Crush With Eyeliner

 

Monster gets mixed opinions. Some feel it's massively inferior to the two albums that preceded it, others find it an exciting change of direction. I kind of see both sides of the argument. Yes, musically it's not maintaining the dizzy heights of most of Automatic For The People but it would have been wrong for the band to create another acoustic, sombre record despite how much we would have all liked that.

Monster also sees R.E.M. becoming fashionable again and, for a while, it wasn't embarrassing as a teenager to admit to being an R.E.M. fan. Nirvana were always a bit too heavy for me but when R.E.M. went all grunge in 1994 it was certainly something I was going to take notice of. In actual fact, the term "grunge" has been wrongly associated with Monster, glam rock would have been a better description for their latest genre experiment.

Crush With Eyeliner marks the start of "the new material" as most will have already heard What's The Frequency Kenneth? on the radio by the time of the release of Monster. It also marks the introduction of the tremolo-effect guitar which was always going to be my biggest hurdle when taking on a cover of this song. It took me a while to work out that it was actually a tremolo and not delay or echo. For a while I was struggling with different echo settings but I knew it wasn't right. Then I stumbled across the "mono tremolo" setting which was a pretty close approximation of the sound on the album. The problem being I couldn't find the exact tremolo speed that would match the rhythm of the song. I do believe there is a type of tremolo that locks in to the tempo of the music. But not having access to this I had to settle for a faster tremolo which I don't think spoils it too much.