Punk connection?

Bush bring the noise to Razorblade Suitcase

by Carly Carioli

Assailed as insufferably pretty and popular, plastic dispensers of prefab post-post-punk confections and style-over-substance MTV monstrosity, Bush are everyone's favorite love-to-hate-'em scrunge band. And though a chasm had already opened up before they came along, their quintuple-platinum debut, Sixteen Stone (Trauma/Interscope), with help from Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill, permanently severed mainstream alternative rock from its indie/punk underground ancestry along with all the ideological baggage that came with those roots.

Thanks to Sixteen Stone, Bush and bands like their labelmates No Doubt inhabit a much wider pop-cultural sphere than the underground or even previous alternative rock ever addressed -- a place where arguments of authenticity and credibility seem sourly out of place. Call it new wave '90s-style, or think of Bush as the Dave Clark Five of the next century; what's certain is that Bush marked a point of no return for the new rock mainstream.

Ironically, or maybe just predictably, Bush spend most of their new Razorblade Suitcase (Trauma/Interscope) trying to convince us that you can go back -- that all you really need is a little noise and a few obtuse lyrics to reconnect Sixteen Stone with, say, the Pixies' Surfer Rosa or Big Black's Songs About Fucking. In a press release, Interscope lauded Suitcase producer and indie-rock maverick Steve Albini as "a master at capturing actual unadorned performances" -- which seems to imply that Sixteen Stone, recorded pretty much live in the studio, was somehow less than "actual," authentic, or real. Or that bringing Albini aboard would somehow make Bush more "real" than they had been before, whatever that means. Which is precisely the kind of reductive cynicism that's made the linking of Bush and Albini look like the most transparent musical arranged marriage since Michael and Lisa Marie.

It's not that Albini hasn't done his job; from the opening Pixies-ish seesaw bursts of "Personal Holloway," Suitcase churns, chirps, and scrapes with incidental contact between fist and guitar. It blares ragged, granulated distortion pockmarked with squeals and squalls of feedback and other spontaneous combustion -- the little "mistakes" that are such an integral part of both indie rock's sonic resonance and its DIY mythology. But at times those mistakes seem orchestrated. Tracks like "Insect Kin" have the producer's latent prints all over them: dissonant ringing guitar lines and hoarse-voiced shouts, a breakdown in the middle where the guitars drop out of the mix and the song reverts to syncopated bass pounding, tangential squiggles, feedback, and nonsense licks (hereafter referred to as "the Six Finger Satellite part"). None of which makes Bush the second coming of Slint; more often than not it comes off as calculated slumming, like throwing a thrift-store slipcover on a million-dollar couch. It only proves Bush would do just about anything, at this point, to be taken seriously.

The thing is, when they max out as a straight-up neo-guitar-pop band, they're as believable as anyone. "Swallowed," the album's first single, has to be one of the catchiest tracks to hit the radio since Radiohead's "Creep." It oozes the same queasy tug of longing and regret, bounces back with a sudden blissful guitar churn that celebrates heartache the way nothing other than vital pop music can. Unlike the opaquely worded singles from Sixteen Stone, there's actual narrative thrust, a sense of urgency in Gavin Rossdale's voice like a sudden revelation by a guy standing in a thunderstorm -- a panicked "Gotta get away from here" setting up the heartbreak in "Miss the one that I love a lot."

It's a simple sentiment and an even simpler hook, a timeless approach -- the kind of song you could pull over your head like a blanket and hide under till the next sonic revolution comes along. Elsewhere, the best moments on Suitcase come when Bush stick to their guns. "Straight No Chaser" and "Bone Driven" are "Glycerine"-styled solo vocal and guitar tracks, both given a subtle autumnal maturity with candlelit, bone-dry string arrangements. "History" stretches out four-chord punch into a breezy, loping gait, like a less saccharine "Machinehead." And "Synapse" stashes a piercing barbed-wire hook in standard loud-soft dynamics.

You can imagine, listening to this mixed bag, that Bush are uncertain of which direction they're headed, feeling that, whatever their sales figures, critical doom awaits and the lack of all-important cred will elude them no matter which way they turn -- it's like trying to fight your way out of a suitcase full of, well, razorblades. With the "Synapse" lyric "Razorblade suitcase/All the tricks of your trade," you have to wonder whether the bag of the album's title doesn't in fact belong to Steve Albini. Let's hope Bush realize they don't need Albini's tricks to collar that elusive credibility; on their own merits, they've proven a "real" enough reason to throw credibility to the wind and crank up the radio.