Bush: Sixteen Stone

Bush is my first "me" band. I found them in the flip shelves at Best Buy, I was about 8 years old. Music up to that point was lighter, safer. Boyz II Men, Michael Jackson, the 70s rock my parents played around the house. All of it felt clean. Approved.

Then I found Bush. From the moment "Everything Zen" kicked through my headphones, things were different. This felt like something you might get in trouble for listening to. Raw, hard, alive. A guitar-driven assault on my ears that still sounds just as fresh today.

"Swim" fittingly swims from the speakers. A rough, gritty intro dissolves into a dreamy verse that sways left to right, pulsing something ethereal out of your eardrums. It alternates between slow and ripping, calm and chaos. A wild ride and a perfect demonstration of what goes missing on later Bush releases. There's a vividness to the guitar here, an energy that would later get replaced by murk and sludge. On Sixteen Stone, the guitars sound alive, clean, and hungry.

"Bomb" starts slow and plays with your expectations, going from meek to bombastic on a whim. Gavin Rossdale belts out screams that feel genuinely visceral. There's a touch of Pink Floyd sprinkled in, and it closes on a chaotic guitar outro that earns every second.

"Little Things" ramps up the tempo. One of the most radio-friendly tracks on the album, it delivers layered guitars and careful plucking, with a chorus that'll burrow into your head and stay there. An all-out drum assault pushes it into one of the album's clear high points.

"Comedown" is the exact opposite of its title. This is not a track to take a break on. The most anthem-heavy song on the album, with the chorus "I don't wanna come back down from this cloud," it's also one of the lightest musically, even if the lyrics point toward something closer to denial.

After "Comedown," we get the actual comedown in "Body." Not a bad song, just not a standout by any measure. It does its job. There's a minimal violin line buried in the background that's genuinely interesting, and something I wish they had leaned into further. It could have given the song its own identity. Instead it just floats by.

"Machine Head" cements itself as one of the best hard rock songs of the decade with its immediately identifiable intro, distorted vocals, and an insanely catchy verse. A total gut-punch halfway through the album when you need it most. A wakeup call if anyone was getting comfortable.

After "Machine Head," it makes sense to pull back. "Testosterone" is slower, more melodic, with that raw stripped-down-ness you'd later hear in Jack White's early output. Not a stretch to think he was paying attention. I wouldn't be surprised to find them listed as one of his childhood influences.

The low point of the album is "Monkey." It lacks the bravado and complexity of everything around it and doesn't leave much of an impression. Forgettable is the harshest thing you can say about it. But if forgettable is your biggest weak point, you're doing something right.

What follows is one of the band's biggest moments. "Glycerine" has had radio play, re-recordings, and more covers than you can count. The slowest song on the album, elegant violin accompanying Gavin Rossdale as he croons his distinctly English-American pronunciation of the title word: "gliss-er-een." This easily could have closed the album and sent us out peaceful and satisfied. But we're not done yet.

"Alien" is the most experimental track here. It opens with something that nods toward Kurt Cobain before launching into the verse. Lyrically it doesn't break new ground, and musically it runs similar to what came before, except for some Creed-like swells around the halfway mark. A decent song, but it pales next to "Glycerine" when it comes to slow-burn impact.

We close with "X-Girlfriend," a bonus-track-energy rocker that doesn't hide Gavin's accent at all, which is kind of the charm. You can picture people losing it to this at a sweaty club show before Bush ever got big. And just like that, it's over.

Bush's Sixteen Stone stands as one of the defining debut albums of the 90s alternative rock era, leaning harder into rock than grunge compared to contemporaries like Nirvana. Nearly 30 years later they're still at it, still filling arenas, still releasing music. And to think, it almost never happened at all. After recording the album in early 1994, their distributor Hollywood Records, didn't think it was good enough to release. Scrambling and worried, Interscope would eventually swoop in and save the day.

After all of it, all the decades and albums and lineup changes, Sixteen Stone remains their best work. And here's the thing: it doesn't just hold up, it holds up the way very few albums from that era do. Most bands from that time have either fizzled or broken up entirely. But Sixteen Stone is genuinely timeless, even while feeling like a complete product of its moment. It's kept Bush relevant in a way nothing else in their catalog has managed to match. They've never topped it. That's not a knock. That's just the truth.