In summary:

Sixteen Stone is fine album, and it deserves a place in your music collection. Despite being unfairly written off upon release, it features a number of tracks which are streets ahead of what many of Bush’s contemporaries were releasing at the same time.

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

Bush’s debut album is an interesting creation.

The UK-based five piece landed during the peak of grunge with what many consider to be a fine piece of work, only to be shunned by their native country and labelled cheap Nirvana rip-offs.

Not to be deterred, the Gavin Rossdale-fronted band headed across the Atlantic, where they found an American audience which couldn’t get enough of them, leading to over six million album sales and a career which has spanned four decades.

So what was it that turned the UK against them?

Well, most grungeaholics (myself included at the time) thought they could smell a rat. Maybe it was Rossdale’s poster boy appearance, or his eery similarity his voice had to the late Kurt Cobain. They were labelled record industry plants, and dismissed without second thought.

As the years have passed, it has become clear that this was dead wrong.

Sixteen Stone is a fine record, boasting several tracks which can stand up against any of the grunge era’s top tunes and, unlike many of its counterparts, it hasn’t lost any of its bite listening back in 2023.

Opener Everything Zen sets the tone (and features Rossdale sounding his most Cobain-like) with crunching riffs and pounding drums, the singer capturing the unease of the early nineties with a great mix of angry and lost lyrics (“There’s no sex in your violence”) before a super-heavy chorus.

Rossdale’s wordplay is at the center of everything which makes Sixteen Stone such a great album. He often teases an outcome, then delivers a curveball punchline which the listener wasn’t expecting. This skill is perhaps most evident on Little Things, with lines such as “I’d die in your arms / If you were dead too”, and “The cupboards are empty / We really need food / But summer was winter / And you always knew”.

In recent years, he has explained that this writing style is something which he does on purpose. What at first may seem random, is actually a deliberate attempt to jar the listerners ear, culminating in lyrics which can be applied to whatever situation the listener finds themselves in, as opposed to commenting on current events and sounding dated just a few years later. It’s a writing technique which has worked well, because many of Sixteen Stone’s tracks remain popular on rock radio stations around the world three decades later.

It’s not all good news, though.

There are several tracks which fail to hit the mark, including the flat-falling Swim and Bomb (inexplicably given #2 and #3 on the track listing, killing all of the momentum gathered by Everything Zen), the and the grunge-by-numbers Body, which is little more than filler.

Luckily, the good far outweighs the bad here.

Sitting slap-bang in the middle of the album, the one-two combination of Testosterone and Monkey see Bush at their leanest and meanest, snarking back at the machismo which dominated rock music at the time (“Oh man / I’m real proud of my manhood”), and letting their critics know that they aren’t phased by being labelled fakes (“I’m just a monkey on a drip / We don’t mind!”).

Now let’s get to the great stuff…

There are four songs here which establish Sixteen Stone as one of the best albums of the mid-90s: Comedown, Machinehead, Glycerine, and Alien. Each has its own defining assets, but Rossdale’s uncanny ability to write a catchy song is the pillar which supports them all.

Comedown, with its killer baseline, went on to become the biggest hit from Sixteen Stone, while the driving riff and smart lyrics of Machinenead (“Deaf dumb and thirty / Starting to deserve this”) make it not only a strong contender for the best track of the album, but a nominee for the best rock song of the 1990s as a whole. Glycerine finds Bush at their very best; stripped back to just Gavin Rossdale’s husky voice and a lone electric guitar (a style they’ve used many times on subsequent albums, but never more effective than this), the hairs on your neck will rise as he croons, “Don’t let the days go by”. These tracks outline Rossdale’s ability to craft a high quality chorus, but they still won’t prepare you for the thunderous guitar drop of Alien, which hits like a rocket ship careering through Earth’s atmosphere.

In summary:

Sixteen Stone is fine album, and it deserves a place in your music collection. Despite being unfairly written off upon release, it features a number of tracks which are streets ahead of what many of Bush’s contemporaries were releasing at the same time.

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