I have, since I was five years old, been obsessed with music. Listening to it, watching gigs, and for the last 15 years, writing about it.
Quite how a rock band can slip through my net that has sold 24m records is anyone’s guess – but we are where we are.
Which is a (very) long-winded way of saying I knew three Bush songs (and to be truthful I didn’t know the title of one of those).
Maybe I am not the only one, who knows? Whatever, “Loaded: Greatest Hits 94-2023” starts with them. My younger brother liked the first couple of records and “Everything Zen”, “Little Things” and “Comedown” (which is the one I didn’t know the name of) are bangers – even if no one knows what “Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow” means in any meaningful way.
So let’s get them out of the way and focus on the other 18, on this mammoth collection – and ok, sound you all know this, but humour me, ok? It’s a little bit good. “Glycerine” for example, broods pleasingly and there’s a bit of string shenanigans, but “Machinehead” has a groove made for the arenas they play in, as well as interesting melodies.
Even if the lyrics here seem to go down the RHCP road of rhyming whatever they can think of, it’s exquisitely done, as “Swallowed” proves. And just to underline what I said about falling through the cracks, I am a big fan of Feeder, and this could have been on “Polythene”.
Just when I thought I’d got them pegged, too, as loud chorus/quiet verse merchants, along comes a “mix” of “Mouth” which is a slice of neo-prog fun, and stuff like “Letting The Cables Sleep” is way more interesting and weird than I’d imagined Bush would be.
“The People That We Love” is a cracker of a thing too, and on the grounds that almost 3 million people have listened to “Inflatable” on Spotify, then you all know that one too. Just me then? Cool.
“The Only Way Out” – a single from 2004 – is overtly American sounding (and I do know that they are English), and doing some research because I dislike not knowing things, it became clear that they’d had a gap of almost a decade. The comeback stuff sounds a little more considered, but still as classy. “The Sound Of Winter” and “This Is War”, basically pick up where the rest left off, however.
The bass groove of “Bullet Holes” though, is fantastic. Touches of The Cult here and there’s a real mighty feel to “The Kingdom” – indeed as we get to the end of this (and thus the more modern stuff) the riffs are what you notice. The angry “More Than Machines” from last year’s ninth record is as heavy as it gets, maybe reflecting its times.
And as we get to the end, and come right up to date with the new song “Nowhere To Go But Everywhere”, what you find on reflection, is a band that sounds the same as it did at the start, up to a point, but they have the maturity to know that everything is not zen, if you will.
It even ends with a cover of “Come Together”. I might know the Beatles, but I have little time for them – there’s a nice symmetry, though. The first time I heard that song was on a Greatest Hits album. This version isn’t as good as Aerosmith, mind you. It does sound like Bush covering The Beatles, though.
And I might not really have known what Bush sounded like about three days ago, but they are “Loaded” with great songs, it seems to me.
Rating 8.5/10
