Review Summary: Half killer half filler.
Say what you want about Bush; say whatever you want about how they were mere radio-rock musicians hanging on the coattails of a dying genre to squeeze as much moolah out of it as possible. I still certainly found Sixteen Stone a more digestible album than, say, Nirvana's In Utero, and for that period of time in the '90s, Bush were
big. Not just big, they were
huge. While music critics were scoffing, and drawing negative comparisons to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Bush was selling out tours worldwide, and winning over the hearts of countless fans. Nevertheless, the scathing remarks of the critics were no doubt starting to get under the skins of the musicians. They had fame, but they wanted credibility. So what did they do? They said their next album would distance themselves from the bands the critics said they were aping in order to achieve success, like Nirvana. And in order to do that, they adopted a darker and edgier sound for their sophomore album (like Nirvana), and hired Steve Albini as producer (like Nirvana).
Okay.
The result of their toils was Razorblade Suitcase, released in late 1996. And you know, it says something about simply how huge Bush were back in the '90s that this album nearly sold four million copies. Why, you ask? Because it sold four million copies, despite being savaged by nearly every critic in existence; even the greatest of fans were left disappointed. It merely gave more fuel for the critics to parrot what they had said two years ago; that the band was nothing but a mimic of other popular grunge bands and had failed miserably in making a second album.
When I first started listening to this album, disdain-marked words of the critics in mind, I was stunned. The album seemed to be the exact opposite of what the critics were preaching about it; it wasn't just decent, it was near-amazing. That stellar opening trio; the groovy bass lines of
Personal Holloway, the sinister eerieness of
Greedy Fly, and the dark, yet radio-friendly
Swallowed had left me blown away in terms of how Bush had expanded their sound. Songs like
A Tendency to Start Fires displayed the impassioned punk influences which they had never showcased before and
Insect Kin and
Cold Contagious, while not being spectacular, still managed to be a treat to the ears, which solid instrumental work and stellar vocals. The first 6 songs were so good; how could this album be that bad?
Then
Mouth started playing, and I said aloud, "Oh."
Honestly, I've never seen an album with a quality decline quite like this. It's like as if Bush thought that half an album was enough to sell an entire album (then again, maybe they did.) After listening to the first half, it was difficult to believe that the second half was even part of the same album. Save for the occasional highlight (
Straight No Chaser, their
Glycerine mimic), the dark, intricate instrumentals, and most importantly, the raw energy of the first half went missing completely. Keep in mind what I said about raw energy, because the second half has almost none. Every song somehow dissolves into a congruent, saturated mess of slow, torpid, unenergetic compositions. No song in the second half, save the noisy, dissonant, semi-decent
History, bothers to pick up the pace. Every dull, sluggish song just passes by, only to be succeeded by another dull, sluggish song.
The completely and pathetically tepid
Mouth,
Synapse,
Communicator and
Bonedriven, with their over-repetitive guitar lines and drum patterns, just serve to have the album fall apart. They all suffer from the most obnoxious flaw in this album; vacant instrumentation. Seriously, almost all of these songs have none. They all suffer from the same pattern of repetitive vocals over a repetitive guitar line, alone. For three-quarters of a song, you hear nothing but that guitar pattern and that voice. That's it. Nothing else in the background, at all. Drums? Bass? Not going to hear of it.
What compounds this issue is Albini's signature rough production. It merely sucks whatever little soul existed in the songs out of it, and merely adds to that feeling you get of unfinished-ness when listening to the second half of the album; like they just threw together random guitar and vocal parts together, and the roughness of the production just serves to make it feel like they rushed everything through as fast as possible, including producing it. And while I don't mean to place the blame of this album's inadequacies on Albini, it definitely aggravates a problem that was bad enough to begin with. Such rough problem is simply out of place with radio-friendly acts like Bush.
To conclude, it's such a shame that such potential had to be thrown out of the window like this. If Bush could make the first half of the album so good, why on earth did they make the second half so terrifyingly bad? Bush had really managed to show that they were on par with the peers they were so often compared to with their first few songs; that they had the skills to delve into the darker edge of the spectrum just like Nirvana had done, and make such impassioned tracks like
A Tendency to Start Fires, and the ultimately brilliant
Greedy Fly, with regards to which I maintain that no other grunge band has managed to make a song quite like it. I have really seen no other album that dives into mediocrity so alarmingly unexpectedly. It really is like a razorblade suitcase, after all; tempting to open, but you're going to cut yourself on the edge in the process.
