Followers of R.E.M., both casual and devoted, must’ve been shocked when encountering Monster (released 9/27/94) upon its original release thirty years ago. Far removed from 1991’s Out of Time and the very next year’s Automatic For the People, the acoustic foundations and lavishly orchestrations of the Southern foursome’s most commercially successful records gave way to raucous and robust hard rock, the likes of which had little precedent in the band’s discography (only their breakthrough record Document was anywhere near as loud).
Yet with the retrospect of three decades, the noisy timbre of this ninth R.E.M studio album shouldn’t be all that surprising. After all, the quartet had forsaken touring since 1989 and may well have built up a sizable head of steam that could only be expended at high volume on stage.
Plus, fatuous as it might sound to compare the DIY stalwarts to the punk-embattled veteran Rolling Stones of 1978 (circa Some Girls), the Georgia-based musicians who had once been at the vanguard of the alternative rock movement in the Eighties may well have also been feeling insecure at the rise of grunge-rock of at the outset of the following decade.
As such, it makes sense R.E.M. would return to something of the enigmatic approach of their early records. For Monster, however, the group and producer Scott Litt chose not to sublimate Michael Stipe’s voice so deeply in the mix: it’s thus hard to miss the menacing air of his vocals on “Crush with Eyeliner” and even more so “Bang and Blame.”
Given how it resides within so much instrumental clamor around and behind him, the expressive tenor of Michael’s singing is all the more laudable (even to his own ears, as he’s stated in recent years). But this musical decision is not just a matter of taste and/or preference for a more conventional sound: the songs themselves, if not the performances of them, sound slightly less foreboding and thus more accessible with the lead vocalist further to the fore.
On those terms, the claustrophobic haze lessens when hearing the characters speak and act in material like “I Don’t Sleep, I Dream.” And especially in Clif Norrell’s remix of the 2019 anniversary reissue, with the guitars less upfront, the confining air dissipates dramatically, even on tunes such as “You” or “Let Me In.”
Still, the emphasis on Peter Buck’s new (at the time) guitar rig remains fascinating in all its jagged, distorted glory. While to some degree, riffs like those of “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” recall the loud chording on the 1987 album above (containing “The One I Love”), that record had virtually none of the barbed edge on display here (nor quite so much contrast with the detailed nuances of bassist Mike Mills’ counterpoint background vocals).
The ever-idiosyncratic quartet that was R.E.M. had always functioned like a distinctly unified entity, and, in hindsight, their collective attitude may never have been more telling than on Monster. Even if only apocryphal, post-release stories of a preponderance of LPs in used record stores testify to the sharply left-field genesis of the title and the proportionally less positive response of a mainstream that had embraced its two predecessors.
Still, it’s more than a little ironic that the courageous formulation of R.E.M.’s 1994 record itself emboldened the four musicians to assemble its next new long-player from material that took shape in soundchecks and on stage while on the road in support of the release. Still, even as New Adventures in Hi-Fi was the first release in the wake of re-upping the group’s label contract via a mammoth deal with Warner Bros, the business-related theme is less germain to the overall narrative of the band: the 1996 title was the final studio effort with drummer/co-founder Bill Berry.
His departure thus ripped asunder a chemistry rare in the history of contemporary rock, one the group would never recover despite all its best efforts—with additional musicians in tow alongside the core three—on long-players such as Reveal five years later.
With three decades’ perspective (and more) on the changing cultural zeitgeist, however, this project of R.E.M.’s appropriately dubbed Monster doesn’t sound much less contrary to the(ir) times than Murmur or Fables of the Reconstruction from some ten years or so prior.
