IN REVIEW: Hum - "Inlet"

Throughout the '90s, as a class of exciting young rock bands wrestled power away from the excess and gloss of '80s hair metal under the umbrella of what lazy journalists coined "grunge", rock music experienced perhaps its greatest ever surge in popularity outside the days of The Beatles. I assign some of the credit for this to the cross-pollination of influences and styles that permeated major labels and, in turn, charts during the decade. If you think about it, there hasn't been a decade (before or since) home to as many niche genre breakouts and such a wide berth of disparate talents succeeding as the '90s.

To put it into a bit clearer perspective, consider this: any current indie band that gets even a little bit of traction on streaming and/or social media these days would have found themselves a major label deal with relative ease in the '90s. For example, off the top of my head, take a band like Black Midi; indie darlings enjoying great critical acclaim for their live show and blistering debut album, I guarantee that if they had come up 25 years earlier Schlagenheim would have come out on, say, Warner Bros.

I'm steering too far from shore. Enter Hum, a prog and shoegaze-inspired group out of Illinois that had released a pair of albums to local fanfare and a moderate amount of critical acclaim in the early '90s. By 1995, they were signed to RCA, who were scoring them a minor hit in Stars which propelled their third album, You'd Prefer an Astronaut, to sales figures around a quarter of a million copies. This sounds impressive until you look at other albums from that time frame that went gold, so as to say selling at least twice as many copies (including such established chart-conquerors as Butthole Surfers, Elastica, Better Than Ezra, Matthew Sweet, Sponge and The Presidents of the United States of America, the latter shifting over 3 million units!). So as to say, Hum were moderately successful for what they were, which was a niche rock band with tons of skill unfairly pigeonholed into the grunge label.

I heard Stars on an old CMJ sampler in 1995 (remember those CMJ magazines, with the free CD of cool new music every month?), immediately dug it and, though I never sought out more from them at the time, I finally got a chance to dig deeper later when I found a copy of You'd Prefer an Astronaut used and cheap. Sadly, with labels and artists alike congesting the airwaves through the late '90s, it wasn't easy to follow a band like Hum because they couldn't establish the momentum needed to stay visible; follow-up singles failed to impact, and in early 1998 their fourth and final album Downward is Heavenward was released to no fanfare and no success. They would soon disband and, despite a handful of reunion shows, there were no new attempts at music from Hum.

Until now, of course; 22 years after the record that failed miserably in the eyes of their label only to catch on as the years went by as a very good and very influential album (which is the sad story of a lot of great '90s albums), Inlet has arrived. Their longest record to date despite having the fewest number of tracks on a Hum album to date, suffice to say there is ample space for the songs to breathe, stretch and evolve. With an average track length approaching seven minutes, there's a lot to digest and very little wasted space. These are sprawling, hypnotic compositions that are sure to scratch the itch for anyone who prefers their heavy music thoughtful and spacious; think of music that meets at the intersection of Torche, Deftones and Failure and you'll start to get the picture. Highly recommended.

June 23, 2020 • Earth Analog/Polyvinyl

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