reviews of deconstructed:

Wall of Sound 68%-Josh Freedom du Lac

Allstar 6/10
Sandy Masuo

To their credit, Bush has come up with a few catchy tunes and some lyrical hooks that cling with Madison Ave. savvy -- where would they be without frontman Gavin Rossdale's "asshole brother" in Los Angeles? Bush's secret weapon, however, is Rossdale's effective pout and brooding demeanor. Without these visual aids, they would simply blend in with Matchbox 20, Seven Mary Three, Third Eye Blind, and the rest of today's teeming generic rock brood. Consider the opposite end of the pop spectrum: The most successful electronic artists generate music that brims with personality though they are for the most part a faceless gaggle of skinny, introverted and/or geeky guys afflicted with an uncontrollable studio fetish. Remarkably, bringing these forces together on this remix album doesn't cause a mutually destructive implosion but some creative musical explosions. As a rule, the more radical the remix, the more intriguing the results. Derek DeLarge pulverizes the cloying bombast of "Everything Zen" while Goldie unravels "Swallowed" and reweaves it into a restless ribbon of nervous rhythms. Meat Beat Manifesto mastermind Jack Dangers' "drum and bees" interpretation of "Insect Kin" wryly incorporates actual buzzing into its dynamic sprawl. In 1981, Brian Eno and David Byrne collaborated to record My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, drawing inspiration from African author Amos Tutola's novel of the same name. Phillip Steir (formerly of Consolidated) alludes to both works with his haunting "My Ghost in the Bush of Life" remix of "Synapse." Tricky's take on "In a Lonely Place" is just as eerie but unwinds with mournful minimalism. At times, the mismatch of music and mix masters seems luridly disproportionate -- images of sledgehammers swatting houseflies loom -- but in the end, though Bush may still hold claim to the music, the substance of these tracks lies in the hands of the deconstructors.

Rolling Stone (3 stars)-Robert Levine

Deconstructed-Bush
It's hard to think of a grunge group that would seem less suited to dabbling in electronic music than Bush, a band better known for shamelessly aping Nirvana than for boldly blending genres. With that in mind, it's tempting to dismiss "Deconstructed," which features mixes of the band's songs by producers such as Goldie, Meat Beat Manifesto's Jack Dangers and Tricky (who here produced Bush's cover of Joy Division's "In a Lonely Place"). But whether the album is an artistic leap forward for Bush or merely their attempt to jump from the alt-rock gravy train to the electronica bandwagon, they make the move more easily than one might expect. Bush's tunes get plenty of window dressing on "Deconstructed": U.K.-based remixer Greg Brimson adds break beats to "Everything Zen," and Bush themselves (under the moniker Stingray) spice up "Mouth" with driving rhythms that make Prodigy's grooves sound subtle. In both cases, however, the effects merely offer pleasant ornamentation for formulaic tunes. The more effective remixers stretch Bush's songs beyond their verse-chorus-verse format, treating them as musical raw material rather than as structural blueprints. Dangers rewires "Insect Kin" into dance-floor-friendly drum-and-bass, while former Consolidated drum programmer Philip Steir turns "Synapse" into ghostly ambient music with detached-sounding vocals. On the album's most inventive track, Goldie and Rob Playford recast the anthemic "Swallowed" as an eerie soundscape haunted by echoing beats. Amid that ominous din, Gavin Rossdale's voice comes through only occasionally and faintly. Ironically, it's one of the strongest musical statements he's made yet. (RS 774)

Bush league
Deconstructing "Everything Zen"
by Douglas Wolk

Bush aren't nearly as bad as they could be. "Everything Zen" was surprisingly inoffensive British fake grunge; "Glycerine" was a surprisingly inoffensive British fake grunge power ballad. They can't even be blamed for the existence of the electronica remix album Deconstructed (Interscope). A "contractual obligation," guitarist Nigel Pulsford calls it in the most recent issue of Kerrang! "In truth, we couldn't have done anything about it if we didn't like it. It's not really anything to do with us." That's believable. It's got tracks from their first two albums remixed into various fashionable forms by a couple of big names (Goldie and Tricky get credited on the cover sticker), a couple of has-beens (Philip Steir, formerly of Consolidated, and Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto), and a bunch of never-weres. Oh, and Stingray -- a couple of members of Bush themselves and some friends -- remixing "Mouth." You can imagine the process by which the album was dreamed up. Razorblade Suitcase (Interscope), goes the line of reasoning, didn't do nearly as well as Sixteen Stone because . . . because the kids aren't buying grunge any more, perhaps? Because the kids are buying electronica? But nothing on Deconstructed does anything particularly new with electronics. Some of it is derivative not just of styles but of particular artists. (The Dub Pistols' version of "History" is straight-up fake Chemical Brothers, though without the Chems' rhythmic whammy.) It doesn't work as rock, it doesn't work as dance music, and it especially doesn't work as remixes. The point of doing a remix is to open up a recording, to discover its hidden textural or rhythmic or contextual possibilities: to, as the academics say, deconstruct it -- literally. That's natural for dance music and hip-hop, and it makes sense in some other pop contexts. It usually works best with artists who build their songs around a groove (see Can's Sacrilege or Run On's Sit Down EP), or who vary their arrangements widely (see Bjork's Telegram), or who are willing to have their recordings remixed into nondance forms (see Pest 5000's Palimpsest). The idea is that you're making a kind of music that's conceived of as a studio project -- that's not trying to imply a live performance. But Bush are a rock band, or at least trying to be one, and even on meticulously tweaked multi-track recordings, rock bands work on how the instruments play off one another in real time -- in short, how they sound on stage. If you open up Bush's mixes, there's not much you can rearrange without destroying the formal integrity of the performance. It's simply a different kind of music from electronica. A techno-enhanced version of "Everything Zen" is no more fun than, say, a techno-free version of "Firestarter." That doesn't stop the remixers on Deconstructed, whose work here mostly consists of grafting bits of the original vocals or guitar parts onto new and pretty much unrelated tracks. For the ones that are good track makers in the first place, that can be okay. Goldie's "Swallowed" ditches just about everything but a few snatches of vocal and uses them as sound effects for a sharp, dark tech-step track. Most of the time, though, the effect is like listening to a so-so electronica compilation while your little sister is playing Sixteen Stone too loudly in the next room. The one song that Deconstructed transforms effectively is not Bush's own: it's a Tricky-produced cover, "In a Lonely Place," written by Joy Division, originally recorded by New Order, and then re-recorded by Bush for the Crow II soundtrack. The melody has been rewritten to the point where Gavin Rossdale isn't quite sure which notes he's trying to hit, and the basic elements of the song -- a bass figure, a background drone, a drum pattern, a hint of guitar -- have been reconfigured into a surprising, clever, "new" piece of music. New Order are actually a great model for a rock band who want to leave their songs open for remixes and remakes -- honest to God, "Blue Monday '88" holds up now, and so do all the alternate recordings on Substance. What did they have that Bush doesn't? An affection for dance-club music and polyrhythms that showed up on their records the first time around, for one thing. For another, singing that was far from the most important aspect of their songs, and a singer who knew it. Rossdale's voice has always been a trifle irritating, but here it's full-on annoying. Could that be because, when he starts singing, his clear, English-accented speaking voice suddenly gains an American Deep South accent and a painfully mannered Kurt Cobain rasp? Or is it that, broken down into soundbites, his lyrics become even more aggressively meaningless? Or that nobody can remember the names of the other three guys in the band? That's a cheap shot, but it's easy to take cheap shots at Bush. Deconstructed isn't a real album: it's a marketing ploy (three of its tracks have already shown up on soundtracks) blown up into an hour-long mistake. The band showed up originally just in time to jump on one trend. Maybe they're jumping onto another now, and maybe they're being pushed, but the effect is the same. And it's almost never anything better than inoffensive.

BUSH-Deconstructed by Marc Spitz

The remix album is the deformed stepchild of contractual obligation. With the lithe body of a pop star and the head of a cash cow, it boasts the dignity and grace of a sideshow freak. Even those "greatest hits" packages with the extra tracks and a tacky badge, are afforded more props. The original opus is rarely improved upon by the hired-gun knob tweekers. Frequently a good song is vandalized (think Bowie's "Fame 90") or smothered with Casiotone cheese like Meco's version of the "Star Wars Theme;" all in the name of the hustle.
The new Bush release might be the most essential Bush album, if not the most necessary remix album, ever made. Over an hour long, Deconstructed the antidote to Gavin Rossdale's penchant for gobbing virulent and identical grief loogies at an adoring public; infecting us with a paralysis that prevents hum-immunity to pesky germs like "Glycerine." Or is it "Come Down?" Pre-mix, only a scientist could tell.
Somebody must have slipped the pretty boy a tab of potent ecstasy as he's finally decided to vaccinate us with beats. A veritable Peace Corps of today's most talented and respected trip-hop, techno and jungle producers (Goldie, Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto) wield the surgical instruments and cure the teen angst blues with bold, schizo versions of previously monotonous selections from Sixteen Stone and Razorblade Suitcase.
"Come Down" (the Lunatic Calm mix) is barely recognizable, with a funky robot come-ons and what sounds like Cyndi Lauper wailing at the bottom of a K-hole. Two hyperkinetic versions of "Everything Zen" bookend the album, chopped and cut like cheap, dance-fuel speed. Fear not brooders, there's still plenty of mope rock. Tricky glazes "In a Lonely Place" with a beautiful teardrop bassline and ghostly vocals that pay just respects to Joy Division. "Mouth" (the Stingray Mix), the single featured in the upcoming horror sequel An American Werewolf in Paris is suitably creepy and sincerely dramatic.
No longer a guilty pleasure, with the medical advances heralded by Deconstruct ed, Bush can now be swallowed without fear of contamination. Attention scrunge bands: call your doctor!