R.E.M. - Automatic for the People (1992)

1) Drive; 2) Try Not to Breathe: 3) The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite: 4) Everybody Hurts; 5) New Orleans Instrumental No. 1; 6) Sweetness Follows; 7) Monty Got a Raw Deal; 8) Ignoreland; 9) Star Me Kitten; 10) Man on the Moon; 11) Nightswimming; 12) Find the River

The quintessential R.E.M. experience. Somber but not sad, grand but intimate, and a masterpiece of songwriting and arrangement.

Key tracks: "Drive", "Try Not to Breathe", "Man on the Moon"

The two albums preceding Automatic for the People - Green and Out of Time - saw R.E.M. broadening their scope and actively pushing their sound forward. One of the defining characteristics for those albums is their variance, full of stylistic experiments and the overall sound dominated by the band introducing new elements. They are classic albums in their own right, and a great deal of their quality is due to how fearlessly the band followed every instinct and idea they had. Automatic for the People, released roughly a year after Out of Time (made easier by the band’s decision not to tour in-between), is the logical conclusion: the new depth the band now had in their sound utilised for a cohesive collection of songs rather than every single separate idea.

R.E.M. cemented their legacy with the result.

One of the things I’ve harped on about on my R.E.M. reviews - and one I’ll probably continue to mention in my future ones - is how R.E.M. have always been masters of choosing the perfect opening song that lays out a statement for the album and signals its intentions right from the start. “Drive” once again does the same: the quiet acoustic base, the increasing dynamics that take the song from minor beginnings to something unpredictable and grand, and the orchestral touch which gives the song its grandeur are all elements that replicate throughout Automatic for the People in varying degrees. But the key thing is the mood: the heavy melancholy that follows the track around, from Stipe’s low drawl to the slow crawl of the music. R.E.M. haven’t been unfamiliar with a moody streak but “Drive” makes it its signature element. Automatic is an album that lets the atmospheric side of the band’s writing take the wheel, and focuses on setting a particular contemplative mood.

Don’t mistake that for sadness. Automatic is obsessed with mortality and loss, literal or metaphorical - death and fleeting time feature throughout the album’s imagery, and even when nothing is ticking away the characters in the songs are still obsessed with their own personal legacies and what will eventually be left behind. But the overall atmosphere is more elegiac than anything: finding the small moments of hope during the darkest times and celebrating life where you can. “Try Not to Breathe” is literally about the last thoughts of an old man dying but with Buck’s gorgeous guitar work and Mills and Berry’s heavenly harmonies, it sounds like a song of praise rather than a lament. Despite the somber tones of the record the band frequently let the songs soar away from the melancholy within.

In fact, I’d make a case for that Automatic for the People is ultimately a carefully joyous album, even if that joy is at times reflected through one kind of sadness or another. Take “Everybody Hurts”, the big break-out power ballad that’s become one of the de facto sad bastard songs in popular culture, but which is ultimately a shoulder to lean against and a helping hand to pick you up, more concerned in conquering the melancholy than dwelling in it. “Nightswimming” and “Find the River” are laced with nostalgia but it’s happy that these moments in life happened rather than being sad about them now having gone. This kind of uplifting melancholy is at the center of Automatic and makes it a wistful yet ultimately celebratory experience. This also helps it tie its various songs together and makes everything fit into the whole. The hyper-happy, stream-of-consciousness jangle pop of “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite”, which riffs on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and is so upbeat that Stipe breaks into a giggle halfway through a line at one point, initially comes off like another style-shattering stand-out along the lines of “Stand” or “Shiny Happy People”, but finds a cohesive footing with the other songs through the warmth that beats even within the album’s darkest moments. Similarly “Man on the Moon” is the album’s great culmination point in this regard, picking up all the strands of nostalgia and loss and bundling them into a life-affirming anthem that’s close to a catharsis for everything before.

Automatic gets the grace it needs to balance all these emotional building blocks via the expansion of sound and increased detail of arrangement R.E.M. had worked on during the past couple of albums, forming an appropriate musical backing to match Stipe. The general, more acoustic-based approach hasn’t changed much from Out of Time and effectively pegs Automatic as the former’s sibling album, and similarly that core is used as a launchpad for an expanded palette. The intricate orchestral sections (arranged by former Led Zeppelin John Paul Jones) give the music wings, and in particular the moments when they suddenly appear during “Drive” and “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” are incredible flashes of brilliance that change the tone of the songs in an instant. The expanded instrumental section puts more weight than ever into Mills’ piano and keyboard playing, with several of the songs carried by Mills’ delicate playing, while Buck’s increased armory of string instruments keep his part of the sound varied throughout, flicking between styles from distorted guitars to gently plucked mandolin. Berry and Mills also go all-out with their harmonies, working together over multiple songs to counter Stipe’s drawl and their backing vocals become integral to the songs’ impact, be it call-and-answer or wordless melodies. The level of detail in the carefully arranged layers is stupendous and Automatic expects you to pay attention to it, hiding intricacies even in its quietest moments (the countdown in the beginning of “Drive” took me an embarrassing amount of years to hear). Automatic is honestly beautiful both on a technical level and in its arrangements, and the sound they have chosen for the album give it its vulnerable, intimate warmth. Even the instrumental interlude (“New Orleans Instrumental No. 1”) resonates, evoking that quiet solemn moment late at night when staring through the window into the sleeping world and everything is still in life for a while.

That even the most obvious filler cut among the tracklist can bring up an emotional reaction like that is to the band’s credit, and underlines why Automatic for the People is such a special album. It’s a stunningly beautiful album, sometimes tragic and sometimes uplifting, but always one that tugs for a reaction straight from the heart. The music has an inherent richness and warmth to it which make it emotionally charged, and while Stipe’s lyrics tell very specific stories for most of Automatic, there’s a quality to them and the words he uses which feel like they manage to condense something very integral to the entire human experience within some verses and choruses. And of course, the songs themselves and the writing. The layers of Automatic aren’t used just to place instruments together but to add up strong melodies and gorgeous musical moments together. The songwriting on Automatic is gold on its own, right down to its curveballs: the grunge-lite “Ignoreland” gives the album a fire in its belly just when it needed one, and “Star Me Kitten” is a genuine delight whether you take it on face value as a dreamy lullaby and find amusement on how its soothing surface is matched with one of Stipe’s unashamedly thirstiest lyrics. You don’t really even need the intricacies: strip these songs down to their acoustic core and they’d be touching as is. “Nightswimming” is just piano, strings and Stipe and yet it’s enormously powerful and the kind of thing that happy tears were made for, and the relatively straightforward mid-tempo alt rocker “Monty Got a Raw Deal” is arguably the album’s best kept secret, a parallel universe hit anthem dressed up in modest garbs, navigating somewhere between swaggering and mystical with a one-two punch chorus hooks with both Buck’s simple guitar melody and Mills’ backing vocals. It’s a set of incredible songs, and a blunt statement like that is probably the best way to put it across - arguably better than a lot of my usual waffling about.

These songs are so incredible in fact that Automatic is among my all-time favourites. Unlike many other albums in that small category, Automatic hasn’t become so because it tied itself to one particular part of my life and became an important channel of expression forevermore; instead, it’s a relationship that’s grown from the enchanted initial listens to this state where I find myself emotionally rejuvenated whenever the album has finished playing. Even without the personal bias Automatic is a stunning album, an example of a band at their prime in a remarkable creative spree, following their instincts flawlessly. It’s the kind of concentration of quality that every artist aspires to make and which takes select creative and contextual sparks in order to happen. Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe not only managed to strike those sparks but made them so strong the warmth from them is still there each listen. They managed to contain something essential about life into their album; through that, it’s integrally tied into mine.

Rating: 10/10