ESSENTIAL ALBUM REVIEW: Hum “You’d Prefer an Astronaut”

                It’s kind of odd for me to think about how this album came out and it wasn’t until many years later people really started to talk about it.   When released in 1995, Mtv was still playing music videos, so I definitely remember this as being a music video for “Stars” but not much else really at the time.

                Almost a year to the day after Kurt Cobain killed himself this album was released, which makes me think that people were not ready, perhaps, for a sound that was this close to grunge.    What wouldn’t be discovered for almost ten years was that this was the next logical evolution from grunge.

                The long and heavy hanging chords were everything we loved about grunge, but the before-its-time math rock made this album exciting and faster paced.   It was- and still remains- the perfect combination of what was once my favorite sound and what was to become my new favorite sound. 

                Amidst the spectacular music are some vocals, which can be sort of monotone and somber.   These will go on to influence any numbers of bands including but not limited to the bands I compare vocally to the likes of They Might Be Giants and The Dismemberment Plan.

                The lyrics on “You’d Prefer an Astronaut” are also painfully honest when not lost in their complexity.   A line such as “a crumpled piece of yellow paper / seven 9’s and 10’s” might be something that needs a bit of deciphering, but then they can also switch it up to something as blatant as “You’re a waste of a song”. 

                Odds are good that amongst other bands too numerous to name, Hum definitely had its influence on the earlier sound of Weezer.    I just think this album is one of those albums that people didn’t really start talking about until almost ten years after it came out, yet it was so good and stuck with me from the very first time that I heard it.

                If you’ve never heard “You’d Prefer an Astronaut”, you’ve most likely at least heard the song “Stars” somewhere.   If you were a part of the grunge scene in your teens like I was, then you owe it to yourself to listen to this epic of an album all the way through.