Posts Tagged ‘R.E.M.’
“A dick record” — R.E.M.’s Monster
J. Edward Keyes’ review of Monster comes closest to explaining that blighted record’s continuing fascination for me:
Arriving on the heels of the dignified Automatic for the People, Monster was a hand job in a seedy theater, and the album that got R.E.M. out of the cabin and back into the arenas, and asserted their place among the legions of grunge bands they’d inspired. It is, as Stipe put it at the time, “a dick record,” leering and lascivious, unsafe to take on an unchaperoned date. If Big Black hadn’t already nicked the title, they could have called it Songs About Fucking. Before this (and, one could argue, immediately after), the group provided the po-faced template for Conscious Rockers, so self-serious that they were on speed-dial for things like Greenpeace benefits and the Clinton inauguration. Monster proved that if they couldn’t be bipartisan, they could at least be bi-curious.
Out of love
After a hasty revisit, the second side of R.E.M.’s Out of Time does contain their most melancholy material, no? Certainly the sequence from “Shiny Happy People” through “Me in Honey” shows a willed accommodation to uncertainty; it’s “Crimson and Clover” extended to almost thirty minutes, beginning with phony optimism and, in the Michael Stipe and Kate Pierson harmonies of “Me in Honey,” a mutual acknowledgment that they kinda like each other because the loneliness of the alternative is too much to bear. “I need this, I need this,” Stipe sings, then howls on “Country Feedback,” as Peter Buck’s guitar and the rhythm section answer, mock, distort.
