Eyebrows shot skyward when the English band Bush announced that iconoclastic engineer Steve Albini – he of the Pixies' Surfer Rosa and PJ Harvey's Rid of Me – would twiddle the knobs for the group's sophomore album. Albini manned the board for Nirvana's 1993 record, In Utero. For Bush, the most successful and shameless mimics of Nirvana's music, to go with Albini at a time when distancing themselves
Read More
from the Seattle sound could only help their credibility seems bizarre – and a little creepy.
Razorblade Suitcase, the outcome of this shotgun wedding, is a decidedly mixed bag. To his credit, Albini actually toughens up Bush's arena-ready thud, adding a new set of dynamics by stripping the mix of reverb; the moments of silence in "Greedy Fly" crackle like small explosions. Albini's stark recording approach also makes the most of the occasional mistake, capturing a spontaneous feedback squeal or finger scrape against reluctant strings, which gives the band's performances an unexpected live-sounding vitality. Bush even rise to the challenge of Albini's post-punk pedigree, adding atonal guitar to the sea-chantey lurch of "History" and shimmering Sonic Youth-style drones to the climax of "Insect Kin."
Unfortunately, for all of their strained attempts at artistic credibility, Bush refuse to let go of the hackneyed posturing that catapulted them up the charts. As a songwriter, frontman Gavin Rossdale relies on nonsensical couplets like, "Do you feel the way you hate?/Do you hate the way you feel?" ("Greedy Fly"). It's bad enough that in "Straight No Chaser," Bush consciously ape the mallternative power-ballad format of their big hit "Glycerine" – but to name the former after the great jazz standard by Thelonious Monk is unbearably pretentious and insulting.
The band's derivative tendencies are everywhere: "Swallowed" borrows liberally from the Pixies' abrasive melodicism; "Synapse" looks a little too closely to PJ Harvey for inspiration. And let's not forget Nirvana – Rossdale's vocals in "Insect Kin" are a blurred xerox of Kurt Cobain's, just as the chord progression in "Mouth" uncomfortably recalls "Heart-Shaped Box." Moments like these make one wish that Bush would just accept their status as the Bon Jovi of grunge. When Rossdale sings, "We are servants to our formulaic ways," in "Greedy Fly," it hits a little too close to home. (RS 749)
MATT DIEHL
