Bush - Golden State

Maybe it’s damning Bush with faint praise, but I’m going to say it anyway: Golden State just may just be the 2nd best record Bush has ever done.

There’s nothing particularly ground-breaking or five star-ish about it, and though it’s lacking songs the caliber of some of the tunes on Bush’s debut Sixteen Stone--“Everything Zen,” “Comedown,” and “Machinehead” come to mind—Golden State is as good as or better than anything the band has recorded since (as good as 1999’s The Science of Things and better than 1996’s Razorblade Suitcase).

Vocalist/songwriter Gavin Rossdale continues in his favorite lyrical vain; he has developed a genuine talent for kitschy sci-fi existentialist imagery, and Bush has now been around long enough doing the same rote riffing—the leather-lunged Rossdale backed by torrents of humming reverb and a backbeat--that there’s now a pleasant touch of nostalgia in their work.

Back in the early ‘90s, Bush’s chief musical contribution to modern rock was diluting the intensity of the music style of its American influences—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soul Asylum—with a trace of a more cosmopolitan European techno rock sound—ala U2, (early) Radiohead, and the like (a strategy that seems to have appealed more to American audiences than it did to the folks at home). Since then, the band has persevered through the alternative rock doldrums of the late ‘90s, tending to abjure creative risks, and remaining intense and faithful to their original vision of themselves, despite the fact that the band reached a point where their music tended to receive less attention than Rossdale’s high profile romance with No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani.

The new album never strays far from the signature Bush sound, and showcases Bush’s most technically polished playing to date, both of which work in its favor. It’s a good enough album, I suppose, if you don’t mind the fact that you’ve been here before, more or less. Golden State will please longtime fans, and perhaps those who might already find themselves in the throes of a premature case of ‘90s nostalgia, but it doesn’t quite stand out in any larger context.

--Matt Parks