Garbage - Beautiful Garbage

Shut Your Mouth

This is my all time favorite album by Shirley Manson and the boys; from the very beginning of the power punch "Shut Your Mouth" through the angst, anger, humor and drama to "So Like A Rose" there isn't a bad song on this set. I'm sure other Garbage heads would go for the first or even the second album, both of course are dynamite but this is the one that does it for me.

By this time, I was of course a fan, having the first two albums and loving them up, but along came Beautifulgarbage, a sort of homage to all the music that proceeded it, "Can't Cry These Tears Anymore" is an electro take on the girl group songs of the 60s, "Cherry Lips" is a throw back to the 80s new wave trips we've all taken, a 70s singer/songwriter turn on "Cup Of Coffee" while other songs define Garbage as the new heroes of alt rock.

"Androgyny" and "Til The Day I Die" stand out as well. If the self titled debut was your bag, this one will probably let you down in its brightness, if you liked Version 2.0 and the direction you could hear the band was headed for, then this might hit your wet spot, or if you just like a pastiche of cleverly disguised nods to all things pop, then Beautifulgarbage might please you as much as it pleases me. June 26, 2008

A sonically diverse album

By far, beautifulgarbage is the most diverse album sonically that Garbage has released. The album incorporates influences from 1950's doo wop to music from the late 1970's and into the 1980's, laid back ballads, as well as what could be called "typical Garbage." Even with these diverse sounds, they are arranged and mixed in such a way that they flow well and fit together on the CD.

Overall, it's a decent album. However, I would have left "Nobody Loves You" off the disc, because it breaks up the flow of the album right near the end. My personal favorites on the CD include: "Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)," "Shut Your Mouth," "Breaking Up the Girl," "Androgyny," and "Can't Cry These Tears."

This is an enhanced CD, with the "beautifulgarbage mixer." Personally, I thought this was a waste. The interface is rather cumbersome, and I just didn't enjoy my experience with it. Personally, I think this enhanced portion of the disc could have been left off without hurting anything. November 12, 2007

Garbage's qualitatively schizoid release contains their best and worst material ever

NOTES: Garbage is my favorite band.
1=bad, 2=average, 3=good, 4=great

Shut Your Mouth: From the bass-heavy disco strut augmented by a salvo of fractured guitar scratches to rapid-fire condemnations of not only stardom, the media and wannabes but the entire human race ("And the world spins by/with everybody moaning/pissing, bitching and everyone is s****ing/on their friends/on their love/on their oaths/on their honor/on their graves/out their mouths/and their words say nothing"), it's the gift that keeps on giving. But wait, did Shirley just say s****ing (and in a separate tirade, f***ing)? Straining to be edgy, "Shut Your Mouth" ironically succeeds as dependable Garbage fare.
4 / 4

Androgyny: Well, here it is: Garbage's worst song. It's not much of a contest. This single charted so embarrassingly that it ended up crippling the sales of Beautifulgarbage and wasn't even included on the greatest-hits compilation. Minimalist sweeps of sporadically-programmed trip-hop beats are monotonous and ineffective. The message is way too lame to take seriously as it advocates free love four decades too late. Striving to be commercial and titillating but ending up flaccid, "Androgyny" is the worst kind of musical malaise; a throwaway that ought to have been replaced by almost anything else.
1 / 4

Disingenuous and saccharine, Can't Cry These Tears continues the obliteration of Garbage's alt-rock image. Shedding her supervixen persona in a pointless attempt to replicate hackneyed girl-group ditties from the `60s, Shirley embraces plastic posturing and diminishes her charm. If it's meant as a joke, "Can't Cry These Tears" is a bad one. Alternatively, if weaved through a David Lynch film score it'd instill an atmosphere of dread, smoothly propping up his nightmarish narrative with an unsettling accompaniment.
1 / 4

Til The Day I Die sure helps rinse out the sour aftertaste of the preceding two misfires. Spinning turntables and scrambling Shirley's chatter, the guys show off a jangly guitar riff and stomping percussive dexterity. It tells a familiar little story about an unappreciative jerk who once made our lead singer swoon ("The force you struck you me down caught me by surprise") but now insists she fights for every scrap of his praise. Sick of being hurt and dropping her masochist act she tells him, "I swear I'm gonna leave you" (and not a moment too soon).
3 / 4

Cup Of Coffee adds the first genuinely heartbroken installment to Garbage's oeuvre, in which Shirley lays bare her soul and agonizes over a departed flame. The sorrow she feels is palpable, made all the more devastating by the way she meticulously details her inability to move on: "I'm walking empty streets hoping we might meet/I see your car parked on the road/the light on at your window/I know for sure that you're home/but I just have to pass on by". Driving herself into seclusion, she winds up "wishing I had never been born", in turn making this a bleak standout.
4 / 4

Shirley recoils from a past act of sexual abuse in Silence Is Golden, which is significantly disturbing. "If I wear a mask there's somewhere to hide" she muses, her undulating smothered with serrated guitars that serve as a protective shield. Duke, Butch and Steve supply their counterpart with all the pulverizing noise she needs to sort herself out (deliberations include: "If I raise my voice will someone get hurt" and "If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide"). She pleads for someone to listen while aching over her violation ("I have been broken/something was stolen") on this disjointed, choral möbius strip.
3 / 4

Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!) is a dazzling paean that hits you like a shot of pure oxygen. The band, in such exhilarated command of their medium, audaciously celebrate a saucy, cross-dressing boy prostitute who "could make grown men gasp" while flaunting his "cherry lips and golden curls". With a vibrant immediacy and an inauspicious twinkle, Shirley's performance also giddily parodies the radio's reigning pop tarts. Frivolous whishing effects generate a bubblegum sheen and the intentionally campy lyrics ("It seemed like rainbows would appear/whenever you came near the clouds would disappear") give it a delectable zing.
4 / 4

Breaking Up The Girl is, frankly, where the album starts to sag. The dizzying highs and terrifying lows begin to level out and a kind of lethargy sets in. Flopping on the charts, "Breaking Up The Girl" happily doesn't approach the gooey cloying of "Can't Cry These Tears" but still fails to leave a distinct impression. Shirley croons about living in the moment because "one mistake's all it takes/and your life has come undone". But her breathy refrains are too pat to be of any use. For a trendsetting outfit that used to banish all clichés within their genre, this is a tedious setback.
2 / 4

Drive You Home is a sleep-inducing, recycled expression of vulnerability that falters decidedly. If the goal for Beautifulgarbage was to steadily phase out Shirley's bubbling vitality in exchange for an inert sentimentality, then mission accomplished. I'm all for Garbage branching out to different areas, but not when it's a wasted opportunity. Sluggish rhythms just about slay any chance the respectable lyrics have to strike a chord, bringing whatever momentum was left to a screeching halt. Prior subdued excursions have managed to be smart and tantalizing, so "Drive You Home" simply has no excuse.
1 / 4

Parade keeps up the gang's ill-advised scavenging of the pop music lexicon by draping New Wave over a surging, bouncy cadence. Shirley appears to be suffering from an identity crisis and regrettably channels `80s has-beens in an attempt to recharge her drained effervescence. Affirmations such as, "Believing in nothing/makes life so boring/so let's pray for something/to feel good in the morning" and "Let's burst all the bubbles/that brainwash the masses" are marred by the dated and gimmicky style of "Parade", which squanders the call to arms that the lyrics incite.
2 / 4

Nobody Loves You is a swell of negative emotion; vibrating with a twilight-tinged, fatalistic gloom ("But grab yourself sweetness where you can/cause sooner or later we're going to die") that's fascinating and at this point, a windfall. The knotted, prickly soundscape effuses a befitting despondency so Shirley can frighten with passages like, "Watching the days slip by so fast/knowing our fate has long been cast/working our fingers to the bone/cause nobody loves you when you're gone". Her chilling hexes force some of us into a small crisis of faith.
3 / 4

Untouchable is pure filler, a stab at late-`90s teen pop that resembles something penned by those Swedish über-producers who churned out hits for Britney and the biggest of boy-bands. It's catchy and has the synthesized bombast you'd expect from this sort of haughty fluff, classifying it as listenable gloss. But is there a fan in the world who wanted to hear such cheesy snarling from a songstress who had proven she didn't need to fit in with the TRL crowd?
2 / 4

So Like A Rose allows the band to unconditionally atone for their failings on this release. Its dreamy, deliberate pace submerges us in a nocturnal expanse that brims with divine beauty. Remember though, "there's no going back" once Garbage shows you the way to aural nirvana. Each stanza meditates on the inevitable death that awaits every person until Shirley tenderly exclaims, "You're so like a rose/I wish you could stay here". Then, invoking the entire range of her talents as a singer, she symphonizes several mixes of her voice into a sustained ethereal chime and we experience a sinking feeling of catharsis. "So Like A Rose" is my favorite song ever.
4 / 4

Best: So Like A Rose (career best)
Worst: Androgyny (career worst) October 18, 2007

Partly Stereotyped, Partly Magical

What happened to Garbage? Why, in the year 2000, did they abandon the experimental, full-blooded sound of their first albums and venture into a territory of over-produced pop? I don't know. Now, Garbage are the last band I should be criticising. But it seems to me that they almost entirely forgot about their spirit in the process of making this album.

The rather kitsch title, Beautifulgarbage, does nothing to help this album. The opening track, "Shut Your Mouth", is the first sign of this album's faults. Garbage seem afraid to step up, be bold, which is in direct contrast to their earlier two albums. The flow of blood is also missing from "Androgyny", the first single, still very forgettable to my ears. The first semi-bright spot is "Can't Cry These Tears", with an interesting verse. Sadly, that's it; it still borders on being rather cliché, topped with the addition of the bell-clinging.

It's not as though Garbage have never employed computer-effects before. On the contrary, Garbage and Version 2.0 were both full of them, mostly courtesy of Butch Vig, adding a very confident sound to the band's music. But on Beautifulgarbage, Garbage go overboard with the effects and, worse, fail to invent. Most of the songs sound like friendly radio pop rather than the full-frontal Garbage we've come to know and love. I would never guess that "Cup of Coffee" was a Garbage song if it weren't for Shirley's voice. And yet Garbage seem intent on manipulating her beautiful voice unnecessarily.

The height of the radio-pop flavour of the album is "Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)", a song as sugary as its title. Not only does Shirley sound like Mya, but this song is so factory-pop-flavoured, also resorting to the bells, that I feel downright angry at one of my favourite bands for selling their souls like this. And "Untouchable" also lacks the spunk, for me.

I might be ready to throw this album in the trash - if it weren't for six songs that show me that Garbage haven't forgotten so much, after all. The first of these is "Silence is Golden", and as I hear this sixth track, I am overcome with joy and relief as Garbage's explosive, full-blooded sound kicks in. Not only that, but this song is excellently crafted, guitars kicking to life and upholding a very confronting melody and lyric. Shirley also finally gets to be more than a mannequin, her trademark sultry voice simmering all over the song.

I'll add "Breaking up the Girl" as the second of the tracks that save Garbage from disaster. Totally different from "Silence is Golden", yet a suitably full-blooded and suitably 'popp-y' song, with lyrics that require some self-interpretation - and that's always a good thing. "Drive Me Home" is one of the few slow songs in Garbage's repertoire, but its magic lies in its simplicity - absolutely magical guitars, Shirley's wonderful vocal performance and lyrics only she could write. And if that's not enough to evaporate your desire to rock'n'roll to Garbage, you needn't wait any further, for "Parade" kicks in right after. The lyric "KABOOM!" describes the song perfectly - the lyrics, which explore the meaning of life or something of the sorts, are a perfect addition.

And then there's, in my opinion, the height of it; my personal favourite, "Nobody Loves You". I think this is one of Garbage's deepest songs, and an experiment that I think is a tremendous success. Such words miss the point of the song, though; it's a slow yet sultry, haunting melody, finely-balanced between soft guitars, computer effects that at last compliment the melody and an explosive climax, topped by Shirley climbing to the top of her vocal scale. By this point, I'm ready to forgive Garbage for the stereotypical majority of the album. If you can sit through the so-so "Untouchable", there is "So Like a Rose" left to take in. A slow song, with Shirley's most intimate vocals yet, with the most self-interpretative lyrics on the album as far as I can make out. This song doesn't abandon its slow pace, almost lullaby-ish, but greatly peppered by the electro-guitar solo and going on into the in-my-opinion spot-on conclusion.

How do I close matters? Here we have seven very disappointing songs, selling themselves as pop rather than the intimate Garbage melodies. On the other hand, we also have six strong, personal songs, all highly distinctive but very successful experiments that yield a high impact over me. Had Garbage released them as an EP, it would have got a perfect score from me. As it is, I'm glad Garbage learned their lesson in time for their follwoing album, five years later, finding yet another subtly-different side to their music. As it was, I was afraid they might betray their spirit and go all-radio. It's a 60/40 situation; partly mechanical, partly viscuous. I go for the second. And I tell you, where Beautifulgarbage is at its best, it is a very powerful best. The magic wins over the stereotypical, even though there are six of the former and seven of the latter. September 9, 2007

awesome

Yet another crisis in my life. This is still the album I turn to listen to when I am so depressed I need "suicide music". Not going to commit suicide or anything, but when I am really upset and down in the dumps...this is the perfect soundtrack. Deep, emotional tracks. Awesome job, Garbage! August 11, 2007

More reviews at Amazon.com ...