R.E.M. – New Adventures in HiFi
A few months ago (a year ago? I don’t even know anymore), a Twitter prompt was going around, asking what the best American rock band was (if it wasn’t The Grateful Dead, if I’m remembering this right…). Well, it’s not the Grateful Dead from my perspective—they’ve never been my thing, though I can see the appeal in the abstract, if not up close. My dark horse pick was Sonic Youth—I can think of few bands whose influence is as vast as theirs in the past 40 years. In fact, I even made a connection between them and the Dead in a recent article, albeit somewhat tangentially.
But then again R.E.M. is right there. I would absolutely accept this as the correct answer, even if I’d probably accept about a half dozen different answers. And part of that is that their catalog runs so deep with such versatile and diverse work. New Adventures in Hi-Fi is one of their most interesting records to me, arriving two years after Monster, and sounding like a hybrid of that record and its predecessor, 1992’s Automatic for the People. It’s somehow both a noisy rock record and an understated acoustic record. Some of the songs were recorded during rehearsals while on tour behind Monster (which makes this something like their Rust Never Sleeps, I suppose?). I remember hearing the first single “E-Bow the Letter” (featuring Patti Smith) when it first came out and thinking this would be mostly back to their acoustic material, but then you hear a song like “Leave,” a rock epic with a blaring siren loop and well, yeah, nothing soft or subtle about that!
There’s a looseness about the album that makes it almost mixtape-like, but the songs are uniformly fantastic, and while the singles from the album didn’t have anywhere near the impact of those on Automatic or Monster, it’s hard to argue that “Bittersweet Me” or “Electrolite” aren’t in the same league, songwriting wise. To say nothing of the deep cuts like “Be Mine” or “So Fast, So Numb.” For a long time I was waiting for this to be reissued on vinyl, and for its 25th anniversary, the band finally did—which was expected, honestly, given that they went through a whole sequence of anniversary reissues. Anyway, glad to have it. While the departure of Bill Berry and some of their ’00s material did see a dropoff in quality (though Accelerate rocks), R.E.M. nonetheless can lay claim to being one of the greatest American bands of all time, full stop.
Rating: 9.2
Sound Quality: Great
Dos Santos – City of Mirrors
I can’t help but develop a loyalty of sorts for labels with well curated rosters of artists. There are, of course, some of the obvious labels that stand out as being legends within their field: Matador, Merge, Sub Pop, Warp, and so on. In metal, labels like Relapse and 20 Buck Spin, and with jazz, long-running brands such as Impulse! and Blue Note. In the 21st century, that also includes International Anthem. They’re ostensibly a jazz label but that doesn’t really do justice to the diversity of music they release. I got into them through artists like Irreversible Entanglements and Makaya McCraven, and they haven’t let me down since. But they also release ambient music, electronic, experimental, prog, and so on, and a lot of the artists on the label have connections to Chicago post-rock and indie in the ’90s (Jeff Parker is a member of Tortoise, for instance; Damon Locks was in several bands including Trenchmouth, whose drummer was Fred Armisen!). All of which is to say I listened to City of Mirrors because it was an International Anthem release, and it was not what I expected at all.
Dos Santos isn’t a jazz band, though members of the group do play jazz, notably Daniel Villarreal, who has released a couple of records of his own that are fantastic (more on that later this year, probably). They began as a cumbia group under the name Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta, and expanded from there. I suppose you could call City of Mirrors, their third record, “Latin alternative” in the loosest terms, as it features elements of cumbia and Latin jazz along with rock, surf, psychedelia and so on. It’s a stunning record, and I don’t think it gets nearly the attention and recognition it deserves, and frankly I haven’t heard many records quite like it. It’s lush and features some gorgeous vocal harmonies along with a series of stellar arrangements. The title track is rooted in cumbia rhythms, for instance, but it’s more of an atmospheric art-pop song, whereas moments like “Crown Me” echo Radiohead’s spacier moments, but with lyrics in Spanish.
I suppose I could say this is my favorite non-jazz record from a mostly-jazz label, but that’s not really the important part. This is a great record, full stop, and you owe it to yourself to give it a listen.
Rating: 9.1
Sound Quality: Great
Rocket from the Crypt – Group Sounds
It might surprise you to learn (especially if you’re one of my San Diego friends) that I only own one Rocket from the Crypt album. That’s in large part because most of them are pretty hard to find. They’ve all been pressed at one point or another, and there are sellers on Discogs with copies of Circa: Now! and Scream, Dracula, Scream—for $75 and up. I’ll get them some day, god willing, but for now I’ve got Group Sounds.
I bought this in fall of 2021 because Newbury Comics did a reissue of this along with Live at Camp X-Ray, because they do a lot of colored vinyl exclusives. Predominantly punk, though this certainly applies. This is maybe the most “punk” of any Rocket studio album, with mostly two minute songs that absolutely rip. And when I saw the group last, they still played a lot of these songs live. Naturally, considering they’re made to capture that live energy; “Carne Voodoo” is all bashing and weird time signatures, “S.O.S.” is a bit more psychedelic surf punk but still rips, and “This Bad Check Is Gonna Stick” is all forward momentum. Just nonstop rockin’.
I saw the band for the first time around when this album came out and it was a pretty rowdy crowd—literally the only time I’ve ever seen a girl on a dude’s shoulders, flashing the band. And the venue where that happened, Cane’s, no longer exists, though I saw a few good shows there in my time. (Though it had a weird vibe—tourist bar on the boardwalk that just so happens to host fairly big touring bands.) A lot of stuff from that world doesn’t exist anymore, but Rocket is forever. Long live Rocket from the Crypt.
Rating: 9.0
Sound Quality: Great
1000 Times Jeff 
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