REMtrospective, 11: Monster
September 19th, 2008 by Curt Holman in Listening Stack
Title: Monster
Released on: Sept. 26, 1994
Favorite tracks: “King of Comedy,” “Star 69”
After the relatively low-key, mellow tones of Automatic for the People, REM clearly wanted to turn the amplifiers up to 11 and rock out again with Monster. In one interview, guitarist Peter Buck described Monster as “a ‘rock’ record, with the rock in quotation marks.” He explained, “That’s not what we started out to make, but that’s certainly how it turned out to be… Like, it’s a rock record, but is it really?” (Answer: Yes! It really is a rock record.)
Monster marks a different kind of directional change in REM’s refinement of its sound. You could say that REM had always gone forward in its musical development. The path would probably look more like a sine wave than a straight line, but the band always followed along a continuum in, for instance, increasing the clarity of Michael Stipe’s vocals and lyrical thrust. Monster strikes me as REM’s first serious attempt to reverse course, to retrace its steps and recapture some of the virtues they’d put aside over time. And, true to form, they want to backtrack while dabbling in musical idioms that hadn’t touched on much before.
Monster strikes me as an brash, exciting experiment with results that aren’t 100% successful – as compared to Automatic for the People, which is an extremely successful experiment whose parameters don’t really interest me in particular. Monster holds up better than I was expecting.
I would have been willing to swear that Monster was REM’s “New York” album. The 1970s glam rock frills give it a big-city-bright-lights kind of vibe, to me, and consider the first three songs:
* The first single, “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” takes its name from the cryptic question two muggers asked of Dan Rather when they attacked him in 1986 on the streets of NEW YORK.
* “Crush With Eyeliner,” was supposedly inspired by the sound of the NEW YORK Dolls. To me, it also sounds like it bears the influence of former Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed, who wrote songs about comparable drag/trans characters (ex. “Walk on the Wild Side”). There’s a back-up vocal that sort of sounds like Lou Reed’s spoken-word singing style, on lines like “Yeah, life is strange” or “She’s her own invention.” And Lou Reed is a quintessential NEW YORK rock musician.
* “King of Comedy” shares the name of a movie set in NEW YORK, directed by another quintessential NEW YORKer, Martin Scorsese. (Reed has even paid tribute to Scorsese in some of his songs.) Its “Make your money…” refrain sounds like an anthem for Wall Street. It’s also comparable to Timbuk 3’s “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)” as an ironic embrace of capitalism.
After all that, I find out that Monster was produced in New Orleans, Atlanta, Miami and Los Angeles – everywhere BUT New York, apparently. Okay, maybe it’s their L.A. album, then.
It’s definitely noisy in a way none of their albums had been before. The mix is full of feedback whines, crashing drums and crunchy guitar riffs that sound comparable to rattling windows or shaking sheet metal. The vocals aren’t quite as clear as on their previous three albums, but it’s different compared to “Early Period” REM. In the Murmur days, the mix subsumed the vocals, but the effect was musical unity, all the elements propelling the song forward.
In Monster, it’s like the instruments are trying to drown out the vocals, and the components don’t always sound unified, but at odds with each other. (And apparently the members of REM were at odds at the time, too.) It’s like the difference between having songs that are inscrutable, and ones that can be nearly impenetrable. For “Let Me In,” the guitar and rhythm section are like a clashing, driving storm, separating the singer from the object of the song. Which is perfectly appropriate, given the song’s title. Apparently the song is about the death of Kurt Cobain, which makes me wonder if there’s a Nirvana influence there. (The death of River Phoenix also hung over Stipe for the album.) But even one of the most bouncy rave-up songs, “Star 69,” has overlapping lyrics that obfuscate the words.
Why is the album called Monster? The “berserk” musical quality could be part of it. “Crush With Eyeliner” refers to Frankenstein and “Circus Envy” to monsters. Supposedly Stipe wrote the songs in the voices of characters, rather than himself, so perhaps they reflect a darker point of view than usual, like the money-obsessed speaker of “King of Comedy.” Given that band suffered health problems during the recording of the album (ex. Mills’ appendicitis when they recorded “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”) and tour (Bill Berry’s brain aneurysm, during a live performance of “Tongue”), it may have felt like a “monster” to complete.
Revisiting the album, I found myself particularly interested in the last four tracks: the sinister, snarly “I Took Your Name;” “Let Me In;” the galumphing “Circus Act,” which, in its chorus references to “Uncle Ben!” sounds like the completion of the ‘Southern Eccentric tryptich’ with “Old Man Kinsey” and “Oddfellows Local 151;” and “You.” “You” is interesting because it has a snaky guitar intro that sounds related to the opening chords of “Begin the Begin,” and though the lyrics seem fairly sweet – “My attentions are turned to you” – the melody and singing are almost threatening, as if it’s really a stalker song like The Police’s “Every Breath You Take.”
Monster has more keepers than I remembered, maybe because the most familiar songs on the album aren’t the strongest. Bang and Blame” has all the ingredients of a big, dramatic REM song, but the “Bang bang bang/Blame blame blame” choral scheme sounds like, well, complaining – it’s like the content of the lyrics are unworthy of the emotional weight of the melody. “Tongue” works, I guess, but with Stipe’s falsetto vocals, it’s more like a pastiche of a soul/R&B song than an REM song. It anticipates the musical impersonations that Beck would start to specialize in a few years later.
And “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” strikes me as a strained attempt to write a track around the notoriously “random” sentence. It’s a pretty wan pop song – and the clip of Rather signing back-up on it (apparently at a sound-check at Madison Square Garden, although the clip was shown on “David Letterman”) strikes me as a moment when the band could have jumped the shark.
But REM couldn’t have jumped the shark then, because they were going to release one of their best albums two years later.
Early listening conditions: Monster came out a few days after my bride and I returned from our honeymoon. Otherwise, it doesn’t really have any associations for me. I do remember seeing that Letterman/Rather clip, though:
Click here for Automatic for the People.
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