Hum[wiki] surfaced on my playlist this morning, so I thought I would poke around on YouTube to see if any, still rabid fans have posted anything there. As you can see, they did.
The track “The Pod” was the one that grabbed my attention this morning, but this video for their song “Stars” tripped my memory a tad. I know it’s such a low-fi video, but this was in the days of the mid-90’s where video production wasn’t as accessible as it is now. We were talking that not many people actually make videos these days, and that’s really interesting because all you need a laptop and a camera.
Anyway, it was one of the first few shifts at KRUI that I discovered Hum. For a few weeks, that zebra on the cover of “You’d Prefer An Astronaut”[wiki] made me curious, but I never gave in until a caller requested this particular song.
Aside from the sudden, quiet to loud beginning of the song that completely over modulated the air signal by peaking the needles solidly in the red of the VU meters (meaning that listening to this on the radio end, it sounded really distorted and like crap), I was immensely in love with the thick, heavy sound that Hum is so well known for. Even in those wee hours of a Saturday morning, sometime between 4AM and 7AM, I knew that this was something to make a note of. One of those moments you remember when and where you were at a time that you discovered something influential in your life.
Hum put out another album after that, “Downward is Heavenward”[wiki], but the band parted ways nearly two years following the release, the farewell show taking place on the final night of the last millennium. There has been a reunion show more than a handful of times, and Matt Talbot went off to lead Centaur[wiki] as well as pop up in other various projects, one of them recently being Neverending White Lights[wiki].
Thus ends this musical lesson journey inside my mind.