A haunting rumination on mortality, Automatic for the People is R.E.M.'s late-period triumph and the pinnacle of their major-label career. Widely regarded as the group's best effort (an assumption that is up for no small amount of debate), Automatic finds the group at their most beautiful. Sporting string arrangements from Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, Automatic continues the largely acoustic approach the group began exploring on Out of Time.

All of this ornate instrumentation serves to support grim subject matter. If "Smells Like Teen Spirit" provided a blistering summation of prevailing teenage disaffection, "Drive" was its cautious older brother. An inversion of David Essex's "Rock On," Stipe uses its lyric to explore the kind of rebellion born of confusion — his declaration "Hey, kids, rock and roll, nobody tells you where to go" is more lament than celebration. Perhaps that's because he's more concerned with the end of life than its mid-period: much of Automatic finds him mulling over mortality. Parents are buried, suicide is considered, and Andy Kaufman and Montgomery Clift assume the stature of martyrs. It's a tremendous credit to Stipe that he can pull off such weighty ruminations without being obvious or overly dramatic, and that his reaction… read more »