In summary:

A number of Sixteen Stone’s well-written tracks have stood the test of time, and Gavin Rossdale’s clever wordplay is streets ahead of what most of their grunge contemporaries were doing at the time.

Sixteen Stone receives 8/11.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Bush’s debut is an interesting creation in that few albums have polarized two sides of the Atlantic to such a degree.

One the one hand, rock music fans in their native England were quick to dismiss Gavin Rossdale and co. as nothing more than “cheap Nirvana rip-offs”, but those across the pond in the USA absolutely lapped it up, catapulting Bush to global stardom off the back of the four hit singles contained on this disc.

In retrospect, the Americans were correct.

Sixteen Stone is a fine collection of songs, which somehow manages to retain all of its bite some 30-years after it’s release (particularly album opener Everything Zen, which sounds rawer and edgier than most of the rock we hear on today’s radio). It also does a fantastic job of showcasing the song-writing nous of frontman Gavin Rossdale, which he uses to tap into the disenchanted minds of mid-90s rock listeners with relative ease.

“I’d die in your arms,
If you were dead too.”

Little Things

There are highlights aplenty here.

Hit single Machinehead will go down as one of the best rock songs of the decade (no typo), and the irresistible hook of Comedown shall rattle around your brain for weeks on end (trust me, I know!).

Elsewhere, the super-heavy combination of Monkey and Testosterone see Bush taking a rare swipe at their critics who labelled them “manufactured” (“I’m just a monkey on a drip?”), and sneering at the machismo which dominated the rock industry at the time (“Oh man, I’m real proud of my manhood”).

However, it’s the stripped back Glycerine which ultimately steals the show.

The tortured vocals and messy guitar arrangement shows Rossdale at his very best, underscoring why he deservedly became one of the standout frontmen of the mid-to-late 1990s, and it remains one of the finest songs they’ve ever released.

Rossdale’s clever wordplay is at the centre of everything that’s good about Sixteen Stone.

His knack for creating ear-jarring lyrics (e.g. “There’s no sex in your violence”) is a talent in itself, and in recent years he’s explained that he developed this song-writing style in order to avoid commenting on specific trends or events so that his music never gets stuck to a certain era.

It’s a “trick” which has certainly paid off for Bush, because a handful of the songs on Sixteen Stone continue receiving regular airplay decades after their initial release!

The album is not perfect, of course, so we won’t treat it as such.

There are several songs here which fail to hit the mark, including the lacklustre Swim and Bomb (inexplicably front-loaded at #2 and #3 in the running order!), and grunge-by-numbers Body which feels like little more than “filler”.

Elsewhere, there are instances of tracks which could’ve benefitted from more time in the studio in order to maximize their potential. For instance, the sleepy verse structure of Alien feels somewhat directionless, before a devastating chorus crash-lands like a rocket ship bursting through the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s one of the highlights of the whole album, but one can’t help wish that the remainder of the song’s musical arrangement was as good as this supersonic chorus.

In some ways, the worldwide commercial success of the album merely added more fuel to the fire of Bush’s critics, as they were labelled “too manufactured” for a grunge scene which was still reeling from the sudden death of Kurt Cobain.

This caused an outpouring of toxicity, with many grunge critics openly flat-out refusing to acknowledge Rossdale’s ability as a frontman due to his model-like appearance.

Bush’s inability to win over fans in their homeland would bug them throughout their entire career, but it didn’t really hold them back, as they went on to sell more than six million albums in a run which spanned four decades (so far).

In summary:

A number of Sixteen Stone’s well-written tracks have stood the test of time, and Gavin Rossdale’s clever wordplay is streets ahead of what most of their grunge contemporaries were doing at the time.

Sixteen Stone receives 8/11.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Related Posts