New Adventures In Hi-Fi

R.E.M. had been making albums for 13 years by the time New Adventures in Hi-Fi arrived. Once stunning new talents, they’d built enough of a catalog to be able to mix and match some of the old pieces into fresh creations. This album, which grew out of the long, starcrossed tour behind the noisy Monster, found them cobbling that album's sonics together with the lush quietude of Automatic for the People. The construction remains one of the group’s finest, most sustained efforts (at 65 minutes, longer than any of their albums had run to this point). Michael Stipe’s lyrics were among his best and most direct: “The Wake-Up Bomb,” rumored at the time to have taken the Gallagher brothers of Oasis as its subject, was the funniest thing he’d intoned since he deadpanned the liner notes of an old gospel LP on the early B-side “Voice of Harold.”