FEATURE:
Untouchable
Garbage’s beautifulgarbage at Twenty-Five
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THIS is a Garbage album…
PHOTO CREDIT: Rankin
that is right up there with their best. beautifulgarbage was released on 1st October, 2001. The follow-up to the acclaimed and commercially successful, Version 2.0 (1998), their third studio album was almost the end of the band. That is what lead Shirley Manson felt. As this article documents, in 2021, Manson looked back at beautifulgarbage and there was this fear:
“Garbage's Shirley Manson has said in a recent interview that at the time of its release, she and the band thought that their 2001 album Beautiful Garbage would mark the end of their careers.
The follow-up to 1998's Version 2.0 was seen as a relative flop at the time, suffering from a lack of label-backed promotion while its lead single "Androgyny" failed to reach the chart positions of their previous singles.
In an interview with Classic Rock magazine, Manson describes the internal fallout that followed the album's release, saying: "I honestly thought that was the end of my career and that we were never going to recover. It took a long time for us as a band to regain our equilibrium and our confidence and our joy”.
I do feel that this is one of their more underrated albums. After following two big albums and then suffering some setbacks, the band did find their way back on course. They are still together today. That said, beautifulgarbage did reach number six in the U.K. and thirteen in the U.S. I feel that it has a couple of classics in there. I wanted to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary. I remember when the album came out. I was a Garbage fan, so I was very keen to hear it. Perhaps it is not as consistent as Version 2.0 or their 1995 eponymous debut. However, we should not dismiss or forget beautifulgarbage, as it is fantastic and worthy of investigation.
Albumism championed beautifulgarbage and urged people not to forget it. I am going to end with a couple of positive reviews. Even if the likes of NME were a little mixed, there was plenty of love for beautifulgarbage. I think that it warrants retrospection and new love ahead of its twenty-fifth anniverssary:
“The gristle-and-glam of Garbage’s “Why Do You Love Me?” was rock 'n' roll bold. The perfect Garbage single.
Shirley Manson (vocals), Butch Vig (drums, percussion), Duke Erickson (guitars, keyboards) and Steve Marker (lead guitar) were back on Bleed Like Me (2005), the album that “Why Do You Love Me?” calls home. But, the heat coming off of “Why Do You Love Me?” felt like a step backward from 2001’s beautifulgarbage, Garbage’s woefully misunderstood third effort.
It's a tale that’s been written and told. Leading rock act with an experimental pop heart is imprisoned by their genre. Said rock act sets themselves free to make music not beholden to where they originated from and suffers the consequences. However, beautifulgarbage did not start off as a self-liberating, creative coup d'état. Initially, the project was envisioned, on the sidelines of the Version 2.0 World Tour, as an assemblage of B-sides. Record label shuffling scuttled the idea, but it ended up as a glorious example of artistic serendipity for Garbage, as the band had recorded some new material at this time too. That music shared an affinity to the vibrancy of their smashing Bond theme “The World Is Not Enough” from October 1999 and pointed to a triumphant, semi-departure from the formula of their previous LPs.
beautifulgarbage still contains some of Garbage's familiar post-modern punk sneer―see “Shut Your Mouth” and “Silence is Golden”―but the album engages in “pop play” too, which opens up their adamantine alt-rock framework to new elements. These sonic variables include, but aren't limited to, electro-rock funk (“Androgyny,” “Til the Day I Die”), new wave (“Cherry Lips”) and vintage Brill Building balladry (“Can’t Cry These Tears”).
September 2001 saw “Androgyny,” accompanied with its scintillating Don Cameron directed video, attempt to hype the crowd for beautifulgarbage, which came closely behind its lead single. Though the record's critical reception was mostly positive, it didn't resonate commercially. “Cherry Lips,” “Breaking Up the Girl” and “Shut Your Mouth” bounded off the record to bolster its market value, fine singles all. Their chart landfall was modest.
Garbage retreated from what some perceived was a supposed creative miscalculation with Bleed Like Me and Not Your Kind of People (2012), albums that had the group sharpening their dependable hard-hitting sound. However, sonically speaking, those two LPs failed to excite the aural palate the way beautifulgarbage had. That all changed with 2016's Strange Little Birds, with its sound arc that cast an affectionate glance backward to the unsung adroitness of beautifulgarbage.
It's apparent now, outside of the glare of varying expectations Garbage was subject to at the height of their popularity, that beautifulgarbage is a Garbage album that is more than capable of pulling its own weight in their beloved canon. And it's most definitely worth a second spin”.
I will end with a couple of reviews. Those that saw the promise and brilliance in beautifulgarbage. I want to start off with Come to the Pedlar and their views on an album that deserves a lot more love than it gets. I wonder how Shirley Manson sees it now. I have written about beautifulgarnage and will always be a fan of it:
“Shirley Manson explores the higher range of her voice throughout the album, perhaps riffing on her own celebrity in her channelling of girl-group melodies and, on the brilliantly parodic ‘Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!), a playful, childlike persona, who sounds like she’s sucking on a lollipop between lines. The old-style computer game riff that opens the track is a lot of fun, and the song works both as a pop song proper and as parody of one, particularly as the heavier guitars chime in for the chorus.
Second single ‘Cherry Lips’ is possibly the most purely pop song on the album.
Pop isn’t just an aesthetic though, but a theme. The constructedness of pop allows Manson to explore other kinds of cultural construction, including most obviously in lead single ‘Androgyny’, which anticipated the current cultural war over gendered bathrooms presciently: ‘Boys in the girls’ room / Girls in the men’s room / You free your mind in your androgyny’. Elsewhere, the lyrics repeatedly return to questions of silencing, as in opening track ‘Shut Your Mouth’, in which a woman appears to be told to shut up after being told to be everything to everyone (‘They say you’re a saint / You’re a whore / You’re a sinner / That he had you / He made you / He can’t live without you’), and ‘Silence is Golden’, which builds a deafening wall of guitar even as Manson plaintively sings ‘Silence is golden / I have been broken / Safe in my own skin / So nobody wins’. The brilliant shift from 12/8 to 4/4 time towards the song’s climax shifts the focus from the wall of sound to Manson’s voice, suddenly bringing the lyrics to the fore. And ‘Untouchable’ is the most R&B of the songs, the production breaking the instruments and vocals down into staccato noise
The record, again mimicking the pop record, is entirely without flab, with every track a potential single. The standout for me is ‘Parade’, a full-on rock anthem with euphoric chorus ‘As far as I can tell it doesn’t matter who you are / If you can believe there’s something worth fighting for’. The song is the most explicit to refer to the pop culture it engages with: ‘Let’s bomb the factories / That make all the wannabees’. Meanwhile ‘Can’t Cry These Tears’ begins as a lighter-waving torch song, beginning with what would usually be a climax, before returning to more conventional verses. The continual upending of normative structures is a pleasure reflected in the gender-bending lyrics.
The quieter moments also work well. ‘Cup of Coffee’ brings in a theramin for a B-movie inflected dramatic ballad, Manson whispering over the synthesised backing music. ‘Drive You Home’ builds around a simple guitar riff and layered vocals to offer a perfect end-of-night tone, ‘I never said I was perfect / But I can drive you home’. And ‘So Like a Rose’ deliberately takes the slick sheen off the production, allowing fractured vocals and guitars to gently lead into a song that ends with a chorus of wordless vocals singing the album out like a choir of vocals. ‘Nobody Loves You’, meanwhile, responds to the band’s recent experience of producing a Bond theme, with John Barry-esque guitars introducing the album’s most avant-garde, atmospheric piece.
I’ve called Beautiful Garbage a pop record, but more than anything it’s distinctively Garbage. The band are still present and correct – Daniel Shulman’s bass in particular shines out on several tracks, Butch Vig’s drumming seamlessly merges with the loops and beats, and Duke Erikson and Steve Marker’s guitars insistently remind the listener of the band’s grungier roots. It’s a masterclass in production, and an album whose sheen has not tarnished almost two decades later”.
Let’s end with Drowned In Sound and their glowing review of Garbage’s third studio album. As I do with all album anniversary pieces, I would encourage people to see out beautifulgarbage. It was perhaps their most diverse and rawest album to that point. It is a shame that it received a bit of a rough ride and got some mixed reviews, because I feel it is much stronger than that:
“There’s a lot resting on the third album from Garbage. After the enormous success of their self titled debut and 1998’s follow up Version 2.0 Shirley, Butch, Steve, and Duke (don’t you just love rock names) have taken their time over number three. The sample and synth rock blueprint remains but there is a change in the air. Garbage are older.
Not that the four piece were ever that young of course. Shirley Manson was, after all, a world wise twenty eight year old when she accepted the invitation to front what was initially a studio project made up by men in their early fourties. This means that unlike other bands on their third album, such as Ash, the six years spent between studio and stage reflects a time period far removed from that of many of those who started at the same time. If the lyrics are anything to go by beautifulgarbage is about the 20/30 shift rather than teens to 20s.
The sound is still a well calculated mix of ear friendly industrial rock, dirty samples, and cooling synths. Track one, Shut Your Mouth, pretty much sums up the feeling of the album, more swearing than on the entirety of the first two combined and defiant lyrical lines including ..would you confess if we asked that you nurture the urge to declare that it’s time to settle down with a man of your own, you want a baby, a family, a piece of security..shut your mouth!..
From then on it’s stylistically quite mixed. Single, Androgeny, is classic Garbage in the style of * Stupid Girl, with it’s pop hooks and easy to sing along chorus. Although it goes a bit *Dubstar in the middle eight. Can’t Cry These Tears, like, Silence Is Golden and Drive You Home, is a larger than life swinging electro pop ballad. It’s got all the Garbage trademarks, looping drums and crackling samples etc, but it’s utterly pop. Anyone from Britney to Atomic Kitten would kill for one of these. Except they’d probably drop the lyrics by about 40 IQ points.
Til The Day I Day sounds like PJ Harvey circa Meet Ze Monster with it’s dirty fuzz guitar and Shirley’s low spitting intonation and shrill peeks. Although the guitar riff does echo I Think I’m Paranoid just a little too closely. Cup Of Coffee is a dramatic and awesome ballad of mature break up, thankfully just a little too self destructive and serious to be grabbed by a tv producer looking for dumping music for his professional women and their relationships sitcom. Perhaps it could have done without the b-movie flying saucer sound effect though. So Like A Rose completes the cd, a dreamy laid back affair without the usual two and a half gigabytes of samples cluttering the simplicity.
Although some might argue it’s merely a mechanical material upgrade for 2001 (notice how it’s released on 01/10/01 - all those zeros and ones, creepy) beautifulgarbage should be seen as a good album in it’s own right. It’s not for kids (see the lamentable chart position for the current single), it’s for adults who don’t want to listen to Dido quite yet. Essentially the sound of reality without the "authentic" reality sound of moping blokes and acoustic guitars”.
On 1st October, beautifulgarbage turns twenty-five. You may be a fan of Garbage and know the album well or are not too familiar with the band. There are many highlights to be found on beautifulgarbage. So many write it off, but I would compel people to…
EXPLORE it in more depth.