I like the album a lot. I was thankful that Peter Buck had decided to put down the mandolin and start playing some big rock guitar.
I’ve always loved it, although for me, “Murmur” is their grand magnum opus, and it’s also their first full-length album.
Except for “Bang and Blame”. Never liked that song, and the very first time I was able to say that about an R.E.M. song at all.
Good lord, yes. Put me off the mandolin for a while, that did.
He is a great guitar player.
I may be the wrong person to ask, because I’m NOT a huge REM fan (I like enough of their songs to put together one good Greatest Hits CD), but I liked Monster a lot.
I liked Monster but at the time it came out I remember having a lot of trouble getting into it since it was such a departure from Automatic for the People which is still one of my top 5 favorite albums of all time.
The first (and only) time I ever saw REM play a show was at the Gorge Amphitheatre in 1995 or so for the Monster tour. It was their first tour since Green (they never toured for Out of Time) and it was an incredible show. Bill Berry was back from brain surgery and they played their hearts out (by the end of End of the World during the final encore, Stipe’s voice was so gone he had to just hoarsely shout the lyrics).
I love it that we have two people with REM song user names in this thread.
I like Monster. I’ll admit it was pretty jarring on first listen, but by the time it was released I was a long-time committed fan and was interested and prepared to enjoy just about anything that came out of their creativity.
I heard the Hib-Tone version of Radio Free Europe on the radio in 1981 or 1982 and was at their first show in Baltimore at the Marble Bar in 1982. Their early shows were harder and rockier than Chronic Town and Murmur would lead you to expect. Document seemed like a change of direction more to folks who had not seen them live, I think.
They were a band that allowed their producers to have a significant creative impact on their albums, I think. The Mitch Easter/Don Dixon albums, Murmur and Reckoning, defined what REM was supposed to be in the minds of a lot of people. Joe Boyd moved them a little away from that on Fables of the Reconstruction, Don Gehman took it a little further on Life’s Rich Pageant. Scott Litt’s first work with them was Document, and I think that they felt that they had really achieved something that they had been searching for, because they kept Litt around through New Adventures in Hi-Fi. I love the first four albums, but I think the ones that were co-produced by the band and Scott Litt are their best work.
The last album I bought was Up, which I like a lot. By that time, I began to feel that they were running out of ideas. The last time I saw the live was the Monster tour.
I don’t think it’s terrible. But Monster is very much a product of the early-mid 90s alternative rock music scene. The whole grunge thing had been winding down. Kurt Kobain was dead. Pearl Jam was experimenting with all sorts of weird noise on their third album. U2 was doing its best to become an EDM act. It was a confusing time for everyone. We had no idea that we were just a few years away from being inundated with the Matchbox Twenty sound or a steady onslaught of Nu-Metal rap-rock.
I’ll go a little further and say that after “Out of Time” and “Automatic for the People”, they were due for something less grand.
Monster was hardly bad, but it was a more rock-ish shift in sound and style, and I think that turned a lot of people off, plus pop music at the time was firmly in the throes of grunge, and REM didn’t fit into that nearly as well as they did in the post 80s pop era of 1991-1993, when grunge was just starting to find wide commercial success.
I mean, people freaking loved “Out of Time” and “Automatic for the People”, and then when “Monster” came out, the general reaction was “Huh.”
(based on personal recollections of my first few years of college, including an insanely rabid, obsessed with REM roommate, who after making me listen to all the albums up through Automatic for the People, just sort of gave up at Monster.)
I agree with this.
I didn’t become an REM fan until Out of Time, and I listened the hell out of that and Automatic. Really liked that sound at the time, but then Monster came out and was glad to hear some rock out of them.
BTW, not only do I have “Chronic Town”, when I purchased it, it was the only record they had. I was in college, and my roommate didn’t care for their music (a massive understatement) and we did agree that it would quite likely be their only release. And then “Murmur” came out, and I knew then that they would indeed be a huge band someday.
And at the time, I wondered if I might know one of them. When I was a kid, there was a boy named Mike Mills that I knew through some activities who was a few years older than me and did indeed look a bit like his namesake, and I went to high school with his sisters. That summer (1983), I was working at Target and they came through my line, and I asked them if their brother was in a band. They said no, and neither had heard of R.E.M. until that moment. I attended our 10-year HS reunion in 1991, and the sister who was in my class told me that I was the first person ever to ask her that. Obviously, I wasn’t the last. 
The second half of Monster has some grating noise that has always bothered me, but altogether I think it’s an excellent album. As others have said, it was just so different. It didn’t attract the same people who had been listening to REM up to that point.
FWIW, I was 14 when it came out. I have Out Of Time through Up, not interested before or after those albums.
Honestly, I don’t get the hate for Monster. It’s a terrific album. I’ll say the same about “New Adventures in Hi-Fi,” too.
I think their post-commercial stuff is frankly excellent, at leastr up until New Adventures. “Automatic for the People” is one of the best albums ever recorded by anyone, full stop; it’s Top 50 all time, which is saying a lot, and albums like Document, Out of Time, etc. are full of absolutely sensational music. When people say “aw they’re no good after they started selling a lot of albums” I honestly wonder if it’s an attempt at parody. REM’s best work was their best selling work.
The band lost its mojo when Bill Berry quit. I don’t think anything they did after that had the life or originality of anything that came before. “Reveal” is a lovely album, in its way, but its way is pretty bland, IMHO, just a repetition of the stuff that worked on previous albums.
That’s no shot against the remaining members. It’s simply to be expected that the dynamic between four artists is not going to be the same when one leaves.
Well, all three of the remaining members agree Bill Berry had a LOT of say on which songs made it onto albums and how they arranged or performed each song. His opinion carried a lot of weight with the rest of the band.
So, if Bill said, “This song sucks, it’s not going on the album,” it didn’t go. Or, if Peter Buck came up with what he considered a throwaway riff, Berry was often the one to say, “No no no, that’s good- keep working on that one.”
Berry was frequently the one to say “Let’s slow this one down,” or “Let’s rev this one up,” or “Why don’t we try this one with a string section?” Even when he wasn’t writing a lot of songs himself, he shaped the overall sound of each album.
For me, they peaked with Fables of the Reconstruction, but I pretty much like everything up to and including Green. Though there’s a few clinkers in tracks, overall they put together a brilliant body of work on the EP and the six subsequent albums. After that, I liked a song here and there, but I wasn’t interested in keeping up with them any longer.
Off of Monster, I like “Let Me In”, but I generally like big washes of guitar.
I loved Monster. It was the first REM album I ever bought (college roommates had Green and Automatic). I saw them on the tour, and that was the first great rock show I ever saw.
I remember Radiohead was the opener and I had no patience for them at the time (Play Creep already!)
To use an analogy… Monster was a VERY popular album, as was Metallica’s Black Album. And yet, it’s common to hear fans saying, “Metallica started to suck with the Black Album” or “REM started to suck with Monster.” EVERYBODY didn’t hate those albums - it just SEEMS that way from angry web postings.
Now, I happen to like both of those albums a lot- in fact, I like them a lot better than most of either band’s earlier albums. But there’s no doubt that each album represented a major change in style from what older fans had been used to. The Black Album didn’t sound like thrash- it sounded like mainstream hard rock/heavy metal. And Monster didn’t sound anything like the college band that people got into in the 80s.
I think it’s absurd to call either a “terrible” album, but easy to see why many older fans didn’t appreciate either album the way millions of newer fans did.
I don’t own all the really old U2, having started with Joshua Tree*, but *Pop *was their first album that I outright refused to buy. Didn’t buy No Line on the Horizon either, just didn’t interest me.
- Then went back and purchased War, and Unforgettable Fire
Didn’t care for Monster, and I liked earlier REM albums.
Not the greatest album ever, but it did give rise to this moment where Dan Rather sang “What’s the Frequency Kenneth” with the band during a sound check. The song title refers to an incident where some lunatic attacked Dan Rather.
I’ve expressed this opinion before, but the REM album I can’t defend at this point is Out of Time.
Let’s be clear: “Country Feedback” is a stone classic and would make my top 5 REM songs list hands down. “Losing My Religion” was so ubiquitous that it’s impossible to really judge it anymore. “Me in Honey” gets most of the way there and misses hard on the landing. “Half a World Away” isn’t bad, but it’s nowhere near as interesting as the slower songs on Green like “Hairshirt” and “You Are the Everything”.
The rest ranges from filler to atrocities like “Radio Song”.
What’s good is so good that it justifies the record’s existence, but it’s by far my least favorite of the records up through New Adventures.