Intro: On The Road With Patti Smith".

LEAVE

Confirming the experimental nature of "New Adventures In Hi-Fi" is also the longest song in R.E.M.'s entire catalogue. Over more than seven minutes, "Leave" delivers one reckless twist after another: a dreamy acoustic intro that, after a minute, morphs into a blistering rock'n'roll, scarred by an obsessive siren (mixed in by Scott McCaughey cranking up the octave switch on an old Arp Odyssey synthesizer) and a swarm of electronic effects, with Stipe raising his voice once again, distilling into an epic chorus this sort of elegy on leaving and the torments that come with it.

Nothing could be bring me closer

Nothing could be bring me near

Where is the road I follow

To leave, leave?

It's under, under, under my feet

The sea spread out there before me

Where do I go when the land touches sea?

There is my trust in what I believe

That’s what keeps me

That’s what keeps me

That’s what keeps me down

To leave, believe it

Leave it all behind

A reflection suspended in doubt, in the uncertainty of a parting, of a new path to be taken, which nonetheless appears to be the only way out. Once again the compulsive desire returns to lose all contact with the earth, to rise above the pull of gravity, already expressed clearly in "Feeling Gravitys Pull", but also, less explicitly, in "Fall On Me". Taking off, then, is the metaphor for breaking away from one's roots and daily troubles, in pursuit of dreams.

Lift me, lift me

I attain my dream

I lost myself, I lost the

Heartache calling me

I lost myself in sorrow

I lost myself in pain

I lost myself in clarity

“Leave” is one of the key tracks on the album, both musically, because it condenses the band's research and insights into sound – futuristic, despite the primitive recording technology used – and conceptually, because it explores in depth the record's dominant theme: the journey, departure, the search for self. The following “Departure” will attempt the same, with less brilliant results.

BITTERSWEET ME

The second single, however, retreats into the intimacy of a romantic relationship, naturally fraught with pitfalls and therefore “bittersweet”. A song with a fairly classic structure, built around an incisive guitar riff, with an energetic pace along the lines of “Monster”. Once again Stipe tries to wriggle free of love-song clichés, drawing on vivid, imaginative language.

I move across, innocence lost

All flashing pulsar

I move across the earth in my new pattern shirt

I pass satellites

“You’re so bitter”, your complaint

I can’t give you anything

I don’t know who you’re livin’ for

I don’t know who you are anymore

I’d sooner chew my leg off

Than be trapped in this

How easy you think of all of this as bittersweet me

I couldn’t taste it

I’m tired and naked

I don’t know what I’m hungry for

I don’t know what I want anymore

“Tired and naked”, like the tail end of a story gone wrong. The same lines will later be turned into a question aimed at the (ex?) partner: “But are you tired and naked?/ Are you tired and naked?”. And “Stanco e nudo” (“Tired and Naked”) will be the title of the imaginary Italian film, starring Valeria Golino, that serves as the backdrop for the song's video.

SO FAST, SO NUMB

Blistering fuzz and psychedelic echoes streak through another magical display of Remmian arte povera. Just one incisive riff and a melodic opening shaped by Stipe in the refrain are enough to set alight the heart of a track that instantly stakes its claim as one of the most gripping on the whole record. It's a new invocation, addressed directly, in the first person, to a boy ("motor boy") who risks burning up his own life.

You're moving through rough waters

Motor boy

And swimming in your sleep

How could I be so blind, mis-sighted

Not to see there's something wounded deep

Anyone could scratch your surface now

It's all amphetamine

You’re blasting yourself into the present

To blur some past indignity

From the allusion to amphetamines to the need to erase the past, everything points to a new borderline situation, one that risks tipping into tragedy, as already happened to friends Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix, mourned on “Monster”.

And so, even what one claims to despise remains a fatal temptation, something to be recreated, while slipping into the abyss of apathy, which strips away all feeling.

You say that

You hate it

You want to re-create it

I’ve been around, I’ve been your lover

I let it go, Kill Devil Hills

You’re coming onto something so fast, so numb

That you can’t even feel

Curious, in particular, is the mention of Kill Devil Hills, the North Carolina town where on December 17, 1903 the Wright brothers first tested their motor-glider. But the main theme remains self-harm, as seems confirmed by the following lines, which paint a picture of complete psycho-physical degeneration, between "shark eyes and heart" and "blood that's freezing".

LOW DESERT

The crossing of the desert marks one of the album's darkest moments. Buck's slide guitar draws nervous patterns, the Hammond organ booms disorientingly, and Stipe's vocals turn mournful. Another metaphysical journey, in which time seems to have stopped at the fatal instant of a car crash.

It happened fast, it's over quick

A little dust and the engine kicks

Did your hands drift down off the wheel?

A roadowl hit your windshield?

An eyelash or a little bit of sleep?

Did time stand still?

Just call it, now, and you’re on your way

The desert is most likely that of Nevada, surrounding Las Vegas. A multitude of lights and casinos, neon and smoke, that becomes almost oppressive, like this desert land, which "could swallow a man alive".

All the ashtrays cities and the freeway drives

Broken casinos and waterslides

The 18 wheeler and the payback dives

Gravity pulls on the powerlines

A jetstream cuts the desert sky

This land could eat a man alive

Let's say you'd leave it all behind

Stipe would later speak at length about this being one of his favorite tracks on the record: "To me it's a gorgeous song, and it surprises me that almost nobody ever asks me about it. Even though people accuse me of never being clear when I write my lyrics, I assure you I couldn't be any clearer. I hate that fucking word, enigmatic, and it's certainly not my intention to build myself an image as some guru speaking in metaphors. Everything I write has a very precise meaning to me, and it comes naturally to write it that way. I couldn't write any other way. In this case maybe I didn't manage to explain myself in the best possible way, but I really did have this image of someone driving a pickup truck through the desert who ends up off the road after hitting something, maybe an animal. It's a dramatic scene, even though nobody dies, and both the sky and the mountains are just standing there watching".

ELECTROLITE

Closing the album is another aching ballad, in the vein of "Automatic For The People". "Electrolite was written in Chicago, on the piano in a sublet apartment where my girlfriend at the time was living", recalls Mills, who wrote nearly all the piano parts on the track, another small gem of simplicity, with banjo embellishments and a fragrant blend of guitar, piano and percussion backing Stipe's harmonious vocal, while Andy Carlson's violin adds fresh melancholic shades.

It's an early, sardonic welcome to the new millennium, unfolding along the Los Angeles of stars, of Twentieth Century glamour and Hollywood idols, dutifully name-checked in rhyme (Martin Sheen, Steve McQueen, Jimmy Dean). The Los Angeles of Mulholland Drive, the great road separating Bel Air from the San Fernando Valley, which director David Lynch would immortalize a few years later in one of his masterpieces.

Almost like the end of a journey, as if the passage through the desert, so wistfully evoked in the preceding "Low Desert", had come to a close with arrival among the chaotic arteries of the Californian metropolis. The title seems to play on ambivalence: an electrolyte is a substance that, in solution or molten state, dissociates into ions, producing a liquid capable of conducting electricity, but the word can also be read as electro-light, electric light, like the vast illuminated sprawl of Los Angeles at night.

Twentieth century go and sleep

You’re Pleistocene. That is obscene. That is obscene

You are the star tonight

Your sun electric, outasight

Your light eclipsed the moon tonight

Electrolite

You're outasight

If I ever want to fly

Mulholland Drive

I am alive

Hollywood is under me

I’m Martin Sheen

I’m Steve McQueen

I’m Jimmy Dean

“I'm alive,” Stipe exclaims at the end of the journey. Only to reaffirm in the next line: “Don't be scared/ You're alive” and then again “I'm not scared/ I'm out of here.” As if the ghosts crowding the album had finally dissolved. Some hardcore conspiracy theorists will even read into it the possibility of the band breaking up at the end of the decade. Stipe comes across as almost romantic here, as much as he's capable of, with those allusions to his “star,” whose light manages even to eclipse the moon. The luminous ending only partly brightens an album that's anything but sunny, dominated instead by darkness and unease, by grey, leaden tones — much like those of the cover and the fine booklet.

“New Adventures In Hi-Fi” wouldn't replicate the worldwide success of its two predecessors (even though it still sold around 5 million copies), which was only logical given the very nature of the record: a travel diary on the road, sketched out like notes on an ideal pad, with its stylized soundscapes and experimental textures, projected into a hypothetical future that, for the band, perhaps would never actually arrive. Because “New Adventures In Hi-Fi” is also, in certain respects, R.E.M.'s swan song. At least of the original lineup, the classic one. Afterwards, with Bill Berry's departure, they would seemingly carry on in the same direction as always. But they could never again be quite the same band. For some — this writer included — their golden era truly ends right here, in this overflowing hour of music that amounts to almost a summation of an entire career. Paradoxical, for a band that had just signed a pharaonic contract renewal with Warner for the staggering sum of 80 million dollars!

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09/05/2026