“Hell Is Where The Heart Is”
The genius of Bush’s Razorblade Suitcase
Some pains are forever. Depression, anxiety, loneliness, they’re not a once-in-a-generation concept. Humanity’s tried coping with these issues for centuries and beyond, and it’s not easy. I’ve struggled with them for years and haven’t found any real remedy. So, to find a work of art that manages to express that same mindset is a rare treat, even better when it is good. And that work exists, in the form of a 1996 alternative-rock album.
Bush’s Razorblade Suitcase is a perfect album. It’s not quite my favorite album, and although I love it, I know I couldn’t get many people to list it in their top 10 lists. But it is one of those rare perfect albums. Every song flows together. The lyrics capture frustration and sadness perfectly. And the music strikes a chord in the heart. It doesn’t make things sadder, nor does it try to cheer you up. It just captures that feeling of pain. It’s emotional turmoil distilled through ‘90s alternative rock. It’s a breakdown in the form of an album.
Razorblade Suitcase isn’t a concept album in the classic “tells a complete story” way. Instead, the album focuses on three main ideas and problems: Being stuck in situations with out way out, the fallout of a relationship, and loneliness. The topics of the songs vary from abortion in “History” to a tribute to Courtney Love in “Insect Kin,” but they all tie into those three ideas. The title itself is vocalist Gavin Rossdale’s more visually evocative play on the phrase “emotional baggage.” The album’s working title was Ghost Medicine, and that would have worked just as well — these are problems without clear or simple remedies.
The opening songs hit hard. Like N.W.A.’s Straight Out of Compton, the album’s first three tracks are definitive, laying out the themes and atmosphere. “Personal Holloway” opens the record with a discordant sound and the growl of a dog before lamenting the forced social norms for women. It talks of progress in slow increments, but still paints the gender rules of modern society as an inescapable prison. It’s a brilliant feminist track. It seeps into the haunting treatise on frustration and the trap of indecision that is “Greedy Fly.” It’s a stark acknowledgment of self-loathing and bad habits. The opening lyrics of “Do you feel the way you hate, do you hate the way you feel? Always closer to the flame, ever closer to the blade” are perhaps the best summation of depression and suicidal ideation. “Greedy Fly” also echoes the idea of imprisonment, noting that “We are servants of our formulaic ways.” This all leads to “Swallowed,” a kind of ‘90s version of The Beatles’ “Help.” It’s a pleading song about isolation in its most brutal form: Being alone in a crowd. Sometimes you can be surrounded by people and still feel emotionally detached, without any real connection to someone. If “Greedy Fly” called for a solution to life’s problems, “Swallowed” called for help. When Rossdale says he’s “loathing for a change,” it’s a moment of despair and a cry for someone, anyone.
Razorblade Suitcase is also a showcase of Bush’s maturation as musicians. The band’s debut, Sixteen Stone, was raw ‘90s alt-rock, that kind of Richard Linklater-but-darker 20-something aimlessness and frustration in musical form. With its sophomore effort, Bush refined its style. It found ways to use blunt, raw sounds to dramatic effect — the sparse music behind the verses in “Swallowed” give the lyrics a calm-before-the-storm atmosphere to hang on, and the terse, succinct tunes in “Mouth” give the song a kind of Ernest Hemingway-like rhythm. At the same time, the music was also more complex. The chords were layered, the use of string were more integrated. The opening notes of “Greedy Fly” are at once haunting, inviting, and beautifully melodic. The song as a whole builds to an outburst of frustration, but Nigel Pulsford’s incredible guitar work makes it all work. The bridge solo alone is one of the best musical moments on the album. The band would, as many artists did in the mid-to-late ‘90s, start experimenting with its style and introduced more electronic elements to its sound, first with the underrated remix album Deconstructed and later for the more electronic-tinged but not dominated The Science of Things. But here, with Razorblade Suitcase, it’s Bush’s angsty, creative style aged and refined into a complex and rewarding sonic experience.
It was the Smashing Pumpkins that said “Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage,” but it was Bush that captured that feeling. People’s prisons range from personal to social constructions. Sometimes the problem is right there, totally obvious, and there’s no way to deal with it. “Cold Contagious” is perhaps one of the more bitter songs on the album; it paints the picture of damage already done, but an inability to do anything about it. “Personal Holloway” at least suggested small, minor progress against the prisons we’re trapped in, but here that powerlessness is palpable. Razorblade Suitcase seems to dwell on inability, both situational and existential.
“Straight No Chaser” is a kind of spiritual successor to Sixteen Stone’s “Glycerine.” Both deal with failed relationships, but while “Glycerine” is about a relationship falling apart, this song is the immediately fallout of one ending. It paints romance and relationships as escapes, ways of hiding from problems — “Climb inside you, away from strangers / building a system of alleys and motorways / it’s all in the way we know we could have it all.” But that doesn’t last, it only pushes the problems to the side. As Rossdale mournfully intones. “Some satellites of pain can’t always be ignored.” Reality challenges presumptions and attempts to escape The song falls at the end, the strings reaching a climax and giving way to the end of the relationship. It echoes the theme of imprisonment and the lack of any real way out; there is “war on all sides.”
Emotional troubles echo throughout the album. Love is never presented as a beautiful thing, or at least as something that’s worked out well. Bush calls for emotional connections and understanding, but also paints troubled relationships as another inescapable trap that increases suffering. In “Synapse,” which features the album title in the lyrics, Rossdale repeats “Hell is where the heart is.” The song points to the vicious cycle of misunderstanding and how self-destructive habits can doom people from a brighter tomorrow.
As the album draws to a close, it starts to speculate. “Communicator,” the most stream-of-conscious track on Razorblade Suitcase, and perhaps the most experimental, asks what-if. In its washed-out sound scape, the song states that “Somewhere, sometime, all things, will be fine.” The narrator is trapped, but wondering what could be. The penultimate track “Bonedriven” combines this with the romantic troubles that fill the album. Rossdale’s words show acceptance of one’s own problems; the singer apologizes for his ways and says that he will wait, as if reconciliation could happen, just not now. That longing for a possible future was earlier hinted at in “A Tendency To Start Fires,” a song that imagines a brighter future but tempers it with the reality of being trapped, and self-destructive habits.
What “Communicator” and “Bonedriven” speculate on, “Distant Voices” offers an answer. It’s not an happy one. The track starts with music that is, for the album, more upbeat. After 12 songs of isolation and being trapped, here the narrator got away. It’s not instant paradise or a quick fix. Like depression and anxiety, the damage is lasting, it doesn’t simply go away. Rossdale paints a vivid picture of that “the coat she wore could not conceal the scars / beneath the magic of her lace / are a thousand lonely faces she can’t place.” The experiences of the album have left trauma, and the only option is to essentially cut all ties. Destroy any connections to truly let that sadness go. It’s not pro-suicide or a call to suicide. It’s a call to start fresh. But it’s not presented as happy, but as a way to move on. Sometimes the only way to help life is to start fresh and escape a toxic environment. And yet even then the album ends on an unsure note. “Distant Voices” closes on a reimagining of the riff from “History.” It’s less haunting, less depressing, but an echo of the troubles of life. Maybe things can get better, maybe some memories are just too hard to let go.
Created in a time when a generation was aimless and art was starting to channel that frustration, Razorblade Suitcase not only reflected the emotional turmoil, it distilled it. It’s an album showcasing a breakdown. More than any other work of music, it captured what depression and anxiety feel like. It is a product of its time, a truly mid-’90s alt-rock album. But what Bush does here, it perfectly does. Sometimes there is not a quick or easy fix.
“Some satellites of pain can’t always be ignored.”
