1989's Automatic is the third album from Glasgow alternative rock institution and was engineered by Alan Moulder. At this point in their career, J&MC was essentially a duo brothers Jim and William Reid and a drum machine. The dark, twisted pop, sometimes soaked in feedback, sometimes pounded out with drum-machine backing of Automatic contains their most successful single up to that point, "Head On" (later covered by the Pixies). Pitchfork wrote in 2006: "Conventional wisdom wrongly calls this the dud. With the band reduced to the brothers only, things go artificial: The drum machine is fore grounded, the bass is played on keyboards, the feedback's on vacation. In that space, the Reids take their biggest shot at doing full on Pop, something that feels like a career peak".