Most of what is included isn’t even as heat-damaged as “Crush with Eyeliner” or “Circus Envy.” Instead, the demos here tend to be lost instrumentals and riffs for which Stipe never ended up writing lyrics. The band declined to throw in any embryonic versions of songs that actually appear on the record we’ll never know if or how “King of Comedy” was assembled piece-by-glitching-piece. It’s hard to determine how Monster got this way and the demos included with this reissue aren’t edifying. Another, “King of Comedy,” is driven by an unusually harsh and rickety rhythm track, sounding like a machine barely held together by screws and breathing large plumes of exhaust.
(During the 1995 show included with the 25th-anniversary reissue of the record, Stipe introduces “Tongue” by saying it has “a little bit of a ‘Luscious Jackson, roller derby’ vibe to it,” which nails it.) Another, “Let Me In,” written after the suicide of Stipe’s friend Kurt Cobain, is more funereal than almost anything on Automatic, a storm of overcompressed electric guitar chords that resembles the sound of the ocean when you close your eyes. A lot of it wobbles sideways like an amoeba, including the two songs that blossom from near-identical tremolo riffs, “Crush with Eyeliner” and “I Took Your Name.” One song, “Tongue,” sounds beamed in from a piano lounge on the moon.
They were going to write an album full of punk songs that would be fun to play live. Peter Buck had recently switched to playing Les Paul guitars, and the sounds he pulled out of them made his amps buzz like beehives. “We smashed against the wall and told the string players to go home,” Stipe said at the time. They hadn’t toured in five years and they worried these quieter, more introverted songs would result in them playing slow, gloomy sets sitting atop stools. By the time they recorded Automatic, the band had traveled far afield musically, into pastoral realms where the strum of a mandolin guided processionals about death and suffering.
Why did fans and non-fans alike quietly reject Monster? For one, Monster was a fatal attempt to return to the band’s roots-to the taut, sparkling rock they made in the '80s. The blurred bear illustration on the front cover became a recognizable orange swell in every used record store’s dollar bin. 1 on the Billboard album charts, Monster is primarily known as a used record.