Review Summary: REM did not make Monster easy – it is difficult to warm to the impersonality of the album’s form and content – but the satire is more often successful than not and it is interesting to hear the band stretch itself sonically, even if out of mockery.
Artistic authenticity is a cogent debate in the pop/rock music world. Unlike television, where viewers have become accustomed to and accepted that “reality TV” is not real – that the “stars” of these shows, while playing themselves, are playing a characterized version of themselves. Listeners don’t take kindly to discovering their musicians being just plain fake, as evidenced by Milli Vanilli or Ashlee Simpson, due to the listener’s desire to create a connection to the artist and their music. However, intentional inauthenticity or satire has often found a warm welcome - critically, at least - within the confines of pop/rock music. A number of factors, though - expectation, pre-release chatter, the inherent blurry line between irony and artifice – can cause a misinterpretation of authenticity.
In just a five-year period from 1987-1992, REM transformed from a beacon of the American indie-label college rock scene to bona fide major-label MTV superstars. The band remained critical darlings and fan favorites through this transition by sticking to their craft, honing it finer while progressively fleshing it out with each passing album. Fresh off their most fully realized work, 1992′s sterling Automatic For The People, and not having toured their most popular releases of their career, REM waded into an artistically dangerous situation as a perennially beloved band confronting wild expectation. Monster as REM’s “rock album” was the party line in pre-release marketing and hype; though, Peter Buck referred to it as the band’s “rock in quotations” album, implying a not entirely straightforward approach to ”rock,” and perhaps, even, a certain tongue-in-cheekedness. This subtle implication escaped many fans – no doubt expecting a muscle-bound version of their earlier work – setting the stage for a big whiff of expectation vs. reality.
A straight-forward rock album, Monster is not; somewhat unnerving, for a band that never seemed captive to a time or subgenre, the rock Buck alluded to that features on roughly half the album is clearly steeped in the past – 60s/70s garage, Iggy Pop-influenced glam, even Neil Young Rust Never Sleeps-era sludge. This sound certainly renders the songs unrecognizable as REM, and unsettlingly pushes them close to pastiche at times. “Crush With Eyeliner” finds Michael Stipe aping the deadpan found on Iggy’s early solo works over a heavily distorted saw-tooth guitar strut and “King Of Comedy” finds his flat, breathy vocals churned through a bullhorn-like effect alongside snappy dance drums and pulsating rhythm. The final third of the album can be particularly murky as the grime and sludge hit track after track. Stipe struggles mightily to escape ”Let Me In”s completely melody-less doom drone and growls akin to his grunge contemporaries betwixt a ”Hey Hey My My” crunch on “Circus Envy.”
These sonic reaches can be simultaneously mightily intriguing and mightily disconcerting. However, much of the concern is allayed by the thematic unity of Stipe’s lyrics – that REM is basically ***ing with us and they don’t appreciate being ***ed with – and the fact that the sound was specifically designed to reflect it. Stipe has never been one to accept the trappings of stardom with open arms, and on Monster, he makes his discomfort abundantly clear – he warns “don’t *** with me” on lead single “What’s The Frequency Kenneth?” and asserts “I’m not commodity” on “King of Comedy.” He’s even lyrically in on the “rock” ruse as you can virtually see the wink and eye-roll accompanying his declaration “I’m the real thing” on “Crush With Eyeliner;” he directly references the album’s rock touchstone on “I Took Your Name” bemoaning, “I don’t want to be Iggy Pop, but if that’s all it takes, hey.”
Monster does feature a couple of truly successful variations on the classic REM sound – “What’s The Frequency Kenneth?” bulks up the anthemic sound introduced on Document, neatly dressing it with flourishes of the buzzsaw guitar employed more extensively elsewhere on the album and a winding, nearly psychedelic, guitar solo. “I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” is driven by Bill Berry’s tom-toms under Buck’s typically melodic rhythm guitar as Stipe employs a falsetto on the chorus backed by a tense staccato synth-line. The balance of the album includes pleasant, if ultimately, inconsequential retreads of prior songs - ”Star 69″ is slightly amped-up REM by numbers and ”Strange Currencies” is a seedier, rockier “Everybody Hurts;” though “Tongue” is truly an oddity – Stipe sings in a falsetto the entire track alongside a simple organ & piano tandem hearkening “The Entertainer” – the track comes across as “Nightswimming”s high-as-a-kite cousin.
It is telling that the album’s most personal song, a paean to the recently deceased Kurt Cobain, “Let Me In,” is where Stipe is most buried. REM did not make Monster easy – it is difficult to warm to the impersonality of the album’s form and content – but the satire is more often successful than not and it is interesting to hear the band stretch itself sonically, even if out of mockery.
