I’ll admit it- I still own a couple Bush records, and even went to a couple of their shows back when they were hot shit. But that was a long time ago, and Gavin Rossdale’s gotta be feeling a bit sheepish around the house these days, married to a smoking hot superstar with a now-massive solo career, whose band opened for his during the good old days. She’s found an absurd level of career-revival success since then, while he can’t seem to get his shit together enough to put out anything worth a damn.

Rossdale tried breaking new ground with the short-lived noise-rock outfit Institute a few years back, who even Helmet’s Page Hamilton couldn’t breathe enough life into to get it off the ground. Their one mediocre effort has sold a whopping 54,000 copies in the US since its release in 2005. So much for a revival of the multi-platinum days, or gold for that matter, because things only take a blinding series of wrong turns on Gavin’s latest release and first solo effort, WANDERlust.

Straightforward, heavy pop is what Gavin does best, and with WANDERlust he tries to appeal to the broadest audience possible. Unfortunately for Mr. Glycerine, this one misses the mark completely; the album sounds like the illegitimate retard child of Queens Of The Stone Age and Coldplay, a blasphemous concept on the most fundamental level. It’s so unlistenable, so safe, trite and uninspired that it’s embarrassing to even review. But this piece is a necessary evil, on the slight possibility that anyone who reads this will come across one of the album’s two listenable tracks and fall for the bullshit that record companies and shameless hacks with all the right connections have used to pillage our wallets since the birth of recorded music. Bleach my memory / make it virgin snow / I want to remember how it used to be / when I knew the sharks that were in my sea. No, I didn’t make that shit up.

It seems as if Gavin’s torn between two worlds. He can’t decide whether to finish building his time machine and return to the not-so-glory days, or try to be a combination of everything that’s currently popular.

The Skin I’m In is one of the aforementioned listenable tracks, and if it makes its way to the FM dial post-collegiate white chicks who still gaze tearfully out the window when Swallowed or Glycerine comes on the radio are going to love it. It doesn’t hold a candle to Beauty In The Beast, however, a track that starts off with a promising Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For vibe before turning into a shameless, chintzy attempt to hammer the heart strings.

The intro and chorus from This Is Happiness are, at the very least, inspired by QOTSA’s Songs For The Dead. And there are some lyrical hijackings of Cobain that simply can’t be passed off as coincidence.

Shirley Manson lends some validating backing vocals to The Trouble I’m In, but it doesn’t save a stale song. This man may be a British xerox holdout from a dead genre, but he’s married to Gwen Stefani, for Chrissake. Let’s step it up here.

Songs like Frontline sound like a man in his forties trying to sound like he’s still in his twenties. Bland. And Future World is a grim examination of- you guessed it- life in the future. He rhymed “firewire cables” with “help you when I’m able” and “run for ages.” You’ve been warned.

Bob Rock, mercifully removed from his production duties for Metallica, has found some kind of refuge in this pile of shit, giving it a deceptive sheen. The same thing was done with Chris Cornell’s abominable last record, but at least those songs had heart. If you’re looking for complicated chord patterns, polyrhythms or anything related to the word “dynamic,” you’re looking under the wrong rock, my friend. There are nosurprises here; the songs go exactly where you expect them to, and inspiration is a distant, dying light.

WANDERlust
June 3, 2008
Interscope

1. Can’t Stop The World
2. Frontline
3. Forever May You Run
4. The Skin I’m In
5. Drive
6. Future World
7. Love Remains The Same
8. If You’re Not With Us You Are Against Us
9. This Is Happiness
10. Another Night In The Hills
11. The Trouble I’m In
12. Beauty In The Beast
13. This Place Is On Fire
14. I Don’t Want to Lose Myself Tonight (Bonus Track)
15. You Can’t Run from What You Forget (Bonus Track)

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 5:16 PM and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can comment, or trackback from your own site. Tags: Bush, Gavin Rossdale, Gwen Stefani, Helmet, Institute, Shirley Manson