Garbage - Beautiful Garbage

With their first two albums, Garbage carved a niche for themselves as a postmodern, Americanized version of Curve, playing electronically svelte, slightly mechanical techno-noise pop. Into this they introduced a montage of fragments of various musical styles.

The group benefited from singer/lyricist Shirley Manson’s gift for expressing referential, neurotic, almost paranoid irony within the locked confines of pop songs. This introduced a complexity into the songs—unconventional lyrics often worked at deconstructing the songs’ pop musical conventions. So it seemed they might continue, having achieved a (albeit rather precarious) balance between pop culture and anti-pop. Producer/percussionist Butch Vig, though, the Svengali behind the band, apparently had other plans.

After establishing himself as a noise pop savant in the early 90’s (producing albums for Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Sonic Youth), Vig got together with former band mates from his days of gigging around Madison, Wisconsin to jam and explore their interest in electronic music and its potential applications to contemporary popular rock. After some promising sessions, Garbage was born (Vig later plucked Manson from her band Angelfish after seeing their video for “Suffocate Me” on MTV).

Beautiful Garbage features a new (more pop-friendly) musical direction complete with songs that are a catalog of popular influences—including a heavier soul, funk, and R&B influence than previous records, and even flirtations with the vocal sound of the early 60’s girl groups (the Shirelles, the Shangra-Las).

Not all of these influences are well assimilated, though. Manson’s voice sounds higher and thinner on this album, and seems ill arranged on some songs. The tracks have moments of clean, catchy, plush-sounding pop, but several are also marred by lapses into a colder, more carefully constructed, almost over-produced feel, as if they’d spent a day too long in the studio working over some material.

Overall, Beautiful Garbage is an album that suffers from too many ideas and not enough inspiration. Unlike past Garbage recordings that gathered themselves around Manson’s voice, in his quest to reinvent pop music from itself, Vig has (perhaps inadvertently) pushed his pop music ambitions from the background to the artistic foreground of the album. Manson’s vocals have been reduced to just another instrument to manipulate in the studio. This is a bad thing.

What made the group’s first two albums—Garbage and Version 2.0--appealing were the tensions established between the electronic pop structures of the music and Manson’s lyrics, which brought ironic flourishes and subversive themes to Top 40 musical ideals. Apparently, Vig’s ambitions have shifted to creating less complicated, less conflicted, more conventional pop songs.

The result is Garbage’s least compelling work to date because Beautiful Garbage finds the band less willing than they have been in the past to explore the dissonant and discordant aspects that exist between the various musical elements that comprise popular music and the effect these aspects have on the band's own attempts to synthesize a variety of popular styles on their records.

--Matt Parks