Happy New Year! Lucy was unwell yesterday, so we stayed in. I wanted to watch a Werner Herzog DVD, but that got vetoed. Instead, I ended up just listening to 6 Music, reading L.D. Beghtol's book and sipping some Laphroaig.
Now, R.E.M. I remember holding out on buying this record when it first came out. I felt let down when everyone said Out of Time was a great album, and it turned out not to be, so I didn't believe them when they said this was a great album. But eventually I relented, early in 1993, I think. Whenever I hear Drive it takes me back to driving along the A259 on my way to Winchelsea to visit Jeremy in the beach hut he was living in, between Christmas and New Year 1992. I guess it must have been on the radio, and I thought, hey, this really is good. That was when I hatched by every-other-album theory about R.E.M.: that Life's Rich Pageant, Green, Automatic for the People and New Adventures in Hi-Fi are the good albums, and the ones in between are just so-so (I don't know enough about R.E.M. before 1986 or after 1996 to judge the applicability of the theory there).
Anyway, I really liked this record for a year or two after I got it. You can hear, I think, that they're near the top of the game, and that Stipe, in particular, is channelling a special energy that he almost anticipates isn't always going to be there. Certainly for me R.E.M. have dropped off the radar, and I rarely listen to them. In 1999 I distilled the albums I have of theirs down to a 75-minute minidisc (see tracklisting), and I think that's pretty much all I've listened to since then. Hearing Automatic for the People again, I still quite like it, but there were no tracks that jumped out at me that aren't on that minidisc.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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