Vig explained that as in his opinion "the most exciting bands are those who incorporate all those elements of punk, funk, techno, hip hop, etc." Garbage would attempt to do the same and "take those influences and make them work in the context of a pop song."
That is from the wikipedia article on Garbage.
You guys know that I'm not a big fan of the "genre" of "grunge." Not, mind you, that I dislike Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, etc. I think the genre is some stupid marketing ploy to convince people that this disparate music that came from a scene is somehow linked by a unique sound which is utterly preposterous bullshit.
That being said, Garbage is a record that is "grunge." It's a pop record with bandmates made of a production team that was en vogue and very instrumental to that scene's rise. They got bored, started dicking around making remixes and then said shit, we should be a band. We can take all these different sounds we love and combine them into a pop behemoth.
Over the years, there have been many disparaging remarks from many of the type of folks who enjoy this band's music about bands like Coldplay and Muse being corporate entities playing to the lowest denominator. I've always found that to be a particularly weird thing to say of a band. Certainly, there have been corporately created bands throughout the years, The Monkees and NSYNC immediately come to mind. Not to say that these bands were not talented. Hell, Neil Young auditioned to be a Monkee and in an alternative reality, he made it and the course of history and music is very different in that timeline. We all know that Justin Timberlake is a very talented musician as well. But to say these modern bands that made it big were somehow created and to use that as a way of demeaning their fans and music was just odd to me.
Garbage's record has some undeniable hits. Stupid Girl, Queer, Vow... they're good pop songs. Very of their moment and time. One might even say production wise, they might be a bit cutting edge. The album does take the sonics of the burgeoning Trip Hop scene (Portishead, Massive Attack) and brings it to the more mainstream alternative music. It's all very marketable and pretty much manufactured that way. This is a band of producers who found a unique singer who was otherwise failing and gave her a platform of polished sounds of the times.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. If you like it, you like it. It is what it is. There is nothing even bad about this record, you could even point out several things in this write up that show this album deserves to be on this list. It is an album of its time, it kind of sums up the total of the hip pop music scene of the mid 90s and that's important in and of itself.
As a long time consumer of critical writing, I know that a lot of people look at the score before they read or decide to read a review and if you've done that, you probably wonder why the score seems so discordant to the words written here.
The thing is, it is completely a record of the moment, not just in the sound presented as a snapshot of the totality of music at the time it was released, but in that it is fleeting and ultimately unmemorable. Moments after even Stupid Girl plays, it flees from the mind. I think the fervent fans must have been so enamored with the lush sound that they played it on repeat by pressing that magic button on their discman until it did become the earworm it so desperately wants to be. None of it makes any mark on me. Just as Spooner and Anglefish ultimately did not affect music other than being previous projects by the two biggest talents involved in this.
Manson is a capable singer, who desperately wants to be a Beth Gibbons but beyond her striking looks, doesn't find the sound or content to compete. Vig is a producer of some talent. Love him or hate him, he had his finger in the pulse of the music of this time - maybe so much that he made a record that showed how meaningless that actual pulse is. It's remarkable that he did get to work with bands who did make landmark records under his watch and he even gave them a little of his own thing to help define a sound, an alternative to the pop rock, glam metal, glossy r n b, etc. He helped make Punk poppy. Which is a double edged sword, good and bad. The music was brought to the masses and changed everything much for the better before the internet came along to emancipate the populace from their corporate music industry shackles. Ultimately, this is the sound of that freedom and maybe that's why it doesn't make the impression that it should. It's an important record that five hundred years from now (assuming man has not destroyed itself) will not be remembered. Utlimately, Garbage, Manson, and Vig will be footnotes to musical history much like Antonio Salieri.
2 stars
www.allmusic.com
