The window for Grunge’s popularity was surprisingly small. It was building up in the underground in the late 1980s, broke wide with Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991, but by the time the British band Bush brought their Grunge entry to the masses in 1994, music writers and the early adopters were exhausted by the countless number of Nirvana/Pearl Jam/Soundgarden clones that seemed to pop up overnight. And while Bush never suffered the fate with their bank accounts—Sixteen Stone went on to sell over 10 million copies in the U.S. alone and more than 20 million worldwide (those are Taylor Swift numbers)—they were almost instantly deemed as uncool by many.
Re-listening to the album 30 years after its initial release, it’s clear the band got a raw deal (at least reputationally. Financially they should have no complaints). To celebrate their debut album’s anniversary Craft Recordings just out out a double LP vinyl reissue of the band’s biggest selling album. The record boasts Bush’s biggest hits, “Glycerine,” and “Everything Zen” two of their best songs, as well as “Machinehead,” “Little Things,” and “Come Down.”
If not for overexposure when this record came out, the record had at least one or two more solid singles, like “Testosterone” (lyrically their sharpest commentary). The album closes on “X-Girlfriend,” a fun 45-second punk number. There are only really a couple of duds on the album, like the plodding “Swim” or the sluggish “Bomb,” which does nothing to stop the Nirvana comparisons. Song for song, though, the album has justifiably aged really well over the years and managed to even find a new less-jaded audience in younger generations that didn’t live through the harsh also-ran criticism the band faced when they first surfaced.
Alongside a wide release of the record on black vinyl, there are six limited-edition colored pressings: opaque red (available widely), Silver (exclusive to Independent Record Stores), translucent lemonade (via Best Buy), sepia (via Barnes & Noble), highlighter smoke (available at Revolver), and a fog pressing exclusive to the band’s Spotify followers via Fans First.
