Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the big screen, OJ Simpson on the TV, and Ecto-Cooler in the refrigerator. What year is it anyway? It’s safe to say the 90s are back (With A Vengence?) and it’s not surprising to hear the music industry to throw it’s oversized Blossom hat into the ring.
While bands like Ringo Deathstarr and Yuck pay homage to the decade with albums that act as living breathing love letters to sound I grew with, the nostalgia card isn’t exclusive to the new class. Artists like The Melvins and Bob Mould have released music over the past twenty years, relevant enough to keep them from sounding like has-beens, but even juggernaughts like Radiohead have recently put out music that calls back to previous time in their career instead of moving forward. Is it a trend? Maybe listeners are just longing for a time in their lives with Rock music was exciting and unpredictable? Whatever the reason, nostalgia is big business.
There was a time in the late 90s when Garbage were critical darlings.
Their self-titled 1995 debut was a Top 20 hit, spawned five successful singles and a Grammy nomination. The 1998 follow-up Version 2.0 upped the ante with a broader mainstream appeal, multiple Grammy nominations, and some even consider it one of the last great albums of the Alternative Rock era. Sadly like most bands of the era, the following decade wasn’t as inviting. The cultural shift in the music industry and the Hip-Hop influence in pop, pushed Garbage further away from the critical spotlight. The next few albums had a few commercial bright spots but they failed to leave the shadow of the band’s early success.
Despite releasing an album as recent as 2012, Garbage’s sixth record Strange Little Birds is being touted in the media as some sort of ‘comeback’ album. With nostalgia being so hot right now it’s obviously a marketing choice. It worked for Weezer’s latest record so why not? Generally I try not to let media buzz influence my feelings on a record. I like to jump in without the burdens of preconceptions. Being I stopped caring for Garbage over a decade ago, I was not only happy to hear an old band receive positive word of mouth, but I was excited to hear what they had come up with in terms of new music.
Strange Little Birds is a weird album.
Of course it’s chock full of industrial beats, grinding guitars and Shirley Manson’s signature vocal coo’s, but straight out of the gate there’s something missing I couldn’t quite put my finger on at first. The opening track “Sometimes” sets the mood with a shadowy cinematic overture before kicking things off with the lead single “Empty”. The production is crisp and clean much like Version 2.0 and the hook is arguably paint-by-numbers Garbage, making it the obvious choice as the radio single but probably not the best song to describe the album as a whole.
Lyrically, the songs of Strange Little Birds are filled with the same masochistic brooding Garbage is famous for, but Manson’s voice has only grown stronger with time. I’m sure there’s all sorts of digital trickery a foot, seeing as the band is made up of mostly producers, but the vocals stand out as some of the strongest work she’s done over the course of the band’s career. Musically it’s a checklist of industrial pop found on previous releases such as buzz-saw guitar riffs, steam punk beats, and digital soundscapes, all of which reveals what I don’t like about the album. It’s predictable.
Most of Strange Little Birds is made up of medium paced drones that drag their feet like the weaker tracks of the Garbage’s first two albums.
While the upbeat numbers such as “So We Can Stay Alive” and “We Can Never Tell” (which should’ve been called “Special II” in my opinion) are a great listen, there isn’t anything hear that comes close to previous greatness. It makes me question why I loved this band so much when I was younger. I really hate to compare a new album to albums over twenty years old, but lets not forget nostalgia might be the driving force here. Even though I can’t remember much about the band’s last three albums, I don’t remember Garbage being this boring.
Production is spot on, vocals are beautiful, it features everything I love about Garbage’s previous work but it’s just missing that excitement the band used to have. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing here I can pin-point that ruins Strange Little Birds, but even at it’s brightest moments like the aforementioned “We Can Never Tell”, it just makes me wish I was listening to Version 2.0.
This is were nostalgia is counter productive. There’s nothing wrong with paying homage to where you come from as an artist. We all want to re-live our glory days in some capacity, but a new album should never make the listener want to listen to something else, even if it’s from the same band. Maybe somethings are best left in 1998?
Rating: 2/5