|
| New Adventures in Hi-Fi |
Adventures begins with "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us." With intricate layers of sullen guitar trills, bemused stoner bass, and insistent piano taps that soon clatter elegantly into dissonant chaos, the track is brilliantly confounding, revealing one part of itself while concealing another on every listen. Next is the lusty "The Wake-Up Bomb," where Michael Stipe growls brattily, "I get high on my low-ass boot-cut jeans / I like being seen." Then he name-checks T.Rex; this song is precisely the gong that most of Monster tried to bang.
R.E.M. likes to reinvent itself with every album, but for at least the first side of Adventures, they amazingly seem to regroup with every song. "New Test Leper" is as pretty and fragile as "Bomb" is crunchy and corrosive, while the sludgy guitar, stutter-beep effects and skittish, radio-static feedback of "Undertow" are cinematic, placing the listener in dark, ominous waters. The snarl and rattle of the song's distortion-smeared fade-out is terrifying, like the moment water touches lungs. "I'm drowning / Me" Stipe cries, chillingly. His aging voice has acquired cigarettes-and-whiskey edges, but what little he has lost in range he has more than made up for in warmth, depth, and expression.
However, former mumbler Stipe taught himself to enunciate long ago, and this is not a virtue on Adventures, since it means that we can discern the lyrics. As a poet Stipe has made an abrupt turn down a sorry path of listless eccentrics where Costello and Byrne go to mope. The problem is first evident on "New Test Leper," which opens, "I can't say that I love Jesus / That would be a hollow claim... / Judge not lest ye be judged / What a beautiful refrain." What a lame quatrain. Later comes "E-Bow the Letter," one of the album's few sonic failures: glum, shuffling, and slack-jawed. Stipe makes matters worse with a pretentious skat-confessional, posing himself as "dreaming of Maria Callas, whoever she is. This fame thing, I don't get it." Reassuringly, he does later assert that "the smell thing, I got it." Then Patti Smith starts moaning. It's all quite bewildering.
He hits bottom, however, on "Be Mine," which is also the only song which, due to its restrained fuzzbox riff, Stipe has to carry all on his own. "I want to be your Easter bunny / I want to be your Christmas tree," Stipe wheedles. He goes on about sanctuaries, drinking of sacred fountains; God comes up once or twice. Finally we reach a point of no return when Stipe intones, "I want to hear the caged bird sing." I hope for his sake that's he's putting us on.
This brings us back to Frost and Young: we can sidestep Stipe's lyrical pratfalls if we can hear this album through curtains and closed windows, allowing it to transcend subject and become simply sound. The impressionist, Helium-esque wash of guitar on "Bittersweet Me," the droning Star Wars-y feedback on "Binky the Doormat," and the jaunty, bass-driven "Low Desert" all reveal the bottomless resources of Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry as songwriters, even over a 65 minute-long album. Adventures closes with "Electrolite," a sweet, quirky trinket buoyed by banjo, zither, and a plinking, off-key piano melody. Amidst so much musical invention, Stipe's posing and preening become almost irrelevant.
On "Undertow," Stipe proclaims haughtily, "I don't need a heaven / I don't need religion / I am in the place where I should be." Done with mythologizing Andy Kaufman and nameless lovers as on past albums, it seems that Stipe has turned to tiresome self-affirmation. The star thing, he's got it. His bandmates, hopefully, will never come close.
--Jessica Winter