Automatic For The People - R.E.M. (1992)


Automatic For The People is a beautiful and melancholy, perfectly-sequenced album that concerns nostalgia, death, aging gracefully, and the acceptance that one's youth was over. It would have been theperfect swan song from R.E.M., The Little Band That Could,: the small college town indie rock post-punk party band that rose from  the sweaty dingy punk clubs of America to become the biggest band in the world in the early nineties.

Unfortunately it was not R.E.M.'s swan song. But it should have been! 

Some songs are this are murky and a couple suffer from overplay for sure - "Everybody Hurts", drummer Bill Berry's last major song with the band was played so often in 1993 that I'm sure many of us are still sick of it. Still, I'm not as sick of that one as I am with "Losing My Religion" which definitely I could happily go to the end of life without ever hearing again. 

Really though, this album is a masterpiece, though and on some days it rivals even the greaet Murmur and Reckoning as my all-time favorite from R.E.M., , which was probably the most important American band of my generation. I listened to Automatic For The People so hard in the winter of 1993, that the album brings back a lot of memories from that time when I was basically dropping out of college: cold snowy nights with the wind blowing: my room without a radiator or heater of any kind so I spent most of the time in the living room long after my roommates had gone to bed listening to this and some other records. 

Man, nothing is lonelier than the frigid Midwest in winter and no one is lonelier than I was then. 

R.E.M. wrote such incredibly good songs: their melodies are stellar and their arrangements always seemingly perfectly placed to put the song in its best stead: it's to their credit that they could all contribute hooks and ideas to songs and work together to make it the best it could possibly be. Michael Stipe's lyrics ruminate on death and dying and nostalgia for his lost youth (he was about 30 when it was recorded) that I remember I was convinced he had AIDS at the time, which was a rumor that I had heard a year or two before. I was even more convinced with Up in 1998, but it turned out to be untrue, as far as I know. 

I also have semi-nostalgic memories of that summer in Cherokee North Carolina, where I worked as an actor. I was going through some seriously heavy shit at the time, (not sure what really: I was just depressed, I guess) so it was not as glorious as it could have been, but nevertheless the place, embedded deep in the deciduous misty jungle of  the Smokey Mountains of N.C,  was just magical in a lot of ways and I'll never forget that eerie mystic feeling that I had there in the deep wilderness.

One of the things that used to happen there was that on most nights the other actors (technicians, dancers) would party outside literally until dawn and when dawn came, inevitably, someone would play "Nightswimming" on the sound system that was hidden in the boughs of the trees of the Grotto, which was the chosen party place -- a small idyllic midnight clearning in the forest with a stream running through it and red colored theatrical lights set up and even a home-made aluminum fountain burbling in the center-- and everyone would rush to the swimming pool across the road , strip naked and jump in. (Not me, though, I had too much social anxiety to even do more than make a brief appearance at these parties anyway.)

So as the album is to some extent Michael Stipe ruminating on his lost youth, or writing through the eyes of characters who are grappling with death -- their own or others -- it really functions to bring back a particularly melancholy, yet momentous period of my life -- which perfectly suits the melancholy and momentous music contianed therein.  

My favorite song (of many) is probably the final song: "Find The River" a Mills-Stipe folk rock masterpiece -- MIke Mills apparently played all the instruments on this one except percussion which was played by Bill -- who also contributed backing vocals iwth Mike.


5/5

https://open.spotify.com/album/0BiNb8HYR4JvuxUa31Z58Q?si=oblq6eWXR0yi82OYM3JsTw

I have the original CD (I bought it once in America and once in Europe) and I also have a digital (ITunes) copy of the deluxe 25 year anniversary edition: it's brickwalled but it includes a whole bunch of demos (including some fully-fledged songs that are really pretty good) as well as a live concert from Athens Georgia recorded in November 1992 -- the only concert the band did to promote the album, which sold something like ten million copies anyway.

This concludes all the albums I have that start with "A", except a few that I've passed over for now. I must say that I do have some other albums, notably live fan club albums from Crowded House and Neil Finn, but I've decided not to talk about them. They are all great, but there's not much to say about them, they get a bit gamey. 

Coming Up:

All This Useless Beauty - Elvis Costello & The Attractions

Alpha Mike Foxtrot -- Wilco*

American Idiot Green Day*

Amnesiac Radiohead*

Another Life - Another Life

B

The B-52s

Bachelor No. 2 (Or, The Last Remains of the Dodo) - Aimee Mann

The Ballad of Easy Rider - The Byrds

Bambu - Dennis Wilson

Band on the Run

Bangles EP

The Basement Tapes - Bob Dylan & The Band

BARB

The BBC Sessions -- Belle & Sebastian

The Beatles [The White Album] 

Beatles For Sale 

Beauty and Sadness -- TheSmithereens

Beauty and the Beat -- The Go-Go's

Become What YOu Are - The Juliana Hatfield 3

Before & After - Tim Finn

Beggar's Banquet. The Rolling Stones

Begin Here - The Zombies

Being There - Wilco

The Bends -- Radiohead

Berlin - Lou Reed

The Best of Badfinger

The Best of Dark Horse - 1976-1989 - George Harrison

The Best of Sam Cooke

Best Shots - Pat Benatar

Betchadupa

Between The Buttons - Rolling Stones

Big Canoe - Tim Finn

the Big Express - XTC

Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi - Camera Obscura

Billy Idol

A Bit of Previous - Belle & Sebastian

The Black Album - Prince

Black Gold - Nina Simone

Black List - Alex Chilton

Black Market Clash - The Clash 

Black Sea - XTC

Black Snake Diamond Role -- Robyn Hitchcock

Black Spring - Lush

Black-Eyed Man - Cowboy Junkies

Blind Man's Zoo - 10000 Maniacs 

Blonde on Blonde - Bob Dylan

Blondie

Blood And Chocolate - Elvis Costello & The Attractions

Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan

Blue Kentucky Girl -- Emmylou Harris

Boats Against the Current -- Eric Carmen

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan In Concert: Brandeis University 1963

Book - They Might Be Giants

Bookends -- Simon and Garfunkel

Booker T & The M.G.'s

The Bootleg Series 1-3 Bob Dylan

Born in the USA - Bruce Springsteen

Born toDie - Lana Del Rey

Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen

Bossanova - The Pixies

The Both

Boy - U2

The Boy with the Arab Strap - Belle & Sebastian

Boys Don't Cry - TheCure

Brian Wilson

Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE

Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin

Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road

Bridge Over Troubled Water - Simon & Garfunkel

Bringing It All Back Home - Bob Dylan

Brutal Youth - Elvis Costello

Bryter Layter - Nick Drake

Buena Vista Social Club

Buffalo Springfield

Buffalo Springfield Again

Buoys - Panda Bear

Byrdmaniax - The Byrds


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Become What You are - The Juliana Hatfield Three (1993)

Image
  Despite the fact that  Become What You Are   reminds me of a rather dreary time in my life -- the year and a half or so when I came back to Springfield Missouri after college to live -- I think this is one of my favorite albums of 1993 -- and 1993 was a really good year for my taste in music.  Juliana Hatfield has a way of telling stories and fleshing out ver complex characters and defining complex emotions in amazingly simple terms, with a few lyrics as possible -- she's sort of, like, the Hemmingway of singer/songwriters. And that's a compliment. But to be clear, this music is not one woman alone with an acoustic guitar; this is a real rock band and Juliana Hatfield herself is quite a formidable hard rock guitarist. This is kind of in the grunge era; I wouldn't call it grunge, but it's from  the brief period of time when singer songwriters could rock in this way that was somewhere between The Stooges, Kiss, and Big Star. See also some of Aimee Mann's cu...
Read more

Arrival - ABBA (1976)

Image
  Arrival was Abba's fourth album, which was long labored over, to good results: it was a huge seller, even going gold in the stubbornly resistant American market, thanks to the giganto-hit "Dancing Queen", still in it's one of the most perfectly written pop songs of all time. The immortal image of the 17 year old girl awash in the first innocent glow of her full physical and sexual power dancing alone under the blue lights strikes tears in my eyes every single time I hear it. I'ts so perfect. .. Like their previous self-titled album  Arrival  runs through a lot of styles and moods, but the the album overall comes off as even more adult and overtly sexual: while the first two songs celebrate innocent girlhood: (girlish fantasies of kissing teacher, the innocent abandon of the 70s teen disco,) the themes seem to progress from innocence to materialistic and sexual cynicism. But the album never breaks a sweat doing this: it all still goes down like ice-cream. The de...
Read more

Beggar's Banquet - Rolling Stones (1968)

Image
Beggar's Banquet was The Rolling Stones' first post-psychedelic album, in which they went back to their roots as a blues rock band, a place which they have decided never to leave again, perhaps due to the disastrous reception of Their Satanic Majesties Request. A pity, in my opinion, but this is not the place to go into it. It's also probably the last great gasp of original guitarist/multi-instrumentalist colorist Brian Jones, although he would play on a few songs on the next album, he was rapidly descending in a tragic downward spiral.  Personally I prefer the rissks the 1965-1967 era Stones took to the Blues Rock phase (though with the addition of Mick Taylor they definitely recorded a pair of their finest albums) and I find the relentless roots rock of  Beggar's Banquet to be a tad bit disappointing. Like, where are the harpsichords, horns, dulcimers and sitars of yesteryear?  Having said that, there are definitely no bad songs here: no ten minute long jams or lame M...
Read more