My Top 100 Albums: #94 - R.E.M., ‘Automatic For The People’
94.
R.E.M., ‘Automatic For The People’
Warner Bros. Records, 1992
R.E.M., for me, occupy an unusual place in the alternative rock canon. It’s easy to see how their sound would come to be replicated in the indie/alternative rock scene of the early 2000s, with the likes of Coldplay citing them as an influence. What is harder to determine, at least in my view, is exactly how they fit with their contemporaries. With influences drawn from as far back as the jangle pop of the 1960s, R.E.M. stood in stark contrast to the punk-based, angsty alt-rock being offered by their peers, and on no album is that individuality so flagrant as on Automatic For The People. While Michael Stipe and co. had been musically active since the very beginning of the 1980s, and as such can perhaps be considered as the natural successors to New Wave icons like The Smiths and Talking Heads, it wasn’t until a decade later that they really found their zeitgeist with Out of Time, and then Automatic For The People. After all, few other bands of that era were serving up reticent, dreamlike ballads like Everybody Hurts, or even chintzy four-chord tunes like The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite and Man On The Moon, and none were hopping from one to the other with the proficiency that R.E.M. achieved on this record. The eclectic feel completed with the more conventional Drive and Nightswimming, this album stands as a testament to the strength of Stipe’s songwriting and to the timeless quality of the sound the band were producing in the early ‘90s, much to the profit of the later bands who would try to reproduce it in the new millennium.
Hidden Highlight: New Orleans Instrumental No. 1
Drive
Try Not to Breathe
The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite
Everybody Hurts
New Orleans Instrumental No. 1
Sweetness Follows
Monty Got a Raw Deal
Ignoreland
Star Me Kitten
Man On The Moon
Nightswimming
Find The River