Best coming of age album ever

Nightswimming, majestic

While I prefer some of their earlier work, this is a very good album from one of my favorite bands. My favorite tracks are Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite, Ignoreland, Star Me Kitten, and Man on the Moon. Everybody Hurts can get a little annoying, but it doesn't detract from the album that much.

Even though I prefer Reckoning & Murmur to this, I can't deny what an analytical pop masterwork this is.

Poignant masterstroke and one of the happy ocurrences where the best selling album by an artist is also their best. R.E.M didn't have anything else to prove after this.

Best track: Ignoreland

Even though Murmur remains my personal favourite R.E.M. album, Automatic arguably saw them at their creative peak. A very strong album from start to finish, blatant fillers like Sweetness Follow included. Drive is easily one of my favourite R.E.M. songs ever.

Emotional, evocative and somber. Its excellence and interest gets stale rather quickly, but for what's there, it's a strong album.

After years of hearing about Weaver D's--the Athens, Georgia, soul food eatery that spawned the catchphrase that R.E.M. borrowed for the title of this album--I finally had a chance to visit there in 2013, just a few months before they closed their doors for good. I can confirm that their fried chicken and black-eyed peas were second to none, and I also can confirm that Dexter Weaver did indeed respond, "Automatic," when he took my order. As for the album that the members of R.E.M. created in honor of this Georgia institution, it's one of the band's best, and that's saying something. It's quite a bit more accessible, more radio friendly, than a lot of their work from the eighties, but still as lyrically oblique as ever. My favorite track, "Find the River," uses the song's namesake river as a metaphor for the kind of artistic seeking that has marked the band's whole career: "I have got to find the river / Bergamot and vetiver / Run through my head and fall away." A great summary of the place R.E.M.'s music has had in my life ever since I first heard them in the mid-eighties.

Best album of R.E.M's discography, has some of their best songs such as "drive", "Man on the moon" and "Nightswimming". Also has their best song which is "everybody hurts" which holds a special place in my heart due to it being the song on the radio that I heard first after breaking up with a second love. Excellent song, simply fantastic.