Album: Bush

Golden State, Atlantic

By far the most commercially successful of all the British artists covered this week, Bush have parlayed their passable imitation of Nirvana into a multimillion-dollar industry, albeit one under serious threat from the nu-metal bands that have supplanted grunge. Bush's album-sales arc is certainly tilting downward – from their sextuple-platinum debut, through the triple-platinum follow-up, to their last album's double-platinum performance – and Golden State represents a crucial indicator of how the band will fare in a marketplace transformed by Limp Bizkit and Slipknot. Sonically, it pushes all the right buttons, their jagged, muscular riffing captured with impressive punch and panache, but Gavin Rossdale's voice still tends to render all their songs emotionally flat, employing the same level of plaint across the same few pitches in song after song. The classic Nirvana quiet/loud manner still subsists in tracks such as "Reasons" and "Solutions", whose titles suggest the vague disquiet that, in the absence of any more specific notion, remains Bush's stock-in-trade. But this time, Rossdale's odes to urban unease and dislocation have been somewhat overtaken by events, his dubiously apocalyptic imagery – with its references to world destruction and his claim to be "at my best when I'm terrorist inside" – sounding all the more infantile in the service of something as trivial as adolescent angst. Still, there's a certain accidental prescience to "Land of the Living", in which the US is depicted, spookily, as "the land of reprisal".