Monster - REM (1994)

The short version: This is REM’s grunge album

The more nuanced version:

You couldn’t be a rock band in 1994 without reckoning with the earth-shaking change in the music over the previous few years. The massive guitar sounds were practially table stakes to get noticed. The lyrics and intentions behind the songs had become radically more personal, expressive, and revealing than before. Structurally, REM had helped as much as anyone to build this “smart rock” revolution. What they had yet to do, after a small acoustic tour for Out Of Time and a single hometown show for Automatic, was mount a massive world tour in this new era.

They decided they needed a batch of tough, edgy songs to support what they already had. Peter Buck filed the serial numbers off his guitar effects and the band submerged an otherwise pretty standard batch of REM songs into a bath of fuzzy distortion.

The sound isn’t as foreign as it might first seem. Sure it’s booming rock in a way that the band seldom dealt in before. But the combination of each member’s talents is still there, still ego-less, and still creating an overall product as good as any you’ll hear.

Tracks I Liked

What’s the Frequency Kenneth? - If you weren’t aware, it’s an homage to a bizarre episode wherein CBS news anchor Dan Rather got curb-stomped

Star 69 - Again, some cultural context: Back before the days when you could always see who was calling, most phone exchanges let you dial *69 to call back to the last number that called you.

Strange Currencies - This was already a highlight of the band’s career before a remixed version soundtracked some significant moments in FX’s brilliant The Bear.

Let Me In - Stipe doesn’t often talk about what his songs “mean”, but this one he’s admitted was his response to watching his friend Kurt Cobain spiral out of control at the end of his life.