Automatic for the People

9.5/10

  All right this is another album I really can't be objective about, but at least this time popular opinion seems to be on my side.  Automatic for the People came out at exactly the right moment in my life to just knock my socks off.  One of my friends had turned me on to Out of Time and Green and I had even heard a little bit of Document.  I hadn't really explored much farther back in their catalog yet, but I was pretty damn obsessed with Out of Time.  Even though it came out in 1991, it was probably the summer of 1992 when I really got hooked on it.  I also turned 15 that year, which is a great age for discovering music.  Music in general just sounded better when I was 15 than it does to my jaded 30+ year old ears.  And I didn't know anything about music yet, so it was this vast unexplored wilderness that held who knew how many treasures just waiting to be discovered.  At this point I hadn't really even gotten into any other bands yet, but I loved me some R.E.M. and lo and behold I found out they were coming out with a new album in October of that year.  I was excited to say the least.  There was no internet for albums to leak onto early back in those days and no websites to read reviews on.  There were music magazines, but I didn't really read them.

  So Automatic for the People became the first album I ever bought on the day it came out.  I also got to listen to it without hearing anybody else's opinion of it, which has become an increasingly rare thing in this day and age.  Before I even listened to it, I couldn't help but notice by scanning song titles like Try Not to Breathe, Everybody Hurts, and Sweetness Follows that this record seemed to be a little darker than the previous often sunny poppy record.  The gray packaging combined with pictures of the band dressed in black with dark glasses and serious looks on their face contributed to this impression.  Sure enough when opening track Drive kicks in with its minor key arpeggiated guitar line it looks like you're in for a depressing good time.  This impression mostly holds with the next song Try Not to Breathe, which I think is a pretty underrated awesome song.  It's got a cool guitar line and a pretty melody and features some nice Mike Mills harmonies.  It also contains lines about flying over my grave and needing something to breathe, which kind of keeps things a little dark and depressing.  I've heard the song is being sung from the perspective of an old man, which makes sense.  It doesn't do much to lighten up the mood though.

  So it looks like Automatic for the People is going to be a major downer and then this goofy-ass bouncy song sung in a high pitch comes along in the form of The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite.  It contains such lyrics as "a can of beans of black eyed peas or a reading from Dr. Seuss" and "tell her she can kiss my ass and laugh and say that you were only kidding."  Kind of strange compared to what's come so far.  Then the chorus involves Stipe cramming as many words as he can in to the smallest number of beats.  For the longest time I had no idea what the hell he was singing, but now I believe it's "Call me in when you try to wake her up."  It kind of sounds like he's saying "Ambien will wake her up," which is a pretty silly thing to say since ambien's a sleeping pill.  It's a good thing that's not what he's saying.  Despite all this I actually do like this song.  It's not my favorite on the album, but it is catchy and I think pacing-wise there needed to be a little more of an upbeat song right around this point.

  I'm not the world's hugest fan of Everybody Hurts, although I don't hate it.  It got really overplayed at the time and the lyrics are maybe the tiniest bit trite.  But if it ever helped anyone who was depressed or suicidal, then more power to it.  It's not a complete abomination or anything and it fits with the rest of the album fine.

  New Orleans Instrumental No. 1 is a kind of cool little track.  It doesn't stick around for too long and it's not a major statement or anything, but I dig it.

  Elsewhere Sweetness Follow is really pretty and features prominent strings that were apparently arranged by John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin.  It furthers the dark vibe though since the first lines mention burying your father and mother and later on it asks a brother and sister what would they care if they lost the other.  Real lightweight stuff here.  But it's seriously a pretty awesome song.

Side 2 is pretty bad ass.  It starts off relatively low key with the 1-2 "punch" of Monty Got a Raw Deal, which features a cool jangly mandolin or something, and Ignoreland, which is kind of a rocker and by far the most out of place track on the album.  I guess it's an angry political rant, but it's kind of hard to understand what Stipe's saying.  Sort of a throwback to the old days.  I would never claim it as a highlight of the album, but it's fine.  Even if it really doesn't fit the rest of the album sound-wise.

  Next up comes Star Me Kitten, which is a really slow song, but it's not boring.  It's just got a really cool vibe to it.  Oh yeah, and he's really saying "Fuck Me Kitten," not Star Me Kitten, which is all kinds of awesome, especially when you're 15.

   Lots of people think Man on the Moon is one of the best R.E.M. songs of all time.  I'm not of that opinion, although I like it a lot.  I don't know, maybe it got a little overplayed or something, but really for me it just gets overshadowed by the next two songs that end the album on a super strong note.

  Pretty is the name of the game when you're talking about Nightswimming.  It's got this neat kind of rolling piano line and even the main melody is kind of non-linear.  There's no chorus to speak of, the song just kind of keeps moving forward, but it's never anything less than beautiful.  Plus it seemed like I knew a lot of girls who liked it and at that age identifying with their music taste seemed like a great way to pick up the ladies.

  I actually kind of overlooked Find the River at first, maybe because it's tucked away at the very end of the album and Nightswimming is so obviously a highlight.  Once I did notice it though I realized I really liked it and it might even be my favorite song on the whole album.  I even managed to get a Find the River t-shirt that I wore until it got several very large holes in it.

  I'm not sure if everything I said here came across as completely glowing, but at the end of the day this is probably my favorite R.E.M. album.  If you'd never heard them before and wanted one album to check out I very well might point you here.  I generally try not to mention every single track when reviewing an album.  I've heard somewhere that doing so is considered bad form in the music reviewing world, but I couldn't help it.  This album came out at a time when music was the most important thing in the world to me and I just had a really deep love for it and it evoked cool moods and feelings in me back then that I can still sort of conjure up if I listen to it now.  It's "mature" and kind of slow and thoughtful, but it's not boring.  It's held up pretty well over the years, too.  This album's old enough now to be of legal drinking age.  Crazy.