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What's the point of living through a traumatic year – 11 months of touring distinguished by two serious medical emergencies and a near-death experience (drummer Bill Berry's double aneurysm) – if you can't pull together at the end and bitch about it? "I won the race/Broke the cup/Drank it all/Spit it up," Michael Stipe snaps over the fire-bombed-arena clamor of "The Wake-Up Bomb," R.E.M.'s catchiest declaration of irritation and hard-won relief on New Adventures in Hi-fi. But the album is about true, not high, fidelity and about... Read More how far you have to roam to find it. Many of these 14 songs are literally about distance and motion ("Leave," "Departure," "Undertow"). But it is rarely propulsion without purpose. "I'd sooner chew my own leg off/Than be trapped in this," Stipe insists in "Bittersweet Me." Even at their most stark or embittered, the pain and argument here never eclipse the music's frayed but rapturous folk-rock heart. R.E.M. could just as easily have made a record about life's shit pageant. Instead, we get all this – and in "Departure," a name check for Rolling Stone's own William Greider. (RS 750/751) DAVID FRICKE
CD Track List
Track List 1 Track List 2 Track List 3
New Adventures In Hi-Fi (1996)
1. How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us
2. The Wake-up Bomb
3. New Test Leper
4. Undertow
5. E-bow The Letter
6. Leave
7. Departure
8. Bittersweet Me
9. Be Mine
10. Binky The Doormat
11. Zither
12. So Fast, So Numb
13. Low Desert
14. Electrolite
Track lists are from a 3rd party source.
Items below can and will differ.
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