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“Stars” – Hum
(Words/music: Hum, available on You’d Prefer an Astronaut, RCA 1995)

It’s simple math – there’s lots of music out there worth hearing and not enough time to listen to all of it, so there will be songs, bands, albums, and occasionally genres that I don’t know as well as I should (or as well as I would like to know).  Still, I’m bewildered when there’s a song that it seems like everyone else know that I don’t know.  This happened my first month at college – “Stars” kept popping up places and I didn’t really understand why.  At the time, I was fairly sure that I knew most of the late-90s alt-rock radio staples – so when a wide variety of people kept bringing up “Stars” as a favorite – my first college radio show partner, a friend I took my first college road trip with, and other new acquaintances – I didn’t really know what happened.  Yes, “Stars” was a modern rock radio success, but it’s not like it was a Green Day like mega hit.

Naturally, I assumed “Stars” must have been something new, and to a degree it sounded like something that could have been on the radio around the turn of the millennium.  When the song starts chugging along during the second minute, the chugging riff sounds like it could be one of the better riffs produced by those faceless nu-metal bands with those screaming singers.  However, “Stars” runs deeper than this drop-D riff – there’s a gorgeously distorted melody line beneath that loud rhythm guitar attack, and even though the drums are aggressive and cymbal-heavy, they’re recorded superbly.  A lot of the derivative alterna-metal bands over mix the drums to the point where they sound like they were recorded in a box, but “Stars” keeps the drums balanced in the mix without yielding any intensity.  Then there’s the vocals – shy, understated, and content to let the music carry the muscle; while many of the bands that came after Hum concerned themselves with cultivating an angst-ridden image (I’m thinking that “I hate everything about you” song that still gets played on the radio from time to time), it always seemed like the obvious and literal lyrics were over-compensation – the kind of thing sending the message of “I’m not sure you’ll understand how I feel unless I directly scream it at you.”  It’s kind of odd to say that a song with as blunt of a riff as “Stars” is “subtle,” but there’s a lot going on underneath all of these distorted layers.

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