so, i picked up the new bush record...
i'm aware that being a bush fan is holding to a kind of a tenuous position in the rock subculture, as they are immensely unpopular in the independent music community. i tend to lean towards this independent music community, so i think i need to develop a defense.
i'm going to use a dialectical approach, in not denying the validity of the criticism and arguing instead to appreciate it for what it is. yes; bush are a calculated, corporate rock band. yet, despite disliking the culture around it, i think there's a valid artistic space for high production rock music. nor do i think that a taste for bush is inconsistent with my tastes for other high production rock bands like soundgarden, nine inch nails and the smashing pumpkins.
of course, i have plenty of criticism for corporate rock culture in it's worst excesses, but these exist largely on an artistic level. these criticisms are valid, but they simply in no way negate the existence of the corporate rock band that uses resources effectively to create compelling music. this category has existed for as long as it's been demonstrable. that's a false binary that the smarter-than-you indie kids tend to fall for every time.
bush is something else that i was first exposed to via guitar world. a tab for everything zen appeared in one issue, and while the riff looked kind of boring, the lyrics printed underneath it caught my attention. then, i noticed that there was a slide guitar part, had fun jamming on it and wanted to hear what it sounded like. they didn't play that song on the radio in ottawa. so, i went to the music store and had to buy an imported copy of the tape, because they weren't being manufactured in canada, yet. it was a few weeks later that they got really popular, so the guitar world article must have been exploratory advertising.
i ended up enjoying the record, but i always interpreted it as fundamentally british and could never really understand the comparisons to seattle bands, like nirvana. i think it's because the production is so obviously brit-pop. it doesn't have any dark, churning moments; it's so bright and very clean. if there were american bands with clean production like this, they were punk bands like the pixies and bad religion. that's what nevermind was actually aspiring to. but, i wouldn't even make that connection. i've just always thought of them as brit-pop. consider the drumming in machinehead, for example; this is just so obviously british.
when i heard they were working with steve albini, i got a little bit worried. it seemed as though they were caving in to the media narrative as being a nirvana copycat, as though they thought they had cornered a market. this is when corporate rock gets terrible - when it starts seeking out target demographics as explicit attempts to tap into specific markets. i was consequently approaching this record with low expectations, half-convinced that it would be full of the worst radio anthems.
while a few of the tracks were clearly singled out and designed for mass broadcast, the record overall is actually surprisingly abstract. albini's raw production techniques are clearly on display in the guitar tone, but he was just as clearly not the final decision maker in the sound design process, which is very cleanly mastered. this combination of glossy processing over raw amp distortion really brings out the harmonics in the guitars, especially during the sections with multiple guitar overdubs. this effect is amplified even further by the liberal use of dissonance over the record.
the lack of disciplined songwriting on the record may be a consequence of a lack of preparation, which is another problem endemic to corporate rock, but in this circumstance it gives the production team a huge amount of space to fill in the spectrum. beyond the layering of guitar harmonics, which by the way is also very british, they also bring in some fairly written baroque-ish string sections. at other times, they fill the spectrum with reverb on drums and vocals in ways that take inspiration from the developing british form of trip-hop. this all culminates in a carefully written result, even if much of the writing and arrangements ultimately came from the production team. it is easy to criticize them for relying so strongly on this production, but that is again to miss the point that the producers, in this case, have produced a compelling result - that corporate rock can fulfill an artistic mandate.
unfortunately, these artistic mandates are subject to market discipline, and in the end i fear the band may regret not paying more attention to the available market research. my immediate perception is that people cannot connect with these songs due to their abstraction, that they are disappointed in the difficulty of the record and are choosing to move on. a band that is scorned like this will not survive a decline in popularity. but, at the least they can say that they made a really good record.
