FEATURE:
Second Spin
Garbage - Beautiful Garbage
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ONE reason for looking at…
Garbage’s Beautiful Garbage for Second Spin is that a twentieth anniversary release has been announced and is available from 5th November. The original album celebrated twenty years on 1st October. The anniversary release looks fantastic. This is what Rough Trade say:
“2021 Remaster. Beautiful Garbage is the third studio album from Garbage, initially released on October 1, 2001. Marking a departure from the sound the band had established on their first two releases, Garbage and Version 2.0, the album was written and recorded over the course of a year, when lead singer Shirley Manson chronicled their efforts weekly online, becoming one of the first high-profile musicians to keep an Internet blog. The album expanded on the band's musical variety, with stronger melodies, more direct lyrics, and sounds mixing rock with electronica, new wave, hip hop, and girl groups.
This brand new edition featuring newly remastered audio by Billy Bush & Butch Vig across Deluxe, LP, CD and Digital formats. The Deluxe edition includes Beautiful Garbage on 2 x 180g Black Vinyl, as well as a 12” 180g of B-Sides and memorabilia. The two Double LP formats have been pressed on 180g Black and 180g white vinyl respectively. This reissue campaign also features a triple CD featuring, original album, b-sides, demos and remixes housed in a deluxe clamshell”.
If you are a Garbage fan, you will definitely want to check out that release. It is going to add extra layers and levels to one of their best albums. It is a shame that there was not more appreciation for Beautiful Garbage back in 2001.
A lot of fans did not like a new direction for the band. I have been listening to a couple of recent interviews where the band’s lead, Shirley Manson, has spoken so fondly about Beautiful Garbage. It seems like it was a happy time for the band. Their second album, 1998’s Version 2.0, was a huge success. Boasting singles like Push It and I Think I’m Paranoid, it is rightly garnered as one of the greatest albums of the 1990s. There would have been a lot of expectation for the follow-up. People assuming it would be a very similar album. Beautiful Garbage was released a few weeks after the terrorist attacks in America. It did not get that much promotion. It would have been strange to release an album at that time. I want to come back to Beautiful Garbage, as it contains so many great songs. Beautiful Garbage is a more expensive and diverse album than their earlier work. Though there were some positive reviews for Beautiful Garbage, there was a note of disappointment from some critics. Beautiful Garbage debuted at number thirteen on the US Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 73,000 copies. Singles Androgyny, Breaking Up the Girl and Shut Your Mouth are some of Garbage’s very best. I think that Beautiful Garbage has acquired better standing in the years since. Critics are revisiting it in the light of the albums that followed – and Garbage are still making music and going strong to this day.
There are a couple of conflicting reviews that I want to bring in. One is very positive, whilst the other is more mixed. Although there are some positive points to SLANT’s review, they only awarded Beautiful Garbage three stars:
“Just as the reception of Beck’s Midnite Vultures was influenced by the critical success of Odelay, Garbage’s Beautiful Garbage will be shrouded in the bias of its predecessors. The comparatively poppy follow-up to 1998’s Grammy-nominated Version 2.0, is no Version 3.0. Good or bad, relevant here or not, the influence of expectation is a product of modern criticism in a time of multimedia pop art. And Garbage is the quintessential pop art outfit, consistently blending rock and electronica in a fusion that is, ultimately and undeniably, just plain pop.
For the most part, Beautiful Garbage succeeds in its attempt at beauty, dressing up the band’s signature rock riffs with sugary melodies and a patently retro pop sensibility that recalls Like a Virgin-era Madonna. In 1984, Madonna shed her initial black-rooted club music for a more mainstream pop sound that, though deemed a defining artifact of ‘80s pop, was just as influenced as it was influential. Similarly, tracks like Garbage’s “Can’t Cry These Tears” and “Breaking Up the Girl” draw on more traditional pop forms; the former is even structured like an old ‘50s tune.
Frontwoman Shirley Manson chirps out a Britneyfied performance on the new wave-metabolized “Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!),” but it’s far edgier than anything our current pop princess could ever sing (it tells the story of a sassy, trend-setting transvestite). Manson displays more vocal versatility than ever before, exuding a subdued, gentler side on the acoustic-based “Drive You Home” and “So Like a Rose”: “Sleeping with ghosts/It’s such a warming experience.” The meter-shifting “Silence Is Golden” finds her wailing as if she’s been forsaken by everything and everyone she holds dear (“Something was stolen/I have been broken!”) and subsequently sums up her despondency amid spooky trilling and splices of cinematic dementia on the standout “Cup of Coffee” (“I give myself to anyone who wants to take me home”).
With tracks like “Shut Your Mouth” and the existential “Parade,” the band sticks to more typical Garbage fare, mixing up turntable scratches, clangy guitars, and super-tight drum programming. The album’s first single, “Androgyny,” is a seemingly disposable, albeit infectious, rewrite of “Queer”; its exhortation that liberation can be found in abandoning sexual boundaries doesn’t seem very groundbreaking in 2001. Yet Beautiful Garbage isn’t so much about breaking ground as it is about coming down to it. Make no mistake though: Garbage makes music just above pop’s sea level and it’s beautiful indeed”.
HOT PRESS had some kinder things to say when they reviewed Beautiful Garbage back in 2001. They note how it is not the ‘difficult third album’ that it could have been:
“After the brilliance of their debut and the relative disappointment of the follow-up, Version 2.0, Shirley Manson and Co have clearly regrouped to their Madison, Wisconsin HQ to consider all their options. And consider they have...
With long-time collaborator Butch Vig at the controls once again Beautiful Garbage covers all the angles, embracing a welter of ideas and a leaving few stylistic stones unturned. The sheer variety of the material is breathtaking and brave, making it sound more like a compilation of a decade’s work rather than the “difficult” third album it could have been. It starts out on familiar enough ground with ‘Shut Your Mouth’ a standard rawk belter all the better for Manson’s tough street-wise vocal. The recent single ‘Androgyny’, is a catchy r’n’b/hip-hop number in parts not a million miles away from U2’s ‘Mysterious Ways’. Then things take an unexpected twist. Sounding like something crafted in the Brill Building for the Crystals or Ronnie Spector, ‘Can’t Cry These Tears’ is a big romantic ballad and a sure-fire char-topper should it see a single release.
Change tack with each track from here on in ‘Til The Day I Die’ recalls INXS at their riffing finest, ‘Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go’) mimics The Go-Go’s plastic power pop while closer to the jangly Americana currently in vogue ‘Breaking Up The Girl’ is another stand out “.
I really like Beautiful Garbage and think that it is an album that was unfairly maligned by some. Maybe there was this sense that Garbage were going to repeat their debut or second album. As it is, we got this incredible album where they expanded and moved into wonderful directions. Led by the inimitable Shirley Manson, the twentieth anniversary release will get the album into new hands. It will also get people looking at Beautiful Garbage in a new way. After all of these years, Garbage’s third studio album remains…
A stunning release.