I’d like to preface this post by voicing adamant praise of the 2020 album Inlet by mid-’90s Champaign, Ill. alt-rockers Hum. I loved what they did with maintaining their boisterous, distorted grunge sound and validating it with some stretching out of the song lengths into the seven/eight minute territory. In addition, Matt Talbott’s seemed as majestic and mysterious as ever, as if he’s in a trance, relating some diatribe on how the earth will be altered in the coming years by cosmological forces, but too blissed and stoned out to make things too clear and digestible.
Anyway, some bands just seem immune to criticism, and this is one of them, so I just thought I’d touch on one particular irony I noticed on what I consider their best LP of the ’90s, Downward is Heavenward (1996). (You might not believe me, but I think Inlet is overall the best album of their career to date.)
I was on a slight Hum kick around 2011 or ’12, I think — actually they’d always come on right after Helmet on my iPod shuffle at work, in alphabetical fashion, and really, made a pretty solid companion piece to Helmet’s debut album Meantime, mimicking their sound and kind of foiling their overserious lyrics with some romance and sci-fi absurdity. Actually, sometimes the romance and sci-fi absurdity would be juxtaposed in Hum’s lyrics with ridiculous proximity, as in “My dreamboat’s leaving on a submarine / She packed a second set of tanks / And a solar powered lung for me”…. “She wakes up fine and rested well / Released at last from in the sleeping cell / Breathing comes with ease”.
What’s up with these lyrics? Meh, they’re funny, ya know. To be honest, Hum was never really popular enough to warrant too much scrutiny or analysis. Their breakthrough single “Stars” was really weird, and about a girl, too. Personally, I came, after my brief Hum kick, to discern that they were copying the Pumpkins’ sound, and kind of the relegate them to my back-burner, third-tier level of alt-rock listening, akin to, say, The Presidents of the United States of America, Matchbox 20 and Alanis Morissette.
Why am I choosing to criticize this darling little alt-rock also-ran? Well, as I recently found out on Facebook, any harsh words about them, in a public forum, are met with a psychotically vituperative brigade of defensiveness, as if you’ve just issued a complain about someone’s mom, or something. All I said was that they sounded like the Pumpkins and I was pretty much treated like a moral pestilence. Not only does their production sound exactly like Corgan and crew, anyway, but they’re even an Illinois band just like said, following in the same decade and style of music, so it makes sense they’d use them as a sonic reference point.
Is it ridiculous to associate Hum with rape culture? Probably… but their romance-at-all-costs shtick kind of wore thin on me, after a while… like all of my wellbeing is lying in this lead singer’s libido, or something along those lines. The insistence on romantic lyrical themes, even placed in correspondence with motifs of apocalypse and respiratory failure, implies an especial devotion to, um, doing the nasty, on the part of Talbott, perhaps to the troubling extent of sacrificing things like common sense and basic decency, for said objective. On “If You Are to Bloom”; as well, he issues certain verbal anecdotes that are sort of troubling. I mean, the “dusty sleep you took too soon”? Why would an instance of going to sleep be “too soon”? It just smacks of the those cheesy ’90s diatribes that preached “living life to the fullest” and avoiding being “an informed and empowered member of society,” as if that’s an awful thing to be. At some point, he references his subject’s “failing green eyes”; which is pretty much completely ridiculous, except for an instance of talking to an elderly person at the eye clinic, which I don’t think is happening in this song. His insistence that “You / Need watering if you are to bloom” is of course vague, the strong, basic, nature-mimicking language meant to make a distinct mark on our consciousnesses, but also strange for implying that the person would completely forget to “bloom,” if not for Talbott’s timeless, invaluable wisdom and coaching. Belittling, in tandem with trying to get a person to move to fast, or efface themselves for the sake of a burgeoning interaction or affair, could probably be tied to rape culture, if we applied enough critical thinking thereto. Luckily, we haven’t heard about any unfortunate happenstances involving Talbott and his personal life, and indeed, Inlet sounded like the work of a dude riding a champagne supernova in the sky, so I suppose it’s water under the bridge. Where did Talbott find the inspiration to turn from tiresome alien-romatic exploits to vague, entrancing prog-rock? It certainly wasn’t from his adoring, he-says-jump-and-they-say-how-high Facebook fanbase… that much is unquestionable.
..
<script async src=“https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-5127494401132808”
crossorigin=“anonymous”></script>
..
<!– Google Tag Manager –>
<script>(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({‘gtm.start’:
new Date().getTime(),event:’gtm.js’});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!=‘dataLayer’?’&l=‘+l:’’;j.async=true;j.src=
‘https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=‘+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,’script’,’dataLayer’,’GTM-5KV22KW’);</script>
<!– End Google Tag Manager –>
<!– Google Tag Manager (noscript) –>
<noscript><iframe src=“https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-5KV22KW”
height=“0” width=“0” style=“display:none;visibility:hidden”></iframe></noscript>
<!– End Google Tag Manager (noscript) –>