Stephen Thomas Erlewine (All Music Guide)

Turning away from the sweet pop of Out of Time, R.E.M. created a haunting, melancholy masterpiece with Automatic for the People. At its core, the album is a collection of folk songs about aging, death and loss, but the music has a grand, epic sweep provided by layers of lush strings, interweaving acoustic instruments and shimmering keyboards. Automatic for the People captures the group at a crossroads, as they moved from cult heroes to elder statesmen, and the album is a graceful transition into their new status. It is a reflective album, with frank discussions on mortality, but it is not a despairing record — "Nightswimming," "Everybody Hurts" and "Sweetness Follows" have a comforting melancholy, while "Find the River" provides a positive sense of closure. R.E.M. have never been as emotionally direct as they are on Automatic for the People, nor have they ever created music quite as rich and timeless, and while the record is not an easy listen, it is the most rewarding record in their oeuvre.

Steve Knopper (Amazon.com)

Continuing to specialize in the art of curve-throwing, R.E.M. followed up its 1991 smash, Out of Time, with this fragile album of soft melodies and string arrangements. The sympathetic ballad "Everybody Hurts" must have prevented countless suicide attempts, while the Andy Kaufman tribute "Man on the Moon" (with Michael Stipe affecting an Elvis Presley imitation) and the rock-into-oblivion "Drive" are among the quartet's strongest hits. (The opening line, "Hey, kids, rock and roll," isn't so much a rallying cry as an expression of anxiety.) It takes a few listens for its charms to unfold, but Automatic is the gem between bigger hits Out of Time and Monster.

Rickey Wright (Amazon.co.uk)

Not quite as flawless as a masterpiece should be--what's the slight "New Orleans Instrumental No. 1" doing among such remarkably grounded material?--Automatic For The People still deserves its reputation as one of REM's best. Another link in the band's chain of 90's classics, it hits each mood--the glum teen-spirit report of "Drive", the sensual wash of "Star Me Kitten" and the gorgeously transcendent "Find The River,"--perfectly. Fittingly, Michael Stipe's lyrics are among his most coherent and empathetic. This will be recalled, and listened to, as a great work long after REM have packed it in.

Martin Johnson (Barnes & Noble)

OK, so they're not simply shiny, happy people, but then R.E.M. never really were. The quartet responded to the immense commercial success of 1991's OUT OF TIME (almost overnight by record industry standards) with this collection of poetically introspective songs. AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE followed its predecessor by a mere 18 months, but remarkably, the tone is vastly different. Lush and serene where OUT OF TIME is lean and perky, AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE is in many ways a continuation of the "unplugged" tour that preceded its sessions. However, the arrangements are more precise and meticulous. "Drive" and "Man on the Moon" are major highlights, while "Everybody Hurts" quickly became a theme for headline variations everywhere. More than ever, this recording shows that R.E.M. could handle the pressures of superstardom with a minimum of obdurate insolence.

(CD Universe)

R.E.M.: Mike Mills (vocals, keyboards, bass); Michael Stipe (vocals); Peter Buck (guitar, mandolin); Bill Berry (drums). Additional personnel: Lonnie Ottzen, Denise Berginson-Smith, Jody Taylor, Sou-Chun Su, Sandy Salzinger, Patti Gouvas (violin); Paul Murphy, Reid Harris, Heidi Nitche (viola); Elizabeth Proctor Murphy, Kathleen Kee, Knox Chandler, Daniel Laufer (cello); Deborah Workman (oboe); Scott Litt (harmonica, Clavinet); Bertis Downs (keyboards). Recorded at Bearsville Studio, Bearsville, New York; Criteria Recording Studios, Miami, Florida; John Keane Studio, Athens, Georgia; Kingsway Studio, New Orleans, Louisiana; Bosstown Recording Studios, Atlanta, Georgia. AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE was nominated for 1994 Grammy Awards for Album Of The Year and Best Alternative Music Album.

A classic of modern rock. Released soon after Out Of Time it shows the band on a creative roll with no shortage of original ideas. Bold songs such as 'Drive' and 'Everybody Hurts' demonstrated that the band were not reluctant to experiment, while the Karl Denver opening on 'The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite' and Stipe's magnificent hair-lip Elvis on 'Man On The Moon' were as good as anything they have recorded. Even with the departure of Bill Berry R.E.M. are still very much alive, but it would be asking a lot to expect any future album to match this.

(CMJ New Music Report, issue 304, October 9, 1992)

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 Moby Grape). And more so than ever before, it's the warmth and genuine feel of that music-some of the greatest ever made-that's infused into R.E.M.'s tenth long-player, Automatic For The People. To some, the rootsy, acoustic mood of this album stems from its oft-bootlegged series of unplugged shows in support of Out Of Time, but the band's really been playing this way since 1985 or so (as it did in the movie Athens, GA-Inside/Out). Built on a sturdy, sometimes subtle base of guitars, Automatic is actually lushly orchestral, awash with strings, haunting mellotrons, reedy accordions and bright mandolins. Automatic For The People is surprising even in its timeliness, arriving so soon after Out Of Time-most superstar acts of its caliber usually take far more time off between albums. Though it's an oft-misused phrase and a bit of a cliche, it's nonetheless very true that R.E.M. have turned around and made the album that it wanted to make, totally open and honest, free from restraint, and completely unsullied by outside pressures or expectations. Over ten years on, after having forever altered the course of American music, Stipe, Buck, Mills and Berry have made a record that undeniably equals the masterpieces they themselves so admire.

Millions have been waiting on the new R.E.M. album, and almost none of them are 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'roll cravings and the singer's ruminative tendencies sit together like completely different things in a pod. Other than on Ignoreland, a stonkalong satire of Reagan/Bush America, it's folk they start from. Acoustic guitars lead the way into Drive (the first single), Monty Got A Raw Deal and several others. Hard on their heels come Michael Stipe's vocals, high and sharp-edged with that severe absence of emoting long associated with a finger in the ear - though there are exceptions such as Try Not To Breathe where Stipe goes into character as an old man wrestling with the imminence of death. But the subliminal message throughout, seemingly, is that the singer is always in control; a distance is maintained. It's crucial to the R.E.M. effect because, at the same time, the band are eager to throw a cheery arm round the listener's shoulder - rock on in with cleverly pointed touches on guitar, organ or a subtly assembled backing vocal from Mike Mills. The strings are impressive too, whether melancholy (Everybody Hurts) or jouncing ELOishly (The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight). Astonishingly, several of the arrangements were by John Paul Jones, eking out his pension post-Mission production and Led Zeppelin. So a lively form of bliss is readily available from the sounds of Automatic For The People.

The words are the best and the worst of it: licensed to be bloody difficult, if not incomprehensible. All interpretations of Drive or Man On The Moon (elegiac?) or Star Me Kitten (sexy?) should own up to being long shots. The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight is a brainteaser involving a phone and, uh, if the coiled cord is the snake ... it still doesn't make obvious sense. At least half the album must be filed under skull-scratchers. Nonetheless, its character does emerge eventually. In fact, it's about Life. Without embarrassment and via sundry dark metaphors, it enquires "What's it all about, if anything?". While Try Not To Breathe dramatises a moment of personal torment, Find The River goes for the huge-size screen, adroitly diverting classic images of river, sea and flowers to eco-philosophical purposes ("We're closer now than light years to go," Stipe pronounces, glumly). Sweetness Follows piles on the misery by flaunting soured, unconvincing consolation for common grief, the loss of parents, brothers, sisters. Yet, if this all seems entirely too much, there's also Nightswimming and Everybody Hurts. Both do a slowdance with death, then pull off the aesthetic pirouette necessary to turn it all around. As the nightswimmer, Stipe sloughs off despond in unsocialworkerly fashion with scalp-prickling music and the mysterious clarity of lines like "September's coming soon/Pining for the moon/And what if there were two/Side by side in orbit around the Ferris sun". In Everybody Hurts he sings a counterpart to the Kate Bush role in Peter Gabriel's Don't Give Up - "You feel like you're lost/No, no, you're not alone". Big emotions, big ideas, and you believe them too, without feeling a fool. For properly beloved entertainers, R.E.M. can give a person quite a going over.

Paul Evans (RollingStone, issue 642)

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 grapple, through a unifying metaphor of "the recklessness of water," with the interior world of memory, loss and yearning. This is the members of R.E.M. delving deeper than ever; grown sadder and wiser, the Athens subversives reveal a darker vision that shimmers with new, complex beauty.

Despite its difficult concerns, most of Automatic is musically irresistible. Still present, if at a slower tempo, is the tunefulness that without compromising the band's highly personal message, made these Georgia misfits platinum sellers. Since "The One I Love," its Top Forty hit from 1987, R.E.M. has conquered by means of artful videos, surer hooks and fatter production and by expanding thematically to embrace the doomsday politics of Document, the eco-utopianism of Green and the sweet rush of Out of Time. Brilliantly, the new album both questions and clinches that outreaching progress; having won the mainstream's ear, R.E.M. murmurs in voices of experience – from the heart, one on one.

In a minor key, "Drive" opens Automatic with Michael Stipe singing: "Hey kids/Where are you?/Nobody tells you what to do," a chorus that wryly echoes David Essex's glam-rock anthem "Rock On." In its imagining of youth apocalypse, "Drive" upsets the pat assumption that the members of R.E.M. might still see themselves as generational spokesmen. The group then further trashes anyone's expectation of a nice pop record with "Try Not to Breathe." Alluding presumably to "suicide doctor" Jack Kevorkian ("I will try not to breathe/This decision is mine/I have lived a full life/These are the eyes I want you to remember"), the song ushers in a series of meditations on mortality that makes Automatic as haunted at times as Lou Reed's Magic and Loss. Relief comes in the form of whimsical instrumentation (such low-tech keyboards as piano, clavinet, accordion); political satire ("Ignoreland") that suggests a revved-up Buffalo Springfield; and, on the catchy "Side-winder Sleeps Tonight," some of Stipe's niftier faux nursery rhymes ("A can of beans/Of black-eyed peas/Some Nescafe and ice/A candy bar/A falling star/Or a reading from Dr. Seuss"). Yet, without a single "Shiny Happy People" among its twelve songs, Automatic is assuredly an album edged in black.

Famous ghosts are tenderly remembered. The calypsolike "Man on the Moon" fantasizes holy-fool comedian Andy Kaufman in hip heaven ("Andy, are you goofing on Elvis?"), and a paean to Montgomery Clift, "Monty Got a Raw Deal," exhorts Hollywood's wrecked Adonis to "just let go." Hard grief inspires "Sweetness Follows" ("Readying to bury your father and your mother"), yet compassion wins out: The sorrows that make us "lost in our little lives," the song says, end in an inscrutable sweetness.

A homespun ditty, "New Orleans Instrumental No. 1," and the woozy jazz of "Star Me Kitten" (featuring the weirdest love lyrics imaginable: "I'm your possession/So fuck me, kitten") lighten Automatic somewhat, but the darker songs boast the stronger playing. Guitarist Peter Buck dazzles, not only with the finger picking that launched a thousand college bands but with feedback embellishments and sitarlike touches. As always, the rhythm section of bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry kicks; on about half the numbers, Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones crafts string arrangements that recall, in their Moorish sweep, his orchestral work for the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request.

If "Nightswimming" and "Find the River" are R.E.M. at its most evocative, "Everybody Hurts," the album's third masterpiece, finds the band gaining a startling emotional directness. Spare triplets on electric piano carry a melody as sturdy as a Roy Orbison lament, and Stipe's voice rises to a keening power. "When you're sure you've had too much of this life, well, hang on," he entreats, asserting that in the face of the tough truths Automatic for the People explores, hope is, more than ever, essential.

© Frank Steven Groen