Bush - Razorblade Suitcase
Critics hated Bush's sophomore album. They said it sounded like Nirvana (it doesn't), the songs weren't hook heavy radio fuel (sure they are, maybe not your radio, but someone's). They confuse Albini for the source of the sound rather than the giftwrap. They mistake Gavin Rossdale's tangential metaphors for Kurt Cobain's pleasure of speech. They think an album has to punch you in the face to be good. In short, they don't actually care.
Sixteen Stone is a classic alternative rock album. Every song is approachable, recognizable, evocative. It has really crass moments and borderline melodrama (a big seller at the time). It's a great album and i won't argue that.
Razorblade Suitcase, however, is an art album. It's the album that came from the life of Sixteen Stone. Written while touring, watching your old life fall apart, actually dealing with all the emotional baggage (see, tangential metaphor). He is not the same person for having written the first album, and that can be easy to miss if you have the impression that this type of art is objective.
However similar the instrumentation, a similar taste for primitive power chord riffs, the occasional tourettes inspired interjections, Bush is nothing like Nirvana. They approach the same essence from different directions. Nirvana comes from the garage band mode of making pop songs your own, whereas Bush is a direct lineage rock band searching for something more primitive and aggressive. That's not blather on my part, those perspectives are a well established part of each band, Nirvana the bored teenage outcasts, Bush emulating their rock heros. I'm not saying they aren't similar, i'm saying the direct comparison comes from a weak surface way of listening.
Razorblade Suitcase is very much like In Utero in one respect, though: it's intentionally antagonistic to it's supposed audience. It's supposed to challenge that naive surface listening, that false sense of inclusion you felt, you are an outsider and this isn't FOR you, it's AT you because you wanted to see deeper.
It's easy to forget that this is a bash it out quick album. Albini may have put a lot of effort into sculpting the finished sound, but the band wasn't sculpting a universe the way Nirvana did on their studio albums. Gavin writes pretty much as you hear it, but Kurt would start from the most remedial of demo idea fragments and build them into a sort of final version, then play them different live. I don't think i'm imagining the difference i hear in their approaches, i think it's real and audible.
So, why is it better than their first? For precisely the reason critics hated it. It isn't meant to be a collection of hit songs, it's meant to be an album. Nothing, and i mean nothing, ruins an album like a runaway hit single that you just can't put back into context. I can't tell you how many times i skip the big single when listening to an album, and that hurts me deep in my soul. I don't have that problem here (though i do have to ignore the god awful remix of "Mouth" that my brain wants to remind me of after hearing the original).
The album as a whole is a singular moment in Rossdale's headspace, and that coherence is audible even though the songs themselves may appear scattered or disjointed. What Albini brings to the table is a delicious vibrancy to delicate moments, and that makes the inevitable plunge into noise-rock territory feel both logical and more intense. It's one of the very few albums where a minuscule dynamic range serves a real purpose, and nothing gets lost or pushed into the background. It's borderline lowercase in a big alternative rock context, and that matches the emotional rawness quite well.
One final little bit of trivia to end this rambling incoherent review: those bizarre string arrangements are by Gavin and Nigel rather than some outside arranger. Not bad for a couple of guitar players....
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