FEATURE:
Second Spin
Garbage – Bleed Like Me
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I am fascinated by the first…
PHOTO CREDIT: Neil Massey
four albums by Garbage. Their debut, Garbage, and 1998’s Version 2.0 are two of the best albums of the decade. It established them as one of the most distinct and important bands of their generation. With a lot of expectation and acclaim behind them, they then released 2001’s Beautiful Garbage and 2005’s Bleed Like Me. Whilst not as acclaimed as their first two albums, it take the band in a different direction. Showing they were evolving and not reliant on a particular sound. Not wanting to repeat themselves or play it safe. I have previously included Beautiful Garbage in Second Spin. I want to do the same with Bleed Like Me. It is an album back in focus, as a new issue and release has come out. It showcases and highlights what an important band Garbage are. I want to include parts of a recent interview from NME with Garbage lead, Shirley Manson. I will come to positive reviews for the brilliant Bleed Like Me. The fourth studio album from Garbage, Bleed Like Me was released on 11th April, 2005. Differing from their previous releases, the band adopted a straighter Rock style that has a live sound. It was a step away from the more Electronic-based sounds of Beautiful Garbage. It was a tough time for Garbage. Maybe some critics noted disharmony or disconnection on Bleed Like Me. There was tension within the band and some tough days. They briefly split at the end of 2003 and came back together early in 2004. Recording with producer John King in Los Angeles, Garbage discovered this new enthusiasm and focus. Reaching number four in the U.K., I think that a lot of people overlook Garbage’s fourth studio album. I would recommend people investigate the new issue.
If you have not heard about it, this website provides details about a new release of a wonderful album that never got the critical acclaim and celebration that it deserved. I think that Why Do You Love Me is among the strongest releases from the band. Nearly twenty years after the album came out, I still feel it sounds fresh and exciting. A band who retained the sound of their first two albums but adds something to the mix. That live sound of the album with some of the studio elements of their 1990s work:
“This was the last album issued before the band’s hiatus and features the UK top 10 hit ‘Why Do You Love Me’. The album has been remastered and is reissued across three formats: 2CD with a selection of B-sides, remixes and demos on the second disc, a 2LP red vinyl edition with 10 B-sides/extra tracks on LP 2 and then a silver single vinyl LP which features just the remastered album.
The 2CD and 2LP sets also features the none-album single ‘Tell Me Where It Hurts’ (from 2007) and its two B-sides, ‘Betcha’ and ‘All That Is Good In This Life’.
This album was never actually issued on vinyl back in 2005, so the single LP and 2LP editions are its official debut on the format.
Bleed Like Me is reissued on 5 April 2024 via BMG”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Garbage in 2022/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Ziff
I want to come to sections of an interview that NME recently published. Shirley Manson is one of the most inspiring and respected leads ever. An icon who has given so much strength to fans and followers. Among the questions she was asked, Bleed Like Me was touched on and highlighted. I would urge anyone who has not heard the album to listen to it now:
“Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson has spoken to NME about the reissue of their 2005 album ‘Bleed Like Me’, the worsening conditions of the music industry, and the band’s plans for new material.
This week sees the alt-rock veterans drop their fourth album on vinyl for the first time, along with a raft of b-sides, remixes and rarities hitting streaming for the first time. While containing the singles and fan favourites ‘Sex Is Not The Enemy’, ‘Why Do You Love Me’ and ‘Run Baby Run’, the album arrived to mixed reviews and didn’t perform as well as its hugely commercially successful predecessors.
“To be a frank, I never had a particularly good relationship with that record until relatively recently,” Manson told NME. “We released it at a time of immense strife within the band, and dwindling interest from our record label and the general public.”
While the rock-leaning record has since become a cult favourite and sits warmly in the hearts of Garbage and their fans, ‘Bleed Like Me’ was made during a period of much inner-band tension and “unpleasant interference” from their label, Interscope Records.
“We were nobody’s child at that record label because they hadn’t wanted us there necessarily,” Manson admitted. “They had bought our label Almo, who had been a small independent label, and we had been sucked into this situation where we were a tiny fish in a massive pond. Interscope at the time were arguably the biggest player in the industry, and there we were stuck without an A&R that was interested in us.
“It was really stressful. They kept on pushing for us to work with people that we didn’t feel were the right fit. As a result of our resistance to that, they decided that we were being really difficult. It was at a time in the entertainment industry when people were much more pliable than we were.”
Relations then turned particularly sour when Manson had “a fortunate or unfortunate incident” on a flight from Los Angeles to London, when she was sat next to “a really famous rockstar” who let slip that Interscope had prioritised No Doubt over Garbage.
“I shan’t name [said rockstar] because I don’t want to cause too many ruptures,” said the frontwoman. “He’s really gorgeous and I love this person, but we got drunk together and he told me that he’d been present at an Interscope meeting where our future as a band had been discussed and there was a vote taken at the table where they decided if they were going to spend money on No Doubt or on Garbage. They decided to invest in No Doubt.
“No Doubt are friends of ours, we love them dearly and this has no bearing on them whatsoever, but to hear that from a well-known and highly regarded rockstar was devastating. He told me this story, and then it was war. I wasn’t going to do fuck all for that record label ever again.”
Manson explained how this led to a feeling of the industry only seeing space for one “female-fronted rock band” on the scene.
“We were meeting the same resistance at radio stations too; they were also saying, ‘Well we’ll be playing No Doubt, we won’t be playing Garbage’,” she recalled. “The domino effect was devastating. It caused us to turn in on each other because we were so frustrated.
“We couldn’t really move anywhere and we felt like we were playing with our hands tied behind our backs. That will drive a person insane, and it did. We all went mad and we took the pressure out on each other. It caused a lot of heartbreak.”
Check out our full interview with the NME Icon Award winner below, where she also pointed out how circumstances are only worsening for new and rising artists, and revealed the band’s plans for an incoming new album.
NME: Hello Shirley. Having the rug pulled out from beneath you before the release of ‘Bleed Like Me’ must have done serious damage to the band’s confidence?
Manson: “When you release a record, you’re really leaving yourself vulnerable to criticism, to disappointment, to shame, to embarrassment. When you open yourself to public criticism, yes you can enjoy great praise, which is wonderful and lovely – but it doesn’t touch you like the negative criticism does.
“Although the record sold pretty well – I think it actually sold a million copies in the end – it was received disastrously! We’d got the most damning reviews we’d ever had telling us that our career was over, nobody wanted to hear from us, and there were a lot of cruel comments.”
But you still had to soldier on?
“We had a tour planned, so we just went on tour and forgot about the criticism, but things had got so bad between us as a band. We were in Australia and due to come to the UK. Our manager called to tell us that the tickets weren’t selling very well so I just sat down with the band and said, ‘I love you, but I’m done and I’m going home – cheerio, goodbye!’
“The band wanted to go into the studio to make another record, but I literally said, ‘It wouldn’t even matter if we wrote [The Beatles’] ‘Sgt Peppers’ – they would piss on it anyway’. I didn’t feel like we were being judged on the music, it was all on people’s bigotry towards us and who they believed we were.”
“I went home and I stayed home, and then the shit hit the fan. My life fell apart and we didn’t get back together for five years after that.”
How would you describe that impact of being told, ‘There’s no room for you’?
“It was devastating. ‘There’s no seat at the table’, was what we were being told. Yet we were still expected to fulfil our contract and to go around the world on tour to garner an audience for the record. It was soul-destroying. We all knew there was no point to it. If your label does not give a shit about you then the rest of the world is not going to give a shit about you.”
And the industry had changed so dramatically since the ‘90s too…
“Yes, this was also the period of Napster and file-sharing that we were unaccustomed to. Nowadays, we’re all used to it. We’ve been beaten down and forced to accept the shit sandwich that we’ve been offered. Back then, we had been used to releasing records, records being sold and there being a transactional relationship. Then all of a sudden our music was literally stolen.
“I think I can speak for so many musicians: it was devastating to have your music leaked and have no control over how you’d release a record. You had no idea of how it would drop, who had access to it. That would affect your chart positions, and you were judged by your chart positions. We felt like we were getting shysted at every turn, and we didn’t believe in ourselves enough to think that we’d have a future beyond that”.
I am going to end with a couple of reviews. Although there was some mixed reception, there were those who connected with it. Were not trying to compare Garbage to their past work and feel like they had betrayed that or were weaker, Bleed Like Me is the sound of a band moving forward. Recharged after a difficult few months which could have threatened their future. The fact they are still recording and gigging together today is proof that they are a solid unit – even if the line-up has changed through the years. This is what The Guardian wrote in their review:
“After losing themselves under the weight of second hand identities on their last album, Garbage have spent four years finding their way back to the grungy guitars, girl-group melodies and adolescent angst that made them famous. But Shirley Manson and her misunderstood-bad-girl persona remain unscathed. Falling somewhere between boy-baiting Madonna and the Boy's-Own style of Chrissie Hynde, she entices and discards with equal disdain. "I'm no Barbie doll, I'm not your baby girl," she sings in Why Do You Love Me, like a bra-burning Ronnie Spector. Yet she bemoans the feminist cause on the campaigning Sex Is Not the Enemy, in which she advocates free love through a loudspeaker yet vocally sounds at her most weak. Boys Wanna Fight equates world politics with a Saturday night punch-up - which might be merely a simplification, if Manson didn't sound like a stocking-wearing schoolmarm glorying in the masculinity of the fight. She is equally voyeuristic on Bleed Like Me, coldly observing self-imposed starvation, self-harming and sexual confusion. However, while Manson's changeling vocals are always worth listening to, Garbage's songs often aren't”.
I will end with a review from Rolling Stone. I do contend that Bleed Like Me is a really strong album. It was not provided the support and appreciation it was worthy of. My hope is that this new reissue will get the album to new people. That it will spread and get a new audience. A bridge between Garbage’s eclectic and strong first three albums and where they would head after 2005:
“Garbage have been making smart hard-pop records about desire and disaster, breaking up and starting over, for precisely a decade. It does not come easy for them. Bleed Like Me is only their fourth album in those ten years -- their first since 2001's Beautifulgarbage -- and making it was nearly the end of them. Early fractious sessions ground to a halt when drummer-guitarist Butch Vig -- a celebrity in his own right for his Nineties production work with Nirvana, Sonic Youth and Smashing Pumpkins -- quit the group, effectively killing it.
He returned four months later and Garbage went back to work. This is the result: the first Garbage album that sounds as if Vig, guitarists-keysmen Duke Erikson and Steve Marker, and Scottish vocal fireball Shirley Manson truly know what they're writing, singing and raging about. "I've held back a wealth of shit/I think I'm gonna choke," Manson snaps in "Why Do You Love Me," a high-speed bouquet of rusted-razor-blade guitars. She can smell her own blood on these tracks. You hear it in high, vicious fidelity.
"Bad Boyfriend" opens the record like a honeyed chunk of Blondie wrapped in thick, serrated layers of Deep Purple: big guitars; even bigger drums courtesy of Dave Grohl, modern rock's own John Bonham; punchy-sax-section electronics that give you an idea of how Nirvana's Nevermind would have sounded if Vig had let loose his inner Phil Spector. Manson plays the predatory coquette with breathy relish ("I know some tricks I swear will give you the bends"). But she is under no illusions about the high price of guilt-free pleasure. Manson has surrendered to the inevitable betrayal around the corner before the song is even over: "If you can't love me, honey/Go on, just pretend." Three minutes into the album and the bad news is already in your face: When you want something in the worst way, that is surely how you will get it.
The first two-thirds of Bleed Like Me is easily the best sustained run of studio Garbage since the opening half of their 1995 debut. The density and detail of the charging guitars in "Bad Boyfriend," "Right Between the Eyes" and "Why Do You Love Me" make you wonder if, in another life, Vig, Marker and Erikson were all members of Blue Oyster Cult. They are certainly old enough in this life to know the original New Wave firsthand, so it comes as no surprise that in "Run Baby Run," Garbage do 1982 better and fresher than revival puppies like Kasabian and Bloc Party. Surrounded by a black forest of power-chord distortion, Manson pleads and prays like Deborah Harry atop a bouncing, throaty guitar riff that New Order would envy. Later, Manson shows off her deep affection for Patti Smith in the synth-pop frost of "Metal Heart," fronting the corrosion with a fight and aplomb that prove one doesn't have to sing through scabrous distortion -- take note, Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor -- to mix pain and machines.
A sameness -- a feeling of roaring in circles -- creeps in toward the end of the record, as if the drama and drain of cracking up and coming together again left Garbage without enough strength, time or songs to maintain the high, shrill thrills upfront. But whatever the four of them went through to get this far, it was worth it just for the title track: a haunting spin on Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side," except this time everyone keeps falling over. Set in a grassy bed of acoustic guitar, dotted with Sgt. Pepper-esque splashes of Mellotron and mariachi-funeral brass, "Bleed Like Me" is a roll call of the sick, addicted and suicidal - Avalanche the anorexic; Chrissie, the boy who may be a girl -- sung by Manson in a cracked whisper that at times eerily sounds like Courtney Love (before she became a regular on Court TV). Manson spares no love or detail for the victims here -- and that ultimately includes herself. "You should see my scars," she sings with chilling sweetness in the bridge. You'll find it hard to look away”.
For Garbage fans or those who are not overly familiar with the band, I would say that you need to listen to Bleed Like Me. I am a big fan of the band. I feel like they created something strong and cohesive with their fourth studio album. It is deserving of love and fondness. Nineteen years after it came into the world, I like this album as much now…
AS I did in 2005.