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

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”.

It’s singular within and without the REM catalog if that’s not too big a claim - and discounting the fact that it samples David Essex (!)

I like that Automatic, Monster and New Adventures all have very left-field debut singles - Ebow, has a similar sui generis quality - their last great single imo

Drive, perfect though it is, I'd say was never going to make it onto In Time or Part Lies. The next four singles from Automatic all eclipsed it in the public memory (at least in UK but I'd imagine US as well?) Like numerous 90s alt-rock lead singles - including a few others of R.E.M. - it was mostly there to appease the fanbase before the second single was to really set things up crossover-wise.

in the ballot poll we did a long time ago, i put Drive at #3. still one of my all-time favorites, and love the video as well

not a great choice for a first single, though, but they ended up doing pretttttty well commercially on that album so i suppose they knew what they were doing, heh

even "everybody hurts" sounds pretty good these days

because it's true.

feel pretty alone as an r.e.m. fan in loving "ignoreland"

i see discussion of "ignoreland" takes up most of this thread.... you cannot IGNORE the pull of "ignoreland"

anyway "monty" deserves 500 votes

got a raw deal, imo

i would probably pick "try not to breathe"

I might agree these days. I remember the first time I heard this album (bought on the street in NYC). I knew "Drive," since it was the first single. But "Try Not to Breathe" as the second track was the real indication that I was in for something special.

I like "Ignoreland"! Takes me back to voting against Poppy Bush.

While I've since more or less come around to the song, I think that gets at its relative ... failure is too strong a word. Setting aside any suspicion that the song was inserted to interrupt an otherwise pretty sleepy, even dreamy record, I also think it interrupts the thematic flow a little, too. "Automatic" is so steeped in a certain out of time (to coin a phrase) Gen X nostalgia. David Essex, Zeppelin strings, Dr. Seuss, Andy Kaufman, Montgomery Clift (just like the Clash!), "Nightswimming." But "Ignoreland" and particularly its anger feels very out of place and contemporary. Though I suppose a case could be made that it works as a sort of negative nostalgia, connecting then current grievance to a timeline of Republican malfeasance.

I’ve always thought of Nightswimming as the older companion to Gardening At Night. The Big Chill to the latter’s Animal House or something stupid like that. (Ouff. I’m gonna regret that.)

It’s almost too pretty, but a key song in my life regardless.

A lot of good tracks here, not sure what I’d have voted for

I love "Ignoreland" though it wouldn't be my #1 pick from this album. The fast parts are cool, but it's the pre-chorus ("They hypnotized the summer..." etc) that really puts it over the top for me. (The clavinet doesn't hurt either.)

I would rank #1 Drive, #2 Try Not to Breathe, #3 Find the River. Nightswimming gets an honorable mention.

Listening to this front-to-back for the first time in years amazed at how much of it is deeply embedded - melodically, lyrically. It'd be Nightswimming for me; if music runs through our lives like a mountain range, this'd be a gentle peak, veiled in a soft haze.

Minor things I don't think I noticed at the time: this quite clearly leads to Jar of Flies/Sap by Alice in Chains.

the only thing i really like about "ignoreland" is the clavinet in the chorus

the best tracks here are the first three and last two, and then "sweetness follows". my favourite is "the sidewinder sleeps tonite". those six are a rather good half-album but the rest, bleh.

would have voted "ignoreland"

I love this album back-to-back

^ this

"Star Me Kitten". The rest isn't bad but I think they did better versions of all these styles on New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

...and some of Monster, for that matter.