Woke Up With a Monster(1994)


 

  1.My Gang
  2.Woke Up With a Monster
  3.You're All I Wanna Do
  4.Never Run Out of Love
  5.Didn't Know I Had It
  6.Rid the Pony
  7.Girlfriends
  8.Let Her Go
  9.Tell Me Everything
 10.Cry Baby
 11.Love Me For a Minute

 

Four years had passed since Cheap Trick’s last studio album, a silence that seemed deafening to longtime followers. The band, still reeling from the modest reception of Busted, found themselves once again at a crossroads—commercial expectations, shifting lineups behind the console, and an industry increasingly disinterested in veterans attempting revival.

Enter Ted Templeman, a producer known largely for his glossy triumphs with Van Halen. The choice raised eyebrows. Early rumors promised a return to the lean energy of the band’s debut album, a tantalizing possibility. What emerged, however, was something altogether different: not so much a resurrection as a patchwork attempt to straddle eras.

Woke Up With a Monster opens inauspiciously with its title track at song #2, a screamer more shrill than searing. Robin Zander, ordinarily the band’s secret weapon, is asked here to holler rather than sing—an unfortunate decision that sets a tone of strained theatrics. And that song, remarkably, was the single.

Still, buried beneath the album’s commercial gloss and confused identity lie a handful of tracks that remind us what Cheap Trick is capable of. Girlfriends, Let Her Go, and Tell Me Everything bristle with melodic tension and lyrical sincerity, evoking the melodic craftsmanship of their earlier years. They are small triumphs, made smaller by their placement and the company they keep.

Much of the rest feels like paint-by-numbers. You’re All I Wanna Do and Didn’t Know I Had It attempt Top 40 charm with predictable results—tuneful but weightless. There’s little evidence here of a band willing to take real risks. Worse still, tracks like Cry Baby and Ride the Pony descend into a kind of genre cosplay—bluesy affectations that come off as parody rather than homage.

The album didn’t fare well, either critically or commercially. It cracked the Top 200 briefly, then vanished. In the wake of its failure, fingers were pointed—mostly at the record label. But perhaps the deeper issue lay in identity. Cheap Trick were no longer the upstarts from Rockford, nor the corporate phoenixes of Lap of Luxury. Here, they sounded uncertain, caught in a liminal space between past glory and an undefined present.

In hindsight, Woke Up With a Monsterstands less as a full-bodied work than as a document of a band in search of itself. The brilliance flashes—but fleetingly.

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