Trash, Plain and Simple
Today, we get to visit one of my favorite rock albums, Garbage, the self-titled debut album by Garbage. Garbage was one of the opening bands at my very first concert! No Doubt with Garbage and the Distillers, November 14, 2002, at what was then the Compaq Center (now SAP Center) in San Jose, California. It was 14-year-old me’s favorite life experience up to that point! Even now, having been to hundreds of concerts, it still stands out as one of the highest-quality shows I’ve seen.
1995 was a year with at least three albums that started off with an earth-shattering bang: Tricky’s Maxinquaye (“Overcome”), Björk’s Post (“Army of Me”), and possibly most of all Garbage (“Supervixen”). I’ll throw Alanis Morissette (“All I Really Want”), Elliott Smith (“Needle in the Hay”), Rammstein (“Wolf ihr das Bett in Flammen sehen”), and No Doubt (“Spiderwebs”)—all also from 1995—in the mix too, even though the openings are less earth-shattering. But a lot of very good opening tracks—and 1995 was a stellar year for music overall.
And let me explain what I mean when I say “earth-shattering”—each of the three opening songs immediately sets the tone for the entire album, with the opening notes. While I will write about Post and Maxinquaye separately in the future, as both are among my all-time favorite albums, let’s focus on “Supervixen.” It’s one of my favorite songs on any album because of its composition. It starts with a drum beat and a guitar lick, and then stops. This is a recurring pattern throughout this song, which rocks hard when it wants to, and then vacillates between face-melting and intimate. It’s about a woman’s innate power. “I can take you out with just a flick of my wrist. Make a whole new religion, a falling star that you cannot live without. And I’ll feed your obsessions, there is nothing but this thing that you’ll never doubt.” By the end of the song, Shirley Manson, one of rock’s greatest frontpersons, starts repeating a command: “Bow down to me.” I won’t lie, I’m bowing down right now.
But Supervixen is just the first song on the album. The next two tracks, “Queer” and “Only Happy When It Rains,” were both major hits. “Queer” is one of the first major-release rock songs to explicitly deal with queer themes. And “Only Happy When It Rains” has the iconic refrain: “pour your misery down on me”—perhaps a riff on a very different theme by Def Leppard.
The album continues combining rock and the then-still-popular trip-hop in interesting and creative ways. Several songs contain repeated refrains, almost in a fashion of begging. Butch Vig, one of the most involved producers with Nirvana, is a member of Garbage, and while you could listen to Nevermind and Garbage back-to-back and not hear a lot of similarities, there are some if you listen closely enough. And the repetition repeats; the last song on the original album, “Milk,” has perhaps the most heart-wrenching repetition of them all: “I’m waiting for you.”
Although it does not appear on the original album, one of Garbage’s most popular songs, “#1 Crush,” first appeared as a B-side to the album single “Vow,” and it was remixed by producer Nellee Hooper the following year for the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.
Most importantly, Garbage is what I refer to as a “no-skip” album. This means that there isn’t a bad song on the album and I enjoy every single song. When I write about albums, this will always be what I try to focus on, even though I will also post about albums with delightfully mid songs. Enjoy on your rainy (at least here in the Bay Area) Sunday!
P.S. - the super deluxe version of the album I’m posting on Apple Music has tons and tons of additional mixes, remixes, songs, and deep dives.