sometimes it's almost a relief when great bands go astray. It's a kind of housecleaning, a way of clearing space for new stuff, of letting go of a part of your past that may have outlived its usefulness. But damn R.E.M. -- it's getting harder and harder to care about them as the years go on, and yet records like their latest, "Adventures in Hi-Fi," keep making it impossible to write them off.

I remember being ready to throw 1992's "Automatic for the People" on my personal couldn't-care-less pile. I'd had it up to there with Michael Stipe and his exceptional cleverness, his coy square-peg-in-a-round-hole routine -- until I heard "Man on the Moon." The song shivered with wistfulness, outlining the contours of uncertainty as if it were tracing the subtle arch of an eyebrow. It spoke both of a desire to connect and of an appreciation for the late comedian/actor Andy Kaufman, as if there were no reason the two ideas shouldn't be at home in the same song. "Man on the Moon" may have been Stipe's admission that pop culture can seem eminently disposable, a glittery fog that we sink into when the mood strikes us, and yet still be the thing that makes us feel most alive. He keyed in to the idea that our enjoyment of pop culture demands that we focus more on, say, the passing of fads than on the passing of people, because the latter is so often too much to bear: How can you know how much you'll mourn for a certain singer, actor, or comedian, until -- Poof! -- he's suddenly gone?

"New Adventures in Hi-Fi" contains nothing as potent or affecting as "Man on the Moon," and Stipe is mostly just pulling his tired boy-genius schtick, being so willfully obtuse and arty you can almost picture the sweat on his brow. And yet "New Adventures" achieves the dubious honor of being both kind of lousy and strangely compelling. It would be so nice to be able to just throw the disc away, to yank it from its box and fling it like a Frisbee, but the sad truth is that, probably, bits and pieces of it would only come back to haunt you. You might find some of Peter Buck's Led Zeppelin-via-Appalachia guitar motifs reeling through your brain, or remember the sensation of being wrapped up in a giant swirl of drum and bass, the sound curled around you like a cashmere muffler. Even Stipe, pain in the ass that he is, seems to be alternately feeding us that old hipster hucksterism thing and reaching out to us. (What do you make of lines like "I'm drowning me.../I am in the place where I should be/I am breathing water.../you know a body's got to breathe"?)

Denser than the band's last LP, 1994's "Monster," "New Adventures" is a record that sounds uneasy in its own skin, sometimes oppressively dank, sometimes overwrought in its attempts to intrigue and engage us. It's not an easy record to slip into. "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us" shambles along on a heavy-bottomed beat, an insistent but delicate piano line pushing it forward almost against its will (it's like some weird sea creature that drags its big butt across the ocean floor on tiny little feet). Stipe's voice is like damp velvet on the song, mushroomy and oppressive, but his moodiness seems wasted on go-nowhere lyrics like "I didn't wear glasses 'cause I thought it might rain/now I can't see anything."

Stipe's wordplay shoots right over the top most of the time (in "Departure," he pulls off a dandy rhyme that enfolds "hang glider," "spider," "disposable lighter," and "William Greider"), but though it may have that swing, it don't mean a thing. And are we supposed to laugh or weep when, on "New Test Leper," he sings with exceptional vim and vigor, "Call me leper, hey?"

But even if you have to fight your way through a morass of ridiculous, pretentious lyrics, there's still the chance that there'll be at least one song on "New Adventures" that you just can't shake. For me, it's "Electrolite," a slight little country love song that Stipe sings with uncharacteristic flirtiness and charm. "I'm Martin Sheen/I'm Steve McQueen, I'm Jimmy Dean/You are a star tonight...You might eclipse the moon tonight/Electrolite, you're outta sight," he sings, the words tumbling out as if he could almost lose control over them. He ends the song with the lines, "I'm not scared, I'm outta here," and he's funny and touching at once.