Welcome back to Consequence‘s Dusting ‘Em Off, which examines classic albums that have found an enduring place in pop culture. Today, Hum become oft-overlooked shoegaze pioneers with You’d Prefer an Astronaut.
When Matt Talbott got an email asking to use his song in a Cadillac commercial, his initial response was, “Yeah, sure, whatever man.” It was 2007; his band Hum had broken up seven years prior, and the song in question, “Stars,” dropped five years before that. These kinds of reach-outs always happened, Talbott recalled at the time, often to no avail.
That skeptical email response is exactly what you might expect from Hum, whose members began making shoegaze-infused post-hardcore together after meeting at a cafe in the Champaign-Urbana area, best known as the home of the University of Illinois and the American Football House. But the bandmates were deeply involved in the flourishing local scene, and – after naming themselves as a sort of tongue-in-cheek descriptor of their roaring guitar tones – Hum’s early lineup of Talbott, Bryan St. Pere, Rod Van Huis, and Andy Switzky wound up in the basement home studio of Steve Albini to record their punkish 1990 demo tape Is Like Kissing an Angel. Within the five years that followed, Hum signed to major label RCA to put out their third studio album You’d Prefer an Astronaut.
Fast-forward to the Cadillac commercial: By then, the days of Hum were over, at least according to its members. And with their RCA deal expired, Talbott and his bandmates weren’t even aware that the licensing deal had been finalized until he just so happened to see the commercial by chance himself. In the driver’s seat is Grey’s Anatomy star Kate Walsh, who proposes a new benchmark question for valuing luxury vehicles: “When you turn your car on…does it return the favor?” Her stilettoed foot then slams the gas as Hum’s blast of guitars kicks in, almost as if replicating the sound of the Cadillac’s revving engine – a sound synonymous with shoegaze.
“Stars” saw success on alt radio upon its initial release, but the Cadillac commercial re-introduced Hum and You’d Prefer an Astronaut to a much more accepting audience. Shoegaze was not yet embraced by the general US rock audiences in 1995. While genre pioneers like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Lush delighted in mainstream success in their respective Irish and British homelands, their most comparable counterparts to American audiences were arguably Swervedriver, who were still riding the post-Nevermind grunge wave; or Swirlies, whose noisy guitar pop was usually too weird to break into the mainstream. Hum were products of the hardcore scene, and though those roots are evident on Astronaut, the album also solidified Hum as some of the US’ earliest true adopters of shoegaze.
And so it’s especially fitting that Astronaut begins with “Little Dipper,” which is nearly five minutes of the type of fuzzed-out, wall-of-sound guitars that made Loveless a classic. But what My Bloody Valentine didn’t quite have was the foreboding air lying under “Little Dipper,” a quality that Hum’s immediate successors would take and run with: “[Astronaut is] where Deftones get a big part of our influence from, tone-wise,” Chino Moreno said in a 2010 interview. “There are these huge chords going on, a huge backbeat, rolling basslines going on underneath, a lot of that has directly inspired certain songs.”
