11.23.92 Time Magazine It’s lonely at the top, and really depressing too. At least that’s the inescapable impression conveyed by Automatic for the People, R.E.M.’s follow-up to its 1991 critical and commercial smash, Out of Time. The record gets off to a somber start with Drive, a dirgelike number featuring lyricist and lead singer Michael [...]
By James Lien 10.09.92 CMJ Magazine If you were to pull the Four Famous Boys From Georgia aside in a quiet place, and ask them about their favorite records, they’d probably all name the same twelve or so LPs by a few Anglo-influenced American artists (Big Star, Buffalo Springfield, Love’s Arthur Lee, Skip Spence and [...]
By Paul Evans 10.09.92 Rolling Stone R.E.M. has never made music more gorgeous than “Nightswimming” and “Find the River,” the ballads that close “Automatic for the People” and sum up its twilit, soulful intensity. A swirl of images natural and technological – midnight car rides and undertow, old photographs and headlong tides – the songs [...]
By Phil Sutcliffe 10.09.92 Q Magazine 4 stars Millions have been waiting on the new R.E.M. album, and almost none of them is barmy. It could have been reverence mortis time, but Automatic For The People turns out to be both aptly unfathomable and just the job. The contradictory elements of the band’s rock ‘n’ [...]
By Greg Kot 10.04.92 Chicago Tribune Rating: 3 1/2 stars With its acoustic textures and evocative lyricism, “Automatic for the People” is perhaps R.E.M.’s most courageous record. Its sole rocker, “Ignoreland,” is buried on the second half of the album, and the tunes unfold with such low-key grace and understatement that it would be easy [...]
By Greg Kot 10.04.92 Chicago Tribune It was March 1991, and R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck was a bit bleary the morning after celebrating the release of the band’s “Out of Time” album. But even then he had a pretty good idea of what was coming next for the Athens, Ga., quartet-or so he thought. “The [...]
By Allan Jones 10.03.92 Melody Maker Reviewing R.E.M.’s astonishingly sombre new single, “Drive,” in last weeks MM, David Stubbs confused the Marlon Brando movie The Wild One with the Sam Peckinpah western, The Wild Bunch. This was an interesting juxtaposition. Both films, after all, examine a specifically American kind of nihilism. But where in The [...]
By Steve Morse 10.02.92 Boston Globe Georgia rockers R.E.M., arguably the country’s most casual superstars, are doing the unexpected once again. Not only is their new album a quiet, acoustic-oriented retreat from the limelight, but they’re not going to suport it with a concert tour. It’s the second straight album that R.E.M. won’t tour behind, [...]
“Automatic For The People” Features Slow, Dark, Brooding Songs By David Fricke 10.01.92 Rolling Stone “The thing that separates this record from Out Of Time is that we have some of the weirdest songs in the world on there,” says bassist Mike Mills of R.E.M.’s forthcoming album, Automatic For The People. “We knew they were [...]