R.E.M.: Monster
R.E.M. released Monster in 1994 and my one-liner about the band for several years that followed was something like, “What I wanna know about R.E.M. is…when did they hold the meeting where they decided to suck?” I’d never really followed R.E.M. that closely, but I respected their early work, loved the singles off of Automatic For The People, and hated the singles off of Monster (with the exception of “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?”). Therefore, I thought this line summed up what was seemingly an intentional plunge off a cliff for such a successful band.
It turns out, there was such a meeting. According to Wikipedia, it was…
Early in 1993, the members of R.E.M. convened a four-day meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, to devise a plan for the next two years. The group settled on a plan for 1994 through the end of 1996, which included recording a new album and touring behind it. Drummer Bill Berry was particularly eager to tour (which the band had not done since 1989), and was insistent that the album “rock”.
Apparently Berry was misunderstood and everybody else in the band heard “suck.”
Actually, if I may, I have to say that given a more considered listen, these 12 tracks don’t all suck, and some of them are quite good. And the album does “rock” in the sense that most of the songs are upbeat rockers with distorted guitar (though they tend to have a same-key, same-tempo problem). Of course, the biggest violator of this trend is “Strange Currencies,” which I still can’t differentiate from Automatic’s “Everybody Hurts” until it gets to the chorus, and only then if I’m paying attention to the lyrics.
The band seems to have enabled the rocking by discovering the wonders of a delay pedal. It’s used heavily on “Crush With Eyeliner,” “Bang And Blame,” “I Took Your Name,” and “You,” and by allowing the repeat delay to re-strike each chord several times, they’re able to pick up the pace of their songs without actually having to move their hands any faster. Except for the drummer, of course, who, as mentioned above, was dead set on this “rocking” thing.
Even though I may have been too hard attaching the “suck” tag to this album, there is plenty of mediocrity (and some suck, too) to go around. The most obvious suck symptom is they do that thing that huge bands past their prime do, where they stop writing great songs but instead focus exclusively on their sound fidelity and timbres, because they can pay for that kind of work, then go and talk to the press about how it’s an “intentional stylistic shift,” how it’s “their favorite album of theirs,” and how now they’re really doing the kinds of things they want to do, when it really amounts to putting lipstick on a pig. “I Took Your Name,” an otherwise mediocre song, is a good example of this, where cool sounding bells enter from crisply-defined space around your speakers mid-song.
But I love “Let Me In” and “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” and the first five tracks can be listened to straight through without a single bad thought about the band or album entering your head. After the first track (“Frequency”), you might not notice that anything’s playing if you’re not paying attention, but at least you won’t be annoyed. And even if my assessment back in the day was too harsh, I can’t even tell you how excited I am to have got the meeting part right.
Rating:
Mixers: none “Let Me In”
Non-keepers: “Crush With Eyliner,” “King Of Comedy,” “I Took Your Name,” “You”
Filed Between: Automatic For The People and Radiohead (Pablo Honey)
Tags: 1994, 3 lunchboxes, CD reviews, I called it, J-mez' collection, music