This is the Thread Where You Bash REM's Monster

I gave up around Green, when they decided to stick with "plodding and deliberate" as an instrumental approach. Based on advance word, I thought Monster would be different, but if anything, it was worse. I always found it overwhelmingly bland and faceless. But it got them on the road, and their renewed joy in playing live at least resulted in a decent studio record (Hi-Fi), so it wasn't all for naught.

Is that doc the one in which the two Michaels look at the sheet music for "Galveston"?

Yep.

I strongly suspect that Automatic-Monster-Hi Fi is their secret creative peak (I am definitely a non-fan)

i mean i would agree but i always thought that was because i was an impressionable teen at the time

I think this is the album where you look to Berry when people talk of his 'restraint' - like in the Pavement tribute song.

He could have been all over this album, given the fact that it was him who seemed to make most noise over the 'return to rock' - but it's not heavy on fills or overplaying at all. Having said that that was pretty much his approach for the duration of the band.

I loved this record, but probably because I was 18.

no recall of ever flipping through this. somebody on here must have one?

http://eil.com/images/main/REM+-+Monster+-+Book+Pack+Sealed+-+CD+ALBUM-549992.jpg

holy fuck i had no idea about this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsCsv996bZw

i remember seeing that special edition.

in retrospect this album isn't nearly as bad as I remember. I like more than almost anything that came after by them.

As a whole, this album doesn't work at all, although some individual songs (like Kenneth) and some individual moments in songs (the chord change on Circus Envy, the throbbing noise in You) are pretty great.

Having said that, I saw them live in '95, aged 17, and was SO EXCITED (and NB also totally high) that it remains, in my memory at least, the best gig I've ever been to.

And Bang and Blame is the first really flat-out irredeemably boring REM song.

i don't think i ever got over the way we heard the album for the first time; over an outdoor PA on a Sunday morning, as we queued up for tickets to the (ultimately cancelled) Birmingham arena gig. it was played at about 8 a.m. and it sounded really thin and tinny over that shitty PA. didn't help that we'd been up all night driving from Manchester to get there i suppose. UP and New Adventures.. wipe the floor with it.

Its the best 'let's run this guitar sound into the ground' album ever

http://i.imgur.com/8XuufQK.jpg

Ha - Piscesx, I heard the record the same way queuing up at Wembley Arena, stuck behind two guys talking about Dark Side of the Moon for three hours. Ugh. Did not sound good.

I was quite a fan before this shabbiness

That three note guitar riff, following the turgid, ploddy 4 chord strumming on Kenneth - its all just flaccid grunge cock

Quite the opposite. They want you to suck their cock.

If I may... http://thequietus.com/articles/16426-rem-monster-review-anniversary

I think this is one of REM's most interesting albums, not least down to Stipe writing some really strong lyrics - dark and ambiguous character studies, plenty of genderfucking.

Their best album.

Good write up

6 Discs on the reissue, but still no room for the best REM doc, which is from the same tour! Maybe they don't liek it. There's a vague Let It Be vibe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBby0SCGLmk

This album sucks, sorry bros

Crush with eyeliner is some boring ass shit

it's good, not in the top 5 but good

20+ years later and i still can't get over how much of a misstep it felt at the time!

And as it remains
They should have called it quits with Green, they’d be legendary by now, a hundred college bands imitating them
I

No no no way before green

This is a good album, though

why did they sing the verse of "losing my religion" when they were singing "bang and blame ?
b and b has a great hook/chorus.
― kenneth jnr, Monday, May 16, 2005 10:00 AM (fourteen years ago)

this always bugs me too, i can't unhear it

I’m gonna bash the fact that the 2-disc version of the anniversary set consists of the original album + remixed album, and not the outtake disc (which you need to buy the 6-disc set to hear).

Who needs two mixes of the same album — especially when the OG version (if you don’t already own it) costs a few bucks in any record store? If the 2CD set was remix + outtakes, there’d be a reason to buy it.

I’m checking out the 25th Anniversary editions of the previous two albums that they’ve been releasing via Craft/Concord... I admit they’re tempting.

Everyone’s got their *jumping off point* with this consistently great band. Monster is a great record, but not my fave sonically.

Appreciate your angle, Alfred. For me, R.E.M. we’re sexiest in the mid-‘80s, when I think they were the most feminine. An attractive veil of artifice and earthy/no-nonsense at the same time.

i haven't heard the remix yet but the remaster itself sounds great, very crisp with a lot of detail i never caught before in the denser tracks cf. "king of comedy"

also this is such a great album, so fun and sexy and weird and creepy

I probably have "I don't sleep, I dream" as my own #1 or #2 track on this, to me it bridges the band's past and present effortlessly.

Pretty sure I just saw the spine of Monster in the CD racks belonging to McNulty in his office cubicle in the first series of The Wire.

It and a Pogues album are the only ones he owns.

I’m gonna bash the fact that the 2-disc version of the anniversary set consists of the original album + remixed album, and not the outtake disc (which you need to buy the 6-disc set to hear).

Exactly, I'm really annoyed by this move. Especially since it also breaks with the run they've had going of the 2-disc version either being packaged with a disc of demos or a live set. I have no desire to have the 2019 mix.

so this seems like a p radical remix? This clip has me excited

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19hhctlleNo&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19hhctlleNo&feature=youtu.be

ugh, well Scott Litt on nixing altogether the staccato guitar on the choruses to WTFK

These remixes are both fucking terrible. I feel like one of those people that bash's Giles Martin's Beatles remixes (which I personally like); WTF is Litt thinking? These sound like boosted rough mixes where he looses almost every little touch that made the songs remotely palateable in the first place (I like this album more than most people but I'm not pretending it's one of their best ones. The remix seems to be aching to make it even worse).

Yeah, just did an A/B listen to "Let Me In" and... I don't think the new version does either the song, or Stipe's vocal, any favors.

(The new version is here.)

The new "Let Me In" is silly.

i'm iffy on listening to the remixes since the original album is so fixed in my mind production-wise, and it was an album i loved right off the bat. i thought it was wildly successful in what it intended to do, and its tepid reception had more to do with it not being the R.E.M. people wanted. Similar to what happened w/a lot of U2 fans in the '90s; both groups of disappointed fans missed out on some of their best work.

there was definitely a distancing effect on the rock tracks where the vocals were buried under layers of guitar overdrive. I can understand how that may have turned people off, but I thought it was pretty cool. "Fixing" the mixes now, just comes across as very unnecessary second guessing.

What will be your look this season?

https://i.imgur.com/WSy9a6j.jpg