This is the Thread Where You Bash REM's Monster

(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.

could be that the songs just aren't that great though.

Sounds nice to me, listening to it now. Why were we supposed to hate Jacknife Lee again?

monster was my way in to r.e.m. (and honestly to a lot of music) at the age of 10....so i've listened to it A LOT. the remix is fascinating given how familiar i am with the sonics of the original mix. when i listen to the original nowadays i think the way stipe's voice is so frequently buried and obscured is the album's fatal flaw. my initial take is that while not every remix works the new versions of crush with eyeliner and star 69 are pretty compelling and making the vocal a little more naturalistic is one of the reasons why.

it seems totally insane to shell out for another physical copy of monster in 2019 but i feel like i really need to give the remaster and remix both a good list.

*a good listen

I don't hate Jacknife Lee, I know nothing about him aside from the fact that I think his name is stupid. But I find that album murky and poorly mixed and mastered, and the songs, while not bad, are kind of all mediocre and unmemorable. It's an 'almost' record, as in, it's almost good. Or, I almost remember liking it, and thinking it was almost right.

Yeah, that album sounds terrible, and the songs (from what I can hear thru the ear-bleeding production) are no great shakes, either. But R.E.M. lost me soon after Monster, anyway.

So, you don't like the compression? Because if it sounds loud then all you gotta do is turn it down.

I think it's warm sounding, clear, bass sounds nice, vocals sound nice. It's like 10X better sounding than Monster.

But Collapse Into Now is even better.

"Supernatural Superserious" and "Mr. Richards" are both all-time R.E.M. for me.

Because if it sounds loud then all you gotta do is turn it down.

How about down to “0,” does that work? 😅

Currently spinning Monster for the first time in 10-15 years - it seems pretty great actually, and the mix sounds like they got exactly what they were going for.

You hate the compression, I guess. I don't know cuz you don't elaborate.

xp

accelerate sounds like a mess imo, every jacknife lee record from around that time is cursed with an awful mix. but then i think monster sounds amazing

great review Brad, agree with most everything you said, and loved the description of Let Me In drowning in the rain of its own grief. It's definitely the queerness of the album which makes it so compelling.

This album is too good for some of y'all.

Gutted that the Tongue remix doesn't reinstate layers of fuzz guitar

Dolby atmos mix of Murmur or gtfo

Brad, if I could write as well as you, I’d (hope to) be a writer too!

The remixes are ok, but I could do without the “It’s Litt!” drops on every track.

lol

thank you matthew and morrisp <3

With regard to Accelerate’s production, it is worth pointing out that the record was mastered very differently for vinyl and for CD. While the CD release was rather a "loudness wars" disaster, the vinyl release actually has some room to breathe sonically. Consequently, though I do not own a turntable myself, I bought the CD to support the band, and then I downloaded a vinyl rip from a filesharing community, and the vinyl rip is what I actually pay over my stereo when I want to listen to this album.

This album is too good for some of y'all.

The irony of this is that...R.E.M. ruled. They were everything Kurt Cobain said they were always. And surely 90% or more of the ILM R.E.M. crew all have a *cutoff point* - whatever your variant of the "I stopped paying attention after Fables of the Reconstruction formula may happen to be.

Y'all are the haters.

didn't know that about accelerate - huh! i should check out the vinyl version, i like several of the songs on that album but the main thing that keeps me from putting it on is my mental "pre-hearing" of what it sounds like.

xp Tim - any band that releases 15+ albums over 31 years is sure to lose many folks along the way (regardless of whatever Kurt Cobain may have "said they were"); it's not a big deal?

yeah really

enjoyed your write-up, brad. didn't really make me want to rush out and buy the reissue though, lol.

I just bought it (the 2CD version), LOL.

Figured I’d contribute to the Mike Mills Jr. college fund, or whatever.

R.E.M. is actually the name of the scientist, the monster is called R.E.M.'s Monster

Can't decide if I want to spend the money on the whole box, but I'm annoyed that the 2-disc version is just the album and the remix. For the previous reissues the second disc of the smaller version was always either a disc of demos or a live set. The remix doesn't interest me at all.

I'll try to be more blasé. Anyway, I was trying to say that I like Monster.

Monster really isn't any better this time around but thankfully, it isn't worse. For all the talk about this being a nod to glam, I don't hear the musical joy of glam coming through at all. It's mostly just slabs of chords in that regard, and I'll never understand Buck's sudden love for the Les Paul, which doesn't suit his style much.

The new Litt remixes are very much a mixed bag, some songs work a little better and some don't; I found them interesting but rarely (surprisingly!) preferable to the originals. I guess I was hoping for a Don't Tell A Soul transformation, because those remixes are GREAT.

The demos are interesting-ish, but if anything they sort of present a band trying to find a louder vibe that will sound like REM. And they don't, really. The live tracks are ok but the band sounds distanced like they are playing stadiums. Which they were, despite Buck making promises that he'd never play stadiums.

Also, if you listen to all of REMs albums in succession in a reasonably short amount of time (as I recently did), Monster doesn't sound particularly out of place as I'd remembered.

peter buck may have been playing a les paul on monster, that's news to me as of this reissue press cycle, but man he did not get anything close to a classic les paul sound.

i think it sort of works on monster, and also on new adventures (which i like a lot more), but it is not a tone i would ever elect to use.

there's certainly a section of the fanbase that were lost by REM's move to stadiums, despite the many more they picked up along the way.

The arena moves by 1988/89 might have been a little much for some of the old guard but IMO it seemed all of a piece with the end of a prolific decade; a natural progression to the million seller that they had become - finishing off in Atlanta arenas seemed like a cap on everything that they had achieved. I feel like some of those along for the ride going into the 90s were alienated by the move to stadiums by 1994 and dropped off; the intimacy of even 1988/89 was lost.

(Buck was bringing out the Les Paul on the Green tour for 'Turn You Inside Out' and certainly a few others; I dont remember if he employed the LP on prior tours)

Also, if you listen to all of REMs albums in succession in a reasonably short amount of time (as I recently did), Monster doesn't sound particularly out of place as I'd remembered.

it gets a little normalized in retrospect by new adventures imo. but i listened to it for the first time a decade after it came out, after having heard most of the previous and following r.e.m. records, and idk, it still shocked me