REM: Classic or dud?

yep

No. I'm talking about classicist songwriting, Alfred. Even a deep cut like "Wanderlust" on Around the Sun has really nice aspects of this.

This is where you and I differ. I lose interest in songwriting if the performance doesn't catch my ear.

i see where you're coming from, but be mine is so much more raw and direct than strange currencies

i vaguely remember being amused/annoyed by Stipe seeming to give very similar interview soundbytes in the '90s about different songs being "the first love song i've ever written" re: "Be Mine" and "Strange Currencies" and possibly one or two others

At My Most Beautiful also

I have zero problem with the performance on "Wanderlust."

xpost to Alfred!

i think joe keyes (emusic) did a nice job defending monter.

There is no way to overstate how passionately some people hate this record. Arriving on the heels of the dignified Automatic for the People, Monster was a hand job in a seedy theater, and the album that got R.E.M. out of the cabin and back into the arenas, and asserted their place among the legions of grunge bands they'd inspired. It is, as Stipe put it at the time, "a dick record," leering and lascivious, unsafe to take on an unchaperoned date. If Big Black hadn't already nicked the title, they could have called it Songs About Fucking. Before this (and, one could argue, immediately after), the group provided the po-faced template for Conscious Rockers, so self-serious that they were on speed-dial for things like Greenpeace benefits and the Clinton inauguration. Monster proved that if they couldn't be bipartisan, they could at least be bi-curious. Buck takes a lot of flak for his overuse of tremolo on this record, but the intention was to make everything on Monster of a single, snarling piece. The seasick swoon of "Crush With Eyeliner," buttressed by backing vocals from Thurston Moore, finds Stipe sarcastically sneering "I'm the real thing," a line that handily sums up the entire affair. Monster is full of personas, a meditation on self-invention in which Stipe turns himself inside-out and shines a light on his darkest corners (the Fun House barnstormer "Circus Envy" starts with him lamenting "here comes that awful feeling again" like a man turning into a werewolf). For an album hailed as the group's "return to rock," it's loaded with lovely slower moments, too. Though they burned the same chord progression on the tender "Everybody Hurts," "Strange Currencies" ranks among the group's finest compositions, a song of raw, pained longing. Monster also contains one of the best R&B songs of the 90s, the perverse and poignant "Tongue." Stipe has rarely been so unabashedly feminine, singing from the perspective of a lonely high school girl and using a triple-X framing device to describe emotional abuse. How many songs this heartbreaking feature the lyric "Anybody can get laid?"

hardly my favorite rem record, but not as bad as many people say. in fact, it's mostly very good, for what it is. a lot of my negative feelings toward it comes from my seeing 15 copies of it in every "used CD" bin everywhere.

Monster is full of personas, a meditation on self-invention

That's how I've listened to it -- it's the band's Roxy Music record.

"Let's go shopping for personae -- anything, anything that allows me to stick my tongue in your mouth."

Monster doesn't feel especially sexy or sexual to me, even by REM standards

most of those Keyes reviews are excellent. Thanks, Daniel.

monster was the last record i *really* listened to

i think it stands up *much* better than the rep it got at the time. nevertheless i don't think it is 'sexy' nor were band members' insistence that it was 'punk' convincing

amused by the recherche focus on latter-day albums people don't like. shallow figured, winners' page

I think it's very sexy---"Bang & Blame" is the band's "Let It Bleed", & you can hear the same vulnerability, openness. I hesitate to speculate this way since I'm hetero, but I hear it as a very beautiful homosexual song, about a kind of maleness I can't experience but find understandable & fascinating.

"camera" is sexy too

qualmsley's constant griping about the line of conversation is so funny i might start discussing Up at length soon. fyi divisive later records make for more lively conversation than the canonized 80s.

it seems so shallow, and low

i am totally in favor of a lengthy discussion of up

it feels much more bloated/overlong than New Adventures at the same length, but there are some moments i really enjoy on it, definitely could edit it down to a lovely little record

yeah it's not like the songs are indistinct but it could be edited pretty easily. like i said earlier my main problem is that it's pretty much an arrangement nightmare--i guess the late 90s were the last time it was cool to use "primitive drum machines"? (i guess moon safari did come out in '98). anyway, a song like suspicion is actually a really nice little song that has a good melody and good chord changes but it's totally sedated to death.

Up is overlong but I like its three-part structure & think each works on its own. I'd cut Parakeet as redundant.

The "I'm the real thing" line in "Crush w/ Eyeliner" is among Stipe's more annoying deliveries. Thinking about Monster, I just didn't believe any of it -- the lyrics, Stipe's delivery, the guitar -- the whole thing struck me as fake. But not just a put on, a bad put on. That coming from a band that always did sincerity incredibly well. The show I saw at the (then) Rosemont Horizon sucked. Flat out sucked.

I dunno, I still own it, which is as more a function of resale market dynamics (scanning the used bin, I'd see like 8 copies in a row) than ever going back to it. Maybe I'll take it to work tomorrow and give it a listen.

The comment above about New Adventures being what Monster wanted to be or should've been, otm. Maybe they just got better at bombast over the course of that tour...

qualmsley's constant griping

A blue jay hectors from a felled catalpa tree.

the dragonflies are trying to lecture me

New Test Leper could have worked as a single. It's easy to envision an alluring video at least.

"new test leper" was released as a promo and has a video

New Adventures best potential singles, I reckon = New Test Leper, The Wake-Up Bomb, Be Mine, Electrolite. So Fast, So Numb would probably have gone down really well in that era too.

I think I remember reading an interview where they said they considered releasing Be Mine but were nervous about it becoming an enormous ubiquitous radio ballad that everyone got sick of. I've always loved that song.

Still find it amusing how much of an after thought New Adventures felt, if not to critics but in the kind of media and places REM would be found 2 or 3 years previous

Less than a year on from the end of the gaudy Monster tour, the Nico/L&K line is good but it seemed to happen so quickly, as if their fanbase average age suddenly jumped 10 years. Then again, an album in 1991, 1992, 1994, and year long world tour in '95, there must have been an element to some of 'just fucking go away for your own sake', they almost seemed to know it going by the NAIHF cover.

New Adventures is the last great REM album cover IMO, everything since has been poor to horrible. Some of those 80's covers are beautiful.

New Adventures is also, I think, the only album where the idea of REM as a stadium rock band feels like a great one. Monster is kind of forced, the earlier Warners albums a little too low-key.

Wasn't that fabled 96-97 span when even Sub Pop was signing bands like Saint Etienne?

yeah it's definitely true they were over exposed in that early 90s era. re: their audience's age, they managed to get a much younger audience along for the ride with the oldsters, up until Monster but the Monster tour did a very good job indeed of baffling/disenchanting the new more mainstream audience they picked up. the night i saw it they played nothing before Document, played a LOT off Monster itself and threw in THREE brand new tracks. don't think it did them any favours.

I seem to recall from interviews that until that 2003 tour, there were a lot of old songs the band simply forgot how to play. Though really, how hard could it be for R.E.M. to relearn R.E.M. songs? #lazyrockstars

How would playing nothing before Document put off a newer more mainstream audience?

Dunno, the night I saw them, Milton Keynes in August 1995 (Radiohead supporting), they killed it, even if there was quite a lot of Monster in the set it was very hit-heavy as well.

They were one of the bands who ran into a juggernaut of UK jingoism very shortly afterwards as well, that needs to be factored in.

well i dunno it just lacked variety. it just lacked.. the magic, instead we got long LONG versions of Departure and Circus Envy and gawd knows what.. oyyy. Revolution sounded pretty good that night i recall mind.

mm every britpop band supported on that tour. Blur, Echobelly, Oasis, Sleeper.. Dodgy? a shedload anyroad.

"Suspicion" is a good song from Up.

xp The covers of the 00s albums are distressingly bad. Around the Sun was at least a fair advertisement for the music - three boring, indistinct figures. There was such a strong sense after Berry left that they never knew what the hell to do next.

All their album covers are terrible, but yeah those last few were reaching.

Nah, some of the 80s ones were great. The kudzu image on Murmur was perfect.

On the Monster tour's Edinburgh date, we got Belly, Spearhead and Cranberries supporting. An odd bunch. Belly were pretty good, if rather dwarfed by the stadium. Spearhead were cheesy but put on a good show. Cranberries were absolutely hideous, unveiling the terrible songs from their 3rd album - I Shot John Lennon, stuff like that. Grim.
REM were good, although they ruined Try Not To Breathe with a grunged up arrangement. They did play the hits and crowdpleasers - we got Everybody Hurts, Man on the Moon, Losing My Religion, End of the World etc plus a lot of the upbeat songs from Green. But it's true to say that it was quite a weird stadium show: pretty noisy and a maybe bit too arty for a mainstream crowd, with all the surrealist films and backdrops.
They didn't really fit into that long hot summer of Britpop jingoism either. The press were going crazy for Blur and Oasis and REM seemed to belong to a different world and era.
I must I have a copy of the Milton Keynes show I taped of the radio somewhere. Would be interesting to revisit it now.
Saw them at Stirling Castle on the Up tour and that was great. A much more atmospheric venue, quite a scale down from the stadiums of yore, but still pretty big. They played early 80s stuff: Cuyahoga, Pilgrimage, Pretty Persuasion, and did a fine job of the new material. They only played Everybody Hurts on one of the nights though. Perhaps my memory fails me, but there wasn't a huge amount of NAIHF the night I went. The setlists are probably online somewhere.

I was at the Murrayfield gig in Edinburgh and confirm just how bloody awful The Cranberries were.
The first night at Stirling Castle was the best of the REM gigs I went to. One the best gigs I've ever seen - despite it pouring rain for most of it!

does anyone actually like the way Michael Stipe would yell "COOOOOOOOL!" after the chorus on live versions of "Man On The Moon" - I feel like it might be the alt version of "Does anyone remember laughter?"

lol i remember that yell, was he really saying "cool"?

No he wasn't.

wait so if he wasn't yelling "COOOL!" after a chorus that ends "nothing is cool," what was he yelling? "FOOOOL"? "DROOOOL"? "

maybe it was "hoos"

I thought he was just yelling 'COME ON!' or something.

I saw them just before Accelerate came out, in a room above the Apple Store on Regent Street, which is about the least rock and roll venue ever but it was sort of amazing because there were about 100 people in the room, and they played West of the Fields.

that is definitely "COOO-ULLLLL!!!!"at 2:30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTtixBih0PM

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqrrylVyfU1qkb66ro1_400.jpg

Jealous! Shame I didn't see them around that time, as they were playing loads of classics. The Live At Olympia sets are something of a fan boy's dream. Think their last Scottish show was Balloch Country Park around the time of Around The Sun? Didn't have much desire to go cos the album was so dull, and there wasn't a huge amount of fanfare around the gig. That's a big space - Oasis did two nights there in their pomp - perhaps too big for REM at that stage? Scratch, that it was T In The Park, an awful corporate festival. Wish they'd done a headline date as well, back then. A friend saw them at Twickenham and said they were brilliant, but tellingly, the venue wasn't quite full.