This is the Thread Where You Bash REM's Monster

I went thru the rough/unfinished demos on my drive... a few of them sound like they could have made good songs, but most sound like super-generic R.E.M. jams.

I really like the remix! "I Don't Sleep, I Dream" is fabulous: Litt draws consistently on the doomy side of the album, in emphasizing the bass, and it lifts this song into something new (rather than just subtracting something old, like on WTFK).

i find the extremely audible amp hiss on "i don't sleep i dream" p much ruins it

listening to the remix r/n and finding it totally hapless for my own ears --- there's definitely neat "revealed details" but it's sorta missing the whole reason i wanna listen to Monster. pulling stipe's voice out and pushing the band back... it sounds like a solo album demo tape, or a late-period REM album maybe. and some of the lyrics that are going for camp menace end up sounding just goofy, idk. like idk, "star 69" and "bang and blame" and "tongue" come through okay, but "circus envy" without everything brickwalled and fuzzed out sounds a lot like "ignoreland" in the "squares trying to be a heavy caveman riff band" kinda way.

it does sound like a demo tape! i hate it

the only smart choice i can point to is subtracting the drums from the first verse/chorus of "you," that sounds pretty cool

I thought "Tongue" came out well. None of these are going to replace for me the original versions (well, maybe "Strange Currencies", the only song on this I've never liked).

I thought it was weird that Mike Mills' voice is mostly cut, but there are other female vocals I never noticed before brought to the forefront. Who are they? Is Stipe's sister on this?

Ané Diaz – backing vocals on "Bang and Blame"
Sally Dworsky – backing vocals on "King of Comedy" and "Bang and Blame"
Lynda Stipe – backing vocals on "Bang and Blame"

sally dworsky's and stipe's gang vocals at the end of "king of comedy" are prob my favorite moment on the whole record

I only discovered today that she's also on the Lion King soundtrack. That's quite the early 90s CV.

huh, cool! the end of "King of Comedy" is really fun now in the remix, in a way I'd never noted before

I think part of the deal for me with the remix is that I’ve listen to this album so many times, it’s kind of become “ossified,” so it’s nice to be able to hear the songs with fresh ears... even if the remixed version is definitely not the one I would recommend to someone coming in new!

(The basic remaster also helps freshen up the songs… although the bass may be boosted a teeensy bit too much on “Bang or Blame.”)

these demos are lame

i'm never going to listen to this remix again.

the remaster is really nice

Looking back at Monster as a whole package, the sleeve imagery, the Thurston Moore guest appearance, etc. it all feels to me now like a concerted effort to sell R.E.M. as these kind of godfathers of the indie rock scene. That might be part of the reason why it felt so baffling and mildly alienating to me as a kid, when "Automatic" was my only other knowledge of the band - I wasn't really into "cool" music then and found this new direction really strange.

It makes it feel like a bit of an anomaly in that sense, I can't think of another album in their back catalogue that is consciously striving for hipster cred status (at least from a presentation point of view) as this one did, and they've never particularly struck me as a band that really gave a shit about that sort of thing. By the time of "Up", just four years later, they were pretty much already rock heritage material in any case.

FWIW, it didn’t feel that way to me at the time... If anything, SY‘s Dirty felt more like that!

i really do not think monster was made with hipster cred in mind or that it even seems like a record striving for that and will expand on this elsewhere. "what's the frequency kenneth" is itself about striving for coolness and failing bc you're too old

Slagging R.E.M. for "striving for hipster cred" on this record is like tearing into the Rolling Stones for "striving for disco cred" on Some Girls. I see where you're coming from, sure, but it's way off base.

I'm not slagging the band at all! I'm suggesting it may've been a marketing decision to try and sell it that way, that doesn't seem so unlikely given the musical climate of the time, to me anyway.

Was in the record store last night and the 2 clerks a (both v earnest early-20s rock kids) were listening to the remaster and complaining that the vocals were too low in the mix on the original. Also had a conversation where they both expressed amazement at how Michael Stipe, “the main guy”, didn’t play guitar. I felt old.

I dont' recall that being the marketing stance at the time. it was just presented as their new and now noisy album, and some people liked it and some people didn't like it. It does have a higher dud ratio than anything else they'd released to that point, I think. I missed the tour for this album even though I had tickets because I had a school party to attend; does anyone know how that went over?

ask the people at the party, idk

the live show included in the reissue is very good

also i would like to advance the theory that there are no duds on this record

This tour kicked ass, but props for being true to your school.

I was there at the time,and Monster confused buyers who became fans after two consecutive slow albums. The rest of us owned Green, Document, and Lifes Rich Pageant; we know they were often loud.

I think it was even more of a surprise of how fuzzed-out virtually all of the album was, it was not a sound even associated with their earlier rockier songs

The mix didn't impress me so much as the queerness in lyrics and delivery: now he mumbled, but legibly, behind fuzz.

i'm straight i'm queer i'm bi

Why were those clerks amazed that Stipe didn’t play guitar?

also i would like to advance the theory that there are no duds on this record

I concur... I also prefer it to the preceding two albums, when all is said & done.

I'm listening to the new vinyl release of this tonight.
It's just a really good record.
I remember it being more fuzzy, repetitive and unfocused than it actually is.
Weird how memory plays tricks on you like that.

What the heck is this trebly mess with remixed "King of Comedy," wow. No thank you.

Why were those clerks amazed that Stipe didn’t play guitar?

They were Guitar Guys themselves (they were debating what guitars different solos sounded like they were played on: "That's a strat!" "No, sounds like a tele!"), and it sounded like they had an idea from Monster of REM as an Cool Guitar Rock Band, and I think they were just surprised that "the main guy" wasnt himself a cool guitar-playing guy like Jack White or Dan Aurebach. It was p interesting to hear them listening to it and processing it as young 2019 rock fans.

That is interesting... I feel like that model shouldn’t be too alien, thnx to more recent bands like Radiohead or whoever

? Thom Yorke is a great guitarist, though often overlooked in praise of Jonny Greenwood

Oh haha, mea culpa

(not a Radiohead fan)

I was there at the time,and Monster confused buyers who became fans after two consecutive slow albums. The rest of us owned Green, Document, and Lifes Rich Pageant; we know they were often loud

I was also there at the time and I knew that Monster had absolutely nothing in common with those great earlier records. Hated it at the time, still hate it now.

I was a bit of an REM casual at the time but I remember being intrigued that they were clearly building up to a left turn. The thing I liked most about the album was its muddiness but I guess Murmur was my other favourite of theirs, it kind of makes sense.

It was the first one I didn't buy but there's at least some continuity with earlier records, no? "You" has a vibe not unlike "I Remember California" IIRC. "Star 69" and "Let Me In" sound like they could have been on LRP. (With a rhythm section added and reverb toned down marginally on the latter, he concedes upon refreshing memory. LOL)

I often think of Monster and Achtung Baby as birds of a feather, bands at the peak of their fame changing their sound in a way that surprised their fan bases. But Achtung Baby was more of a departure thematically than Monster was. While U2's album turned away from the "current affairs" politics of The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum, REM had already made that turn on Out of Time, towards a more inner politics. Monster intensified that, turned more acutely toward sexuality, but continued a turn already taken.

Stipe is of course not good at playing guitar but during the Up era he at least pretended to in concert, right? I remember on "Hope" he strums one chord (a G) the whole way through.

hmm was really excited to check this out but yeah there's something so muddled about it, same thing starts off on fire then I lose interest

new mixes are shocking! pretty crazy, usually these things are cool but tasteful like the Beatles ones, these are radical, not sure it's any better than the brown murk but it's definitely a different take on the record

I wonder if they'll remix Around the Sun and Reveal to make those albums bearable.

i don’t think a remix would help those records. maybe a disc of demo versions for reveal cf. the excellent demo of “the lifting” which makes the album version seem overthought and its tempo rushed

I'd be interested in hearing a remix that made the albums even worse, like the Monster one. Ok I wouldn't.

Wouldn't change Around the Sun. Reveal would be fun to play around with.

frankly accelerate could use something. it's an ok album, and a bit like monster in it's aesthetics, but I think it sounds shitty.