The Sidewinder Sleeps, Sleeps, Sleeps In A POLL: REM's "Automatic For The People"

I don't listen to it often -- it's been at least a decade -- but the songs I love boast Stipe's new declarativeness and the band's bold mixing of songs as mysterious and vaguely sinister and terrifying as their earliest material. I'm thinking of "Monty Got a Raw Deal" and "Sweetness Follows."

the great thing about sidewinder is that it's written in stipe's absolute upper register, which gives it this weird unfamiliarity even within the runtime of the album. it is a very silly song that is also somehow majestic in the lushness of the arrangement and beautiful string parts.

i'm way overdue to spend some time with this album.

"Sweetness Follows" is bruised, ominous and gorgeous, but the peak experience of this album for me is to absolutely crank it on good speakers, it's so beautifully recorded you can just lose yourself in it. JPJ's strings on "Drive" are the heaviest thing ever, I nearly passed out when I listened to it loud one time.

I know it's been overexposed to death (maybe less so lately), but "Man on the Moon" is <i>incredible.</i> The confidence of everyone involved to handle this big, anthemic, but gentle and meditatively questioning song.... you can almost feel the experience of the last few records under their belt. On this listen what's blowing me away is the earnestness in Mills's backing vocals, and the very slight edge of grit to Buck's licks and solos (anticipating the sound he'd lean into on New Adventures) ... and, as everywhere on the record, the warmth and intimacy of the recording.

Another great thing: falling back to just the acoustic strums, Stipe's vocal and some light percussion for the start of the final verse, before bringing all the other elements back in gradually, isn't rocket science, but it works so well to re-ground things before we take off into the final sequence of choruses. It's basically a drawn-out version of the dramatic re-starts that lend so much oomph to "Fall On Me" ("don't fall on meee, DON'T FALLLLLL"), and it works just as well.

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then the album ends with "Nightswimming" and "Find the River."

The key innovation -- what repulsed me for years after my initial embrace -- was the confidence with which R.E.M. use the clarity they experimented with as far back as LRP. The strings are assertive, the instrumental filigrees discrete and easily picked out, and Stipe gives his most full-throated performance; his lyrics don't lose their ambiguity for being forthrightly sung.

I'd posit this album did more damage than Nevermind and Ten, encouraging the Lives and Creeds to wail their profundities.

Surely Joshua Tree is more to blame for both of those acts!

(Live's debut had already come out before this, for one thing.)

oh but "Lightning Crashes" and the dolphin song have more Stipeisms than Bonorosities.

more damage than ten is a tough sell for me, rock radio was littered with lesser vedders for a decade and a half

Bonorosities

t/s: monoculture vs bonoculture

well, the stipewinder stipes tostipe

Creed def had more to do with PJ than REM. one of em even got fired for dissing the former

A question of degrees.

It’s interesting to think of a case for REM as having imitators because I’ve long thought of them as a band without such, except as “80s indie band gets enormously popular” exemplar. But their music has seemed sui generis to me, and Stipe’s singing in particular.

I tend to agree with you, Euler... While I can think of some jangling indie bands that clearly listened to REM in their day, no one sings like Stipe.

so many of you were spared the tragically hip

(I kid, they were....fine)

i feel like stipe's influence as a singer may have been in weird trickle-down ways. i feel like a lot of people eventually picked up on that voice-cracking thing he does, for example, but they might be emo bands or something.

yeah that sounds right

The video for Drive is beautiful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UE7tXDKIus

yes it is. a friend of mine had a collection of r.e.m. videos and would always start out the night of hanging out with it. so good

Was it the Parallel VHS with the videos from this album and Monster? That thing was a cornerstone of my youth

I remember the day the Drive video premiered on MTV; watching it for the first time (and taping it, of course).

Adam Scott can be briefly glimpsed in the crowd in the Drive video

that is believable, which is enough for me

25 yrs ago I was an extra in R.E.M.’s “Drive” video but had never been able to locate myself in it, despite Zapruder-level analysis. Thanks to
sharp-eyed RU TALKIN’ R.E.M. RE: ME? listeners, that long national nightmare is over... pic.twitter.com/WSQaG5PZ8L

— Adam Scott (@mradamscott) May 4, 2018

Man, what a heavy track 2 to drop on people.

It's such a great Track 2 (is there a thread for that? there should be).

This might be an uncultured swine thing of me to say but this song kind of reminds me of an Arcade Fire record. I hate to compare this younger bands because older people will be pissed but I feel like I’m pretty well-versed in Arcade Fire. This sounds like Neon Bible. I was crazy about that album in high school.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne489w/snail-mail-lindsey-jordan-automatic-for-the-people-rem-listens-first-time

ooooof

Lindsey Jordan: It’s up my alley so far. It’s crazy that this is their eighth album. Is this their breadwinner?

Noisey: One of them! It’s their top-seller and it’s sold well over 18 million copies, which is crazy.

Top seller? Pretty sure OOT has sold more

snail mail is only a few years younger than me so its funny that she had no idea rem did "it's the end of the world as we know it" etc

(No shade toward her - in the way that anyone might hear music from the past that reminds them of more recent music - but it's funny to read as someone older.)

Possibly my favorite R.E.M. album. Either that or Murmur, but Murmur was like unearthing an artifact. (A friend of mine actually bought Murmur, mistaking it for a "new" album, and for whatever reason he was massively disappointed when it wasn't. He didn't even open it yet, but he let me borrow it and after I heard it, I was like "holy shit this is great." To steal a phrase from Peter Bogdanovich, there are no “old” records - only records you've heard and records you haven't.) With Automatic, a relative got it through a music club and forgot about it. It was a long while before he actually cracked opened the cardboard mailing sleeve, by which point I had become a new fan just getting familiar with them through Out of Time. Again, borrowed the CD and I think it was the very first album I heard where I was immediately blown away - start to finish great, and after one complete play, it was like my favorite album ever. Granted I barely knew any, but I just knew I was going to listen to that album every single day for the rest of the school year.

Yeah its prob my favourite REM album too

i just listened to this for the first time in years because i finally felt ready, like it wouldn't send me down a rabbit hole of emotional distress, and it was ok. while not my fave REM album, definitely full of some quality songs (now that i can separate the memories they conjure from the songs)
also hi drugs a money!! :)

Wow, drugs!

I was obsessed with REM in high school, total fanboy, and have also avoided this album to some degree because of emotional distress related to it.
"Sweetness Follows" is really the one for me, just an incredible song.

I was obsessed with REM in high school, total fanboy, and have also avoided this album to some degree because of emotional distress related to it.
middle school through high school for me, hardest years of my life. i can FINALLY listen to this album again after lots of therapy :-/

these lyrics right here

The river to the ocean goes
A fortune for the undertow
None of this is going my way

There is nothing left to throw
Of ginger, lemon, indigo
Coriander stem and rose of hay

Strength and courage overrides
The privileged and weary eyes
Of river poet search naiveté

Pick up here and chase the ride
The river empties to the tide
All of this is coming your way

great. also gotta be one of my favorite Stipe vocal performances.

I thought it was - "There is nothing left to grow / But ginger, mint, and indigo"

Of river poet search naiveté

This has never made sense (obv), but I guess you're just supposed to "feel" it (and it works!)

the chorus is very 70s singer songrwiter-y reminds me of a john denver song but cant recall which atm. its gorgeous

Love, love the vibe of Drive. There’s nothing else like it in their catalog. It reminds me of Floyd’s Animals, of the Fire Walk With Me soundtrack — emotionally transparent but musically enigmatic. And in the middle, Buck’s best solo

I thought it was - "There is nothing left to grow / But ginger, mint, and indigo"

― Reese's Pisces Iscariot (morrisp), Wednesday, November 9, 2022 2:00 PM (forty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sounds right to me

I believe Peter Buck brought “Drive” to the rest of the band essentially musically complete.

I’m not sure how many cases there are of first track lead singles - on what is probably their biggest selling album - failing to make it on subsequent best of compilations; “Chocolate Cake” and Recurring Dream is one

(Deliberately not including the live ‘funk’ version on the 2003 comp)

That's an interesting observation about the comps... looks like "E-Bow the Letter" (which I also love) didn't make it onto Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage, though it was on In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988–2003.

I agree that "Drive" is a very cool and singular (for them) track, and probably underrated in the context of their catalogue.

It sounds like a dark twin to James Taylor’s “Riding on a Railroad” to me. Perhaps just my upbringing. I mean it as a compliment, I adore “Drive”.