I've been a garbage fan from the start, and I've had so many opportunities to see them live. We watched the band's frustration with the music industry and each other lead to Bleed Like Me, an album that was good, if feeling a little lost. Years later, Not Your Kind Of People made us remember why we loved them. Strange Little Birds goes even further, hooking us almost immediately, start to finish, the way that "Supervixen" to "Milk" did. This album is brilliant.
With any band, you hope that they'll keep making music that brought you in, without making the same album over and over. I'm not a musician, but I imagine that's hard. Garbage manages to do it. You can tell as soon as you spin up Birds that the moody, atmospheric sounds are Garbage, with Shirley Manson's sweet vocal on top, but it's like hearing them for the first time. "Empty," the first single, is unmistakable Garbage, wonderfully dark and maybe even a little angry, but it feels more raw. Many of the other attracts make you wonder if they were listening to some combination of Nine Inch Nails and Jesus Jones (remember them?) until the influence rubbed off and made its way into the music.
Usually you don't associate simplicity with any music described as atmospheric, because of all the production that goes into such songs, but describing Garbage has always been hard. There are plenty of noisy guitars, but more interesting bass lines and harmonies. Many of the songs are longer than we're used to as well, something usually reserved for their live arrangements. "So We Can Stay Alive" is this brilliant journey of joy and loss, with stinging guitars, electronic sounds and a bass line that has to be seen live. It's like everything awesome about Garbage wrapped into a new package, in three acts (the second bridge is amazing), that makes you want to get up and cheer, right to the end.
This album deserves critical and commercial success. It might be a little dark in spots, but it's the brightest thing in music I've heard in a long time.
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