Kerrang!
by Simon Jones
rated: KKKK
Bush: Rossdale’s crew return with album number four
GIVEN THAT when they emerged Bush were pretty much written off as a bunch of opportunistic Brits riding on the coat tails of the grunge explosion, it’s somewhat of an achievement that they’re still here almost 10 years on, releasing their fourth album. That fact that they’ve survived the legacy of a song as popular and uncharacteristic as ‘Glycerine’ is in itself no small achievement,a s it could quite easily have confined them to a dwindling career spent trying to replicate that commercial bright point.
To be honest though, things haven’t been completely rosy over the past few years – after the huge success of their first two albums, ‘Sixtenn Stone’ and ‘Razorblade Suitcase’, album number three, ‘The Science of Things’, was a relative commercial disappointment, managing to only just scrape past the platinum mark in the States after the multi-platinum feats of its predecessors. Which means that there’s a lt riding on ‘Golden State’ to get things back on track.
On the strength of the songs alone, it’s certainly capable of doing this. Devoid of any asemblence of the technology which infiltrated the band’s sound on ‘The Science of Things’, this is a back to basics effort that sees the band calling on every side of their musical personality.
‘Head Full of Ghosts’, ‘Hurricane’ and fantastic closer ‘Fload’ are the band’s bread and butter – the mid-paced rock songs complete with nice, big, arena filling choruses – and indeed these are some of the best to bear the Bush name yet. ‘My Engine is With You’ is the fastest song band have ever recorded, ‘Reasons’ satisfies their fondness for aggressive, near-discordant rock, while by way of contrast, ‘Inflatable’ and ‘Out of This World’ are two of the band’s gentler moments. The former is a beautiful ballad, the latter a moody track with a dreamy use of atmospherics and piano and a fantastic vocal performance from Gavin Rossdale.
As with each Bush album, a sense of deja vu starts to take over by the time the album nears completion. Rossdale’s voice is fairly one dimensional, and the riffs are at times guilty of blurring into one. Given time, though, each song gradually assumes its own identity,a nd chances are if you like Bush, it’s an identity you’ll be very happy with.