Automatic for the People

Twelve tracks in about forty-nine minutes, and ten of them pass the subtractive test. Drive must open: a dark, low song that sets the record’s light before the band breaks in. Try Not to Breathe, Everybody Hurts and Sweetness Follows are the core, three ways of facing an end, and Man on the Moon, Nightswimming and Find the River make the last turn, from doubt to memory to passage. The instrumental is a breath before Sweetness Follows and earns its two minutes. The test bites twice, at about a sixth of the running time: Star Me Kitten, the slightest song, goes without loss, and Ignoreland, a tirade in a muddier mix, goes with gain. The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite and Monty Got a Raw Deal are lighter still.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: dying, grief and the wish to die are ordinary, and so is what carries a life through them: attention, memory and the people left. Try Not to Breathe gives an old person’s choice to let go, and the wish to be remembered by a look. Sweetness Follows sets a family at a parent’s burial, each member sealed in a private world, and finds sweetness after: a condition, not a mood. Everybody Hurts says to the person thinking of suicide, in the plainest words on the record, “hold on”, and the plainness is the method. Man on the Moon makes belief and doubt one game. Held from the top: mortality was not unseen before, and Ignoreland states positions.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Elevation comes on seven of twelve tracks, often at a high pitch of beauty and rarely of terror. Drive holds dread in its low murmur until the distorted guitar breaks in. Try Not to Breathe rises gently in its chorus. Everybody Hurts climbs, strings and voice together, to a climax of plain consolation; Sweetness Follows is a grave height, cello over a drone, under a voice of grief. Man on the Moon lifts in its chorus. Nightswimming is beauty sustained, piano, strings and oboe over a figure that repeats like memory, and Find the River closes in quiet transport. Five tracks stay level. The ceiling is lower than a record whose summit is terror or grandeur; frequency carries the figure.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth is built in two places, and the particular stays particular. Man on the Moon builds the trickster: a comedian whose death some refused to believe, Elvis perhaps alive, the moon landing doubted, Moses, Newton and Darwin set in one catalogue with a wrestler and a board game, so that resurrection and hoax become one story a culture tells about its icons. The sequence builds a passage: the record opens on a road and ends at water, a night swim in a remembered summer and a river sought toward the sea, the oldest figure of the last crossing. Monty Got a Raw Deal makes Montgomery Clift a fallen star. Held from the top: much else is atmosphere, and no figure carries the pattern from end to end.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance is the band’s own: the jangling American college rock it had led for a decade, and Out of Time (1991), where the mandolin, the strings and the quiet hit had already arrived, with the chamber folk of Nick Drake beyond it. The turn is to a whole record slow, acoustic and about death, made at the band’s commercial peak, in a year when loud guitars ruled the field it had helped to open, with no tour behind it. The stake was real: the follow-up to its biggest record, and a sombre one. What holds it is the path: the palette was proven on the previous record, the song forms are conventional, and the wager is in mood and subject, on ground already cleared.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Change the form and most of what the record knows goes, because its knowledge is in its pace. A record about dying is built slow: tempos held back, drums often absent or light, strings and piano where guitars would be, the voice close and unforced. Everybody Hurts is built as a lullaby in a rocking metre that climbs, so the song consoles by its shape before its words. Nightswimming repeats one piano figure under the memory it tells, and the repetition is the remembering. Sweetness Follows holds grief under sweetness on a drone. Sequence is counted here, once: from the low road of Drive through the songs of endings to the water of the close. Held from the top: four songs are containers the form neither needs nor shapes.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence first, and thirty-four years supply it. The record’s standing has held and grown: it is the album most often named the band’s best, reissued for its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2017, with demos. Its songs have been carried into other hands and uses: Everybody Hurts as a charity single that reached number one in Britain in 2010, and Man on the Moon giving its title to a film of 1999. The yield in the record is real and repays return: the political puns of Drive, the catalogue of Man on the Moon, the relation of grief to sweetness in Sweetness Follows. Held from the top: the arrangements are clear rather than layered, the study is thin beside the use, and much of the return is to two songs.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The contest is with the rock of 1992, loud, young and angry, and with the band’s own jangle. The force is real: an alternative band at mass scale made a quiet, adult record about death and showed that rock’s new audience would take one, which widened what the form could carry at that size. Held from the top: the means were the singer-songwriter’s and the band’s previous record’s, and little changed in how music was made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: number one in Britain, six singles and sales in the millions; Everybody Hurts became a public standard of consolation; and the reflective, string-lined album by a rock band at its height became a model, though its line of descent is asserted more than documented.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Survival is weighed over thirty-four years. The form is whole: twelve tracks, in print since release, reissued in 2017. Presence is wide and continuous: Everybody Hurts and Man on the Moon in broadcast and in other hands, the album still named as the band’s measure after the band ended in 2011. The fabric aged well: acoustic instruments, real strings and a plain mix carry little of 1992’s sound. The surface fixed to its moment is small and real: Ignoreland’s quarrel with the Reagan and Bush years, and the topical puns of Drive. Its presence is narrower than the widest records of its years: it stands level with Achtung Baby and Loveless at 8.6, a tenth below Nevermind at 8.7, and far below what has lasted centuries.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and load-bearing in the songs that carry the record. Scott Litt’s production is warm and lucid; every instrument is legible. The band traded instruments to find the sound, Peter Buck’s mandolin and acoustic guitars and Mike Mills’s piano, organ and accordion among them, and John Paul Jones’s string arrangements are scored for gravity rather than sweetness. Michael Stipe’s voice, at its most exposed and exact, carries Everybody Hurts and Nightswimming on breath and diction. Drive withholds the band until its distorted break. The faults: Ignoreland’s buried vocal and generic rock arrangement, Star Me Kitten’s deliberate murk that reads as slack, and the light setting of The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs the record: mortality met with tenderness, in a hushed, slow, acoustic space. The two most distant elements obey it. Man on the Moon, a comic catalogue of icons and hoaxes, and Sweetness Follows, a family at a burial, both ask what lives on after a death, and both answer in the same low light. Try Not to Breathe and Find the River, a dying and a passage, frame the law from either end, and comedy and grief, the bedroom and the grave, are held inside it. Held from the top: the law strains at The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite, a novelty, and at Star Me Kitten, where tenderness blurs into desire, and it breaks once, at Ignoreland, an angry tirade in a harsher mix.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for being an album. Consciousness, as depression and memory; the family in grief; age and dying; youth and friendship, in Nightswimming; the natural order, as river, sea, night water and the moon; celebrity and the media, in Kaufman, Elvis and Clift; the state, in Ignoreland and Drive; eros, in Star Me Kitten; the sacred, faintly, in the crossing of Find the River. Mortality joins most of them: family, body, nature and celebrity are held as aspects of one condition. What holds the figure is the join: the state stands apart in its own angry track, labour is absent, and history enters only as the moon landing and the Reagan years.

Score: 8.0 / 10