Monster

7.5/10

  People hate Monster.  What's more people love to hate Monster.  They love to call it a grunge ripoff sellout album.  They take especial glee in pointing out how prevalent it was to find it in used CD bins.  Until Around the Sun came out it was pretty much guaranteed to be pointed out as the worst R.E.M. album.

  I'm going to stick up for Monster though.  I like Monster.  No, I don't think it's as good as Automatic for the People, but it's awfulness has been wildly overstated.  I also think it's ubiquity in used CD bins is more reflective of people's fickle taste in music than the poor quality of the music contained within this particular record.  R.E.M. was popular at the time.  Most people are sheep-like when it comes to buying music so lots of copies were sold.  Then these same people were told to like something else instead so they sold off their copies of Monster.  Good.  Monster doesn't need those people anyway.

  As for the charge that they were ripping off grunge, I kind of have to disagree with that as well.  Grunge was everywhere at the time.  This doesn't sound like grunge.  Actually some would argue that most of what was on the radio at the time didn't sound like "true" grunge either, but regardless, to my ears this really doesn't sound like Pearl Jam or Stone Temple Pilots or Gin Blossoms or Goo Goo Dolls, or whatever the hell else was popular at the time.  It just has more distorted electric guitars than the previous R.E.M. albums had and distorted guitars were one feature of grunge music.

 Here's the thing, though.  R.E.M. hadn't toured since Green and they wanted to hit the road again.  Their last two albums were quieter and not particularly rocking albums that weren't exactly suited to large arenas.  They wanted some big dumb loud rock songs they could play in stadiums.  Also, it was just time to shake up their sound again.  Even as a fan who loved Out of Time and Automatic for the People, I remember hoping they would shake up their sound for the next album.  The most opposite thing they could do from the quiet, largely acoustic previous album was to plug in and get abrasive.  I, for one, was excited for some rocking electric guitar music from them.  And on that front they delivered.

  I also remember my sense of anticipation for this album was through the roof.  I was hugely obsessed with R.E.M. at this point and this was the dark days before the internet.  It had been two long years since Automatic for the People and I had next to no information as to what the band was up to.  They didn't have a website where I could see updates.  I knew they weren't touring, and whenever I'd browse music magazines there weren't any articles about them during that time.  I had no idea if they were working on a new album or if they had broken up or what the hell was going on.  Two years with no news about your favorite band seemed like an interminably long time back then.  So when I finally heard that Monster was coming out I did a little jump for joy and counted down the days.  I never get that level of excitement around music any more, and that's a sad thing.

  Anyway I bought it on cassette the day it came out, gazed in wonder at the bright orange packaging, and couldn't wait to pop it into my tape player.  Right off the bat What's the Frequency, Kenneth? kicks in with its distorted guitar chords and signals this is going to be a different sort of R.E.M. album, and at the time I couldn't have been more thrilled.  It's a pretty kick-ass song, and I loved the little chugga-chugga guitar noises that crop up from time to time.

  It's immediately followed by Crush With Eyeliner, which I suppose is probably about a transvestite or something, but it continues the rollicking good vibe from the first song.  It even features Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth fame repeating some of the lines Stipe sings and sounding too cool for the room.  The guitar tone is pretty much the same as the first song.  Peter Buck uses more or less the same guitar sound on almost every song on this album, but it's a cool sound.  I'm assuming he bought a new pedal and fell in love with it or something.  Really there aren't any other "grunge" albums that have the same sound as this.  That's partially why I bristle at the grunge comparison this album constantly gets.

  King of Comedy didn't really sound like any R.E.M. song I'd ever heard, but I thought it was pretty cool, too, while I Don't Sleep I Dream features some prominent falsetto that would be explored more fully with Tongue.  Star 69 is just a fast rocking good time.

  The first real break in the proceedings is Strange Currencies.  It's a ballad that's in all honesty kind of a rewrite of Everybody Hurts from the previous album.  But the weird thing is, I kind of like it better than Everybody Hurts.  It doesn't have a "message" like that song did, and it's all the better for it.

  Next up is the aforementioned Tongue.  It's kind of a slow piano ballad sung entirely in falsetto and only features a little bit of the distorted guitar that is so prominent elsewhere on the album.  I remember thinking it sounded utterly bizarre to me the first time I heard it.  I wasn't sure about the high-pitched almost feminine singing style at first, but I grew to really like this song.

  The rest of side 2 brings back the electric guitars in a big way.  Let Me In is kind of interesting in that it doesn't have drums for most of its run.  It's almost like a ballad set against a distorted guitar without the kinds of rock drums you normally hear.  It actually makes for a kind of a strange effect.  There's also a pretty cool organ line that comes in near the end.  I guess this was a tribute to Kurt Cobain, who had committed suicide earlier that year.

  For some reason I really like I Took Your Name.  I never seem to really hear anyone mention that song, so I'm mentioning it.

  I'm not quite as big on the final two songs, but they're fine.  They certainly fit well with the rest of the album.

  It's kind of funny because for awhile I let the critical consensus about Monster affect my opinion of it.  Without having actually listened to it in a decent expanse of time I started agreeing that it wasn't a very good effort.  More than ten years after its initial release I got to talking with a friend of mine who was a couple years younger than me and a huge R.E.M. fan.  I asked him what his favorite R.E.M. album was and he replied without hesitation Monster.  I had actually introduced him to R.E.M. around the time this album came out and I think it served the role for him that Out of Time did for me.  It was probably the album that launched his music fandom and he had lots of good memories associated with it.  And that got me to remembering how much fun it was to pop this into the tape player in my car and crank up the volume back in the day.  I loved blasting the hell out of this while driving down the freeway and that's got to be worth a little good will.  I don't know if I would direct a newcomer to R.E.M. here as their initial introduction to the band, but it certainly is a worthy addition to their catalog, despite what the haters would have you think.