Sweet Monster Headache

R.E.M. with Dan Rather on Letterman, 1995


My next R.E.M. album is Monster, which is another one of their albums I don't listen to that often. The album was heralded as their return to "rock" after Out Of Time and Automatic For The People, and it does rock, but most the songs sound exactly the same, so it kind of grates over the course of 45-50 minutes.

When I was a kid, I used to call it "headache music". One of the earliest albums I bought with my own money was Desolation Boulevard by The Sweet. I remember that I liked all the songs on DB when I listened to them one at a time, but I would get a headache if I tried to listen to the whole album from start to finish, because they all sounded exactly alike.

Monster reminds me a lot of Desolation Boulevard, both in the way it sounds (somewhere between glam and grunge) and the way it hurts my head to listen to the entire album from start to finish. The only songs that stand out are "Strange Currencies" (essentially a shorter version of "Everybody Hurts") and "Tongue" (a faux-soul number where Michael sings like Roland Gift), which are my two favorites. The others are just one big stretch of distorted guitar and tremolo/vibrato. In other words, headache music.

The main reason I don't listen to Monster very much is that I don't get a lot of enjoyment out of listening to it. And the title of the leadoff single was stolen from Game Theory.