Garbage (album)
Garbage is the debut studio album by American rock band Garbage, released on August 15, 1995 by Almo Sounds. It was recorded from April 1994 to May 1995, during which the album was overhauled multiple times. The band aimed "to create something that sounded fresh" by experimenting with different styles and genres, and lead singer and songwriter Shirley Manson wrote about darker themes in her lyrics.
The album was promoted with five singles: "Vow", "Only Happy When It Rains", "Queer", "Stupid Girl", and "Milk". All singles entered the UK singles chart—two reaching the top ten—while the first, second and fourth of these entered the US Billboard Hot 100. After the album was completed, Garbage embarked on a year-long tour from November 1995 to December 1996, playing on the European festival circuit and supporting acts like the Smashing Pumpkins.
Garbage earned critical acclaim upon release, receiving three Grammy nominations in 1997 and other accolades. The album peaked at number 20 on the US Billboard 200 and number six on the UK Albums Chart, and charted within the top 20. It garnered multi-platinum certifications in several territories. In the years following its release, Garbage is regarded for its unique production and blend of rock and electronic music.
Background
In 1983, Butch Vig and Steve Marker founded Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, and Vig's production work brought him to the attention of Sub Pop. Vig's old band Spooner reunited in 1990 and released another record, but disbanded in 1993 as Vig's and Marker's careers as producers gained strength.In 1994, as Vig became "kind of burned out on doing really long records", he got together with Duke Erikson and Marker, and they started producing remixes for acts such as U2, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails and House of Pain, featuring different instrumentation and often highlighting new guitar hooks and bass grooves. The experience inspired the three men to form a band, in which they "wanted to take that remix sensibility and somehow translate it into all of the possibilities of a band setup." An early comment that their work sounded "like garbage" inspired the band's name.
Shirley Manson had been performing with the Edinburgh-based rock band Goodbye Mr Mackenzie since 1984. In 1993, several of the members, including Manson, formed the side project Angelfish. Their only studio album, Angelfish, was as commercially unsuccessful as preceding albums by Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, selling only 10,000 copies.
Initial sessions with Vig on vocals and the members' past work with all-male groups led to the band's desire for a woman on lead. Marker was watching 120 Minutes when he saw the one-time airing of the music video for Angelfish's "Suffocate Me". He showed the video to Erikson and Vig while their manager, Shannon O'Shea, tracked Manson down. When Manson was contacted, she didn't know who Vig was and was urged to check the credits on Nirvana's album Nevermind, which Vig had produced. On April 8, 1994, Manson met Erikson, Marker and Vig for the first time in London. Later that evening Vig was informed of Kurt Cobain's suicide. Garbage was put on hold as Angelfish was touring North America in support of Live. Erikson, Marker and Vig attended the Metro Chicago date, and Manson was invited to Madison to audition for the band. The audition did not go well, but Manson socialized with the men while there and they found they had a similar taste in music. Angelfish disbanded at the end of the Live tour. Manson called O'Shea and asked to audition again, feeling that "it would work out".
Recording
In her return to Smart Studios, Manson began to work on skeletal versions of the songs "Queer", "Vow" and "Stupid Girl". While looking for a record deal for the album, Garbage sent out demo tapes with no bio, to avoid a bidding war over Vig's production history. Garbage signed with Mushroom Records UK worldwide and to Jerry Moss's label Almo Sounds for North America. Manson's contribution was licensed to both Mushroom and Almo by her label Radioactive Records.Garbage continued to work on the album throughout the start of 1995, delayed by Vig's work producing Soul Asylum's Let Your Dim Light Shine album and the songs being "piecemealed together in the studio". Vig described the composing process as a "dysfunctional democracy" where someone would bring a loop or a sample, which was followed by jam sessions in which the band members would "find one bar that's kind of cool, load that into our samplers, jam on top of that, Shirley will ad-lib", with the process continuing until the song was finished, often with "all of the original ideas gone, and the song had somehow mutated into something completely different." Given Vig "got bored spending so many years recording really fast, straightforward punk records", the band "didn't want to approach the Garbage record from the angle of a band playing live", making their songs out of samples that would be processed and reworked in a Wall of Sound process "to create something that sounded fresh."
A major part of the work involved Manson rewriting the song lyrics, which Vig said the band attempted to "write from a woman's perspective and I think, initially, some of them were a little pretentious. But as soon as Shirley came on board she simplified the lyrics so that they were a lot more subtle and worked better as songs." Manson detailed that regarding the previous song sketches, "some of the ideas for lyrics I found unsuitable, and others I liked and worked on with them. I always went to bat for what I believed in." She added that because "the lyrics take a while to work on" bandmates would give suggestions and she included the ones that fancied her.
When Garbage began to collate the material for career retrospective Absolute Garbage in 2007, the Garbage analog masters could not be found. Vig and audio engineer Billy Bush were able to track down an archived, but rather incomplete and damaged, set of 16-bit 44.1 kHz safety DAT mixes. Despite the condition of the backups, mastering engineer Emily Lazar at The Lodge in New York City was able to reverse-engineer the missing songs from the damaged archive. Lazar used some alternate versions of the songs when completing the final master. Her assistant, Joe LaPorta, mastered and edited the remixes for the special edition.
Composition
Lyrics
The lyrics on the record were described by the band members as "a collaborative psycho-therapy session wherein personal demons of various sizes and importance are exorcised, vilified, taken revenge upon and laid to rest." Vig said they tried to deal with "dark themes that I think a lot of people can relate to in some way or another", which included voyeurism, hedonism, perversion, obsession and "the art of self-destruction." Manson stated that even though she put together most of the songs, "everybody has ideas that come to the table and I just use what I fancy. When we're working on something, the lyrics take a while to work on and come to me and say 'I've had these ideas, use them if you want' and if there's something I like, I'll stick it in with my own, or vice-versa. Some people come in going 'I've got this great title for a song' and I might use that."Manson remarked that while the content was "a lot more poppy" than most of her previous work, the songs invoked the dark side of her nature, as "sometimes I'm a wee bit creepy, and that definitely comes out in the music." She also declared that music "unlocks sensations and feelings that you keep inside, that society doesn't allow you to show", saying that the gist of a mean-spirited song like "Vow" is very real despite "none of us hav ever really acted on those feelings". Vig added that the band was eager to exploit the contrast between words and music: "The initial idea was to make this a dark lyric with a shiny, happy, pop sensibility. You could be singing this really catchy line and realize the lyrics were totally wacked."
Among the songs that were completely reworked, "As Heaven Is Wide" went from "a big rock track" to a techno-style song with Tom Jones-inspired beats, only keeping Erikson's fuzz bass and Manson's vocals from the original recording. In 2017, Manson revealed during an interview with Yahoo! that the song "Fix Me Now" was originally titled "Chris Cornell", because she was obsessed with the lead singer of Soundgarden. A demo version of the song features Manson singing Cornell's name.
Music
Garbage has a sound that "tr to incorporate different styles and genres, throw it all into a big melting pot and see what would happen", according to Vig. 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." The band went overboard with experimentation, with Erikson adding that throughout they liked to include "sounds that we found accidentally, like Steve's sample of a tape deck backing up, or the bit in 'Stupid Girl' that was initially a mistake, but when we slowed it down, actually fit the timbre and pace of the song and became the hook."Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic stated that the album "has all the trappings of alternative rock—off-kilter arrangements, occasional bursts of noise, a female singer with a thin, airy voice, but it comes off as pop" because of Vig's "glossy production". Erlewine characterized the sound of the record as "slick and professional", full of "well-crafted pop songs", including "trashy alternative pop gems" like "Queer" and "Vow". The A.V. Clubs Stephen Thompson described the album as "a prototypically '90s record full of pumped-up, electronically enhanced, sample-laden pop-rock songs." Newsweek remarked that the album "has an impressive swirl of acoustic and electric guitars, keyboards and swanky pop hooks that actually push alternative rock in a new direction." About.com's Tim Grierson stated that the album "was steeped in alt-rock, but hits like 'Only Happy It Rains' had a dance element to them that distinguished the band from many of their angst-rock peers." Grierson further categorized the album as "dance-rock" and "techno-rock".
Gil Kaufman of Addicted to Noise described the album as a "surprisingly non-guitar rock mix of ambient noise, shifting trip-hop beats, grinding jungle rhythms and an ocean-size chunk of buzzing noise that, somehow, gels and rises above the din thanks to catchy hooks and killer song construction." Metro Weekly characterized the album as "a heavy mix of electronic pop and guitar rock with samples, electronica and trip-hop beats thrown into the mix." Billboard noted that "acting on the premise that more is more, foursome Garbage thrashes out power pop with enough skill and passion to rate among the cream of the alternative crop. First single 'Queer' is a modern rock success, and other cuts—especially 'Only Happy When It Rains', 'Stupid Girl', and 'Supervixen'—are capable of keeping interests high. Proof that success can come from the oddest combinations."