Monster (R.E.M. album)
Monster is the ninth studio album by American rock band R.E.M., released by Warner Bros. Records in the UK on September 26, 1994, and in the United States the following day. It was produced by the band and Scott Litt and recorded at four studios. The album was an intentional shift from the style of the band's previous two albums, Out of Time and Automatic for the People, by introducing loud, distorted guitar tones and simpler lyrics.
Led by the successful single "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?," Monster debuted at number one in the United States and at least seven other countries, and received generally positive reviews. Four more singles were released from the album, including UK top-20 hits "Bang and Blame," "Strange Currencies" and "Tongue." In 1995, the band promoted the album with its first concert tour since 1989. Although the tour was commercially successful, band members suffered several health problems. At the 37th Annual Grammy Awards, Monster was nominated for Best Rock Album, but lost to The Rolling Stones' Voodoo Lounge. The album's follow-up New Adventures in Hi-Fi was primarily recorded during the tour.
Recording
Early in 1993, R.E.M. convened a four-day meeting in Acapulco to plan their next two years. The group agreed on a plan for 1994 through 1996, which included recording a new album and touring to promote it. Drummer Bill Berry was particularly eager to tour, and insisted that the album "rock". "If we did another record like Out of Time or Automatic for the People, we'd be sitting on stools all night and swapping acoustic instruments, and that would be kind of boring," he said in October 1994. The band agreed that after their previous two albums, they did not want to record another slow-paced album. Frontman Michael Stipe in a 2019 interview with BBC Music viewed the album as an attempt to "reinvent" R.E.M., wanting to do "something that was loud and brash and punk rock."Later that year, R.E.M. began recording their ninth album. Pre-production took place at Kingsway Studio in New Orleans under the supervision of Mark Howard, who had worked on Automatic for the People. Guitarist Peter Buck said that the band wrote 45 songs, including "a whole album's worth of acoustic stuff" which they demoed. According to Howard, the sessions were experimental: "The bass had a tremolo sound on it. It was a more inventive session for them." The studio did not have a control room, so Howard recorded Michael Stipe singing lyrical ideas while lying on a couch: "Being able to put those vocals down helped him write the lyrics to a lot of songs on Monster." When the sessions were finished Howard played the recordings to co-producer Scott Litt, who had worked with the band since their fifth album.
In February 1994, the band moved to Crossover Soundstage in Atlanta, Georgia. At Crossover, most of the album's basic tracks were recorded live as if the band were playing in concert. Litt said, "I thought since they hadn't toured in a while, it would be good for them to get into that mind-set—you know, monitors, PA, standing up". The sessions were hampered by several events, including Berry and bassist Mike Mills falling ill on separate occasions, Buck and Stipe leaving to visit family members and the deaths of Stipe's friends, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and actor River Phoenix. The band wrote and recorded "Let Me In" in tribute to Cobain and dedicated the album to Phoenix, whose sister Rain provided background vocals on "Bang and Blame".
In late April 1994 the band relocated to Criteria Studios in Miami, Florida, but recording was interrupted because Stipe had an abscessed tooth. Unlike previous album sessions, by the time production moved to Ocean Way Recording in Los Angeles the band was behind schedule. Litt attributed the delay to recording live at Crossover, which lengthened the mixing process; he told Rolling Stone, "We're trying to figure out how raw to leave it and how much to studiofy it." Stipe was still writing songs when the band was supposed to be mixing the album. Tensions arose among the band members, who were staying in different locations in Los Angeles and would rarely be in the studio at the same time. The situation came to a head when the group was recording at Louie's Clubhouse ; years later, Stipe recalled, "We broke up... We reached the point where none of us could speak to each other, and we were in a small room, and we just said 'Fuck off' and that was it." The group met to resolve their issues; Mills told Rolling Stone, "We have to begin working as a unit again, which we haven't been doing very well lately."
Composition
Unlike R.E.M.'s previous two albums, Monster incorporated distorted guitar tones, minimal overdubs, and touches of 1970s glam rock. Peter Buck described the album as "a 'rock' record, with the 'rock' in quotation marks." He explained, "That's not what we started out to make, but that's certainly how it turned out to be. There's a nudge, nudge, wink, wink feel to the whole record. Like, it's a rock record, but is it really?" Mike Mills told Time, "On past albums we had been exploring acoustic instruments, trying to use the piano and mandolin, and we did it about all we wanted to do it. And you come back to the fact that playing loud electric-guitar music is about as fun as music can be." Stipe's vocals were pushed down in the mix. Buck's guitar work on the album was inspired by the tremolo-heavy guitar playing of Glen Johansson of Echobelly, who supported R.E.M. on some of the Monster Tour. The album's music has been described as grunge, alternative rock, and glam rock. One critic noted its "sloppy lo-fi fun-isms" in contrast to New Adventures in Hi-Fi. The band has called it a "foxy, in-your-face, punk rock, trashed and stupid" record. "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", "Crush with Eyeliner" and "Circus Envy" have been described as glam rock.Stipe wrote Monster lyrics in character; this, according to biographer Dan Buckley, "set the real Stipe at a distance from the mask adopted for each song." The album dealt with the nature of celebrity and "the creepiness of fandom as pathology". Buck called the album a reaction to the band's popularity: "When I read the lyrics I thought, all these guys are totally fucked up. I don't know who they are, because they're not Michael. I would say that this was the only time where he's done characters that are creepy, and I don't know if anyone got that. He was getting out his things by acting out these parts that are not him." The band noted that at the end of certain songs, they left blank choruses so fans could sing along.
File:Fender Jag-Stang Sonic Blue.png|alt=A Fender Jag-Stang Sonic Blue|left|thumb|349x349px|"Let Me In", a tribute to deceased musician Kurt Cobain, was played using a Fender Jag-Stang guitar that belonged to him.
The song "Let Me In" was dedicated to the memory of American musician Kurt Cobain, leader of the grunge band Nirvana, who maintained a close friendship with Stipe. On April 5, 1994, during the first recording sessions for Monster, he died from a self-inflicted shotgun wound. On the recording of the track, Mills used a Fender Jag-Stang guitar that belonged to Cobain; his widow Courtney Love, leader of the band Hole, gave it to Mills. As Cobain was left-handed and Mills was right-handed, he had to play the guitar backwards. On the other hand, Buck used a Farfisa organ during the recording of the track. Speaking during BBC Radio 1's Evening Session Show in 1994, Stipe reflected on how the deaths of Cobain and American actor River Phoenix contributed to the creation of Monster: "We feel like we reached a zenith with that record. River's death prevented me from being able to write for almost five months. When I did start writing I came up with 'Crush With Eyeliner,' 'What's the Frequency, Kenneth?,' 'Circus Envy' and then when Kurt died halfway through making the record and I just threw my arms up and I had to express the frustration that I had, trying to pull him out of the state of mind he was in and not succeeding you know, I wrote that song and we put it on the record".