Album Anniversaries: 25 Years of ‘Garbage’ And Alt Rock’s Left Turn

With trip hop beats and guitar sparkle, Garbage offered a dynamic reprieve from grunge gloominess and opened the door to experimentation and genre fluidity in its self-titled debut.

In Album Anniversaries, writers honor their favorite aging albums and their subsequent legacies, revealing which projects have stood the test of time.

Written by Carys Anderson

In an era of teen spirit, shitlists, and cherub rock, distorted guitars and screaming exorcisms of insecurity, anger, and angst dominated early ‘90s alternative radio. Much of this landscape-shifting sound can be credited to Butch Vig, the producer behind seminal albums such as Nirvana’s Nevermind and Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream. Vig had a knack for finding clarity amid dense noise, from Cobain’s thrashing punk rock to Corgan’s infinite layers of guitars. Albums with Vig’s touch reached the mainstream because they managed to reconcile sludge and polish, to hone in on a hook without losing any of the artist’s bite or underground street cred. How else could Sonic Youth have made it to Letterman?

But while Vig helped refine the cultural zeitgeist of grunge, he just as quickly helped tear it apart. Burnt out after becoming one of rock’s most sought-after producers, Vig jumped back to the drums, his first musical love. Joining with longtime collaborators Duke Erikson and Steve Marker, producers in their own rights who had created remixes for artists like Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails, Garbage sought to make more electronic music than the heavy rock that saturated the airwaves.

The trio found their singer in Shirley Manson, singer of the Scottish band Angelfish. Marker saw the music video for “Suffocate Me” on MTV’s late night alternative music program “120 Minutes” and was enamored with Manson’s low, understated delivery; at the time, most singers opted to scream instead. Soon enough, Manson was on a flight from Edinburgh to Madison, Wisconsin, and spent the next year recording an album with perfect strangers.

Rather than joining the ranks of a heavy handed guitar-bass-drums sound, the ragtag group created an album as unconventional as its origin story. A meticulously crafted patchwork of samples, electronic beats, and piano, Garbage is a layered, off-kilter album that often draws more from hip hop than rock and roll. The project is a continuation of Vig’s inclination for clear-eyed complexity, but a decidedly more adventurous take on alternative rock.

Right off the bat, Manson exudes a confident sexuality that departs from grunge’s anxious, often asexual aura. Opening track “Supervixen” crashes in with a squalling, stop-start riff of almost synthetic sounding guitars. “You can always pull out if you like it too much,” she teases, before promising to “make a whole new religion.” Even in the song’s quiet verses, Manson remains an intriguing threat, purring, “I can take you out with just a flick of my wrist.” Marker and Erikson’s guitars twist together as the singer imparts her final command: “Bow down to me.”

This sultry energy seeps into “Queer,” a slow crawl of thudding bass and sizzling guitar. Inspired by Pete Dexter’s novel “Brotherly Love,” Manson sings from the perspective of a sex worker hired to turn a boy into a “man,” offering the suggestive lines “Let me dirty up your mind” and “You can touch me if you want.” But her infectious “do do do do do do,” fluttered throughout, is what truly makes the song memorable — that and the quavering line of clarinet ending each verse, an unexpected flourish that brings an air of mystery to the sinister track. Vig’s reputation may have been Garbage’s initial draw, but Manson’s commanding presence in these songs quickly made her the face of the band, one of many ‘90s frontwomen somehow simultaneously heralded as empowering role models and objectified sex symbols.

With fuzzy guitars and a singable melody, third track “Only Happy When It Rains” sounds more like a typical rock song. But its lyrics poke fun at grunge era nihilism rather than revel in it. Each line is funnier than the next, from the masochistic “And why it feels so good to feel so sad” to the absurd “I only smile in the dark.” Snappy percussion accents each hyperbole before the song culminates in proud proclamation: “You wanna hear about my new obsession? / I’m riding high upon a deep depression.” Here, Garbage breathes life into the increasingly sullen alternative rock scene with winking self-awareness and refreshingly upbeat guitar acrobatics.

Despite the tongue-in-cheek nature of “Only Happy,” Manson embraces her inclination toward darkness on the slow burner “A Stroke of Luck.” Eerie notes of guitar ring out over a maudlin organ and background tape fuzz, as the singer braces for the bad news that invariably follows a glimmer of happiness. “Did you know I was lost until you found me?” she asks a new love, but the contentment doesn’t last long before she begins to overthink it all. “A stroke of luck or a gift from God? / Hand of fate or devil’s claws? / From below or saints above? / You came to me,” she frets, as smoldering guitar ignites behind her. “Here comes the cold again,” she sings, unfazed. It’s listeners’ first look at trepidation from the singer, who spends the beginning of the album presenting an image of self-assuredness.

The equally dark Marker composition “As Heaven Is Wide” is an incensed condemnation of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, but it doesn’t rely on conventionally “loud” instrumentation to convey its anger. Skittering electronic drums and drilling fuzz bass replace wailing guitars, and rather than screaming, Manson sticks to her lower register, seething, “Nothing that you say will release you / Nothing that you pray would forgive you / Nothing’s what your words mean to me.” The song appears understated on first listen, but this frantic electronica in fact hammers its damnation home. Without even raising her voice, Manson looks evil in the face and banishes it to hell, growling:

If flesh could crawl
My skin would fall
From off my bones
And run away from here
As far from God
As heaven is wide
As far from God
As angels can fly

Manson’s bravado quickly returns in “Vow;” as Garbage’s debut single, the song immediately introduces the singer as a tenacious force. “I can’t use what I can’t abuse,” she sings atop a glistening, delayed guitar. With a whoosh, the song takes off, and soon enough, the singer compares herself to both Joan of Arc and Jesus Christ. A guitar soars once Manson hisses, “I came around to tear your little world apart / And break your soul apart.” A fine mission statement indeed.

The band’s choice to debut with this more straightforward song was a sign of the times, when, as Manson recently put it, “guitars were still en vogue” and experimenting with other genres signified a sellout, not an innovator. “Back then, if you went out sounding like you gave a shit about being on the radio or chasing commercial success, as an [alternative] band that would've been the kiss of death,” she said. “Vow” hinted that the band could shimmer, but instead focused on its ability to shout — the rest of its capabilities would be saved for those who bought the album.

Garbage’s pop inclinations could instead be found on songs like “Stupid Girl,” a catwalk-fitting number that borders on disco with its memorable bassline and Clash-sampled drum shuffle. The track offers a textbook ‘90s, backhanded message of empowerment, one that admonishes its listener for belittling herself. “Stupid girl / All you had you wasted,” Manson sighs, a guitar howling in agreement. “I can’t believe you’d fake it.” A climbing keyboard punctuates each chorus, one of many small, deliberate instances of additional instrumentation that elevate Garbage above its more unambiguous contemporaries.

Manson even manages to make hopelessness sound cool on “Fix Me Now,” Garbage’s most enticing track. The singer relies on romance to rescue her from despondency, begging a lover to take away her fear and doubt. On paper, things look grim, but you almost miss her insecurity on record: “Things don’t have to be this way / Catch me on a better day,” goes the aloof hook, her whisper combining with smoky guitar and thumping bass into an alluring saunter. “Fix me now, I wish you would,” the singer begs. “Bring me back to life / Kiss me blind, somebody should / From hollow into light.” Here, Manson gets by on pure spunk, her despair masked by sensuality.

Garbage ends with the siren song “Milk,” where Manson finally lays bare her insecurities over heartbroken piano chords. “I am lost / So I am cruel / But I’d be love and sweetness / If I had you,” she explains, a considerable change in tune from “Supervixen”’s demanding confidence. It’s a full-circle moment for the album, a song more musically simple and emotionally vulnerable than its counterparts. The album, then, closes on a note of melancholy, a somber comedown after an hour of bright intensity.

With its kaleidoscopic debut, Garbage infiltrated a culture that prided itself on potent simplicity and struck a nerve. Trip hop, industrial, and club beats soon dominated the music industry of the late ‘90s, and the definition of “alternative” expanded accordingly. Genre seems to be an increasingly arbitrary concept nowadays, as rappers sing emo confessionals and legacy rockers dip their toes into funk. Garbage, always a band unafraid to stand out, paved the way for this coalescence — but with all the mixing that’s followed, no one’s come up with a combination of sounds that rivals its self-titled debut. Manson warned us that she came around to “tear (our) little world apart” — who knew she meant rock as we knew it?

ANALYSISAfterglow ATXAugust 15, 2020carys anderson