Garbage would sooner risk obsolescence than fake a smile. The industry learned this the hard way in 2001 when they tried to steer the band back to the mainstream following the commercial failure of their third record Beautiful Garbage, released three weeks after 9/11. Hoping for a smooth transition onto the pop-and-rap-glutted charts, label executives approached frontwoman Shirley Manson and producers-slash-bandmates Duke Erikson, Steve Marker, and Butch Vig demanding rapped guest verses and pop hooks. They got the same old Garbage instead: seething, surging, brutal–Billboard potential be damned.
Fifteen years later, Garbage have outlasted the naysayers and jilted ex-lovers. 2012’s Not Your Kind of People* couldn’t match the sonic cohesion and thrills of 1995's self-titled debut *and *Version 2.0, *but as the band’s first effort in seven years, it also provided an oasis for all those jaded by EDM's brainless, bro-y #posivibes. With their post-return jitters under control, the band have solidified that return with Strange Little Birds, their darkest, most intimate LP and the band’s strongest effort in 15 years.
Manson's been happily married for six years (her husband, Billy Bush, co-produced this album and its predecessor), but she’ll never get over misery, her lifelong muse; like all Garbage albums, *Strange Little Birds *obsesses over, romanticizes, and even celebrates sorrow. On the lead single “Empty,” she towers over her bandmates’ roaring void with arms akimbo, underscoring her woe by way of dramatic, elongated syllables; “I’m *sooooo *empty,” she moans, quaking atop Vig and Erikson's steeled groove. “Night Drive Loneliness,” a ballad inspired by a piece of fan-mail thrust into Manson's hand following a Garbage gig in Russia, develops its titular subject as a sensual ritual. Considered in tandem with the track’s slinky lounge arrangement and boudoir imagery (“I got my high heels/and my lipstick/My blue velvet dress in my closet”), Manson's sighing refrain–“My night drive loneliness comes again and again”–hints at a more hopeful subtext: perhaps depression's just another nameless paramour occupying the passenger seat, another car whizzing by in the night.
Of course, the same could be said for love. Every glimpse of romantic bliss on *Strange Little Birds–the galvanizing lust on “Magnetized,” the stolen glances of “We Never Tell”–ultimately dissolves under Manson’s fatalist approach to matters of the heart. Although she’s come a long way from the paranoid interrogations of the Bleed Like Me *era (“I think you’re sleeping with a friend of mine/I have no proof, but I think that I’m right"; “Why Do You Love Me?”) the front-woman still regards love as a rigged game–one she’s happy to play, because she’s got nothing else to lose. Midway through the album, on the funereal choruses of “Even Though Our Love Is Doomed,” Manson soberly proclaims the song’s titular sentiment to deliver a message of hope, not fear: “Even though our stars are crossed/You’re the only thing worth fighting for/You’re the only thing worth dying for.” Elsewhere, “Sometimes” and “Amends”–Strange Little Birds’ respective opener and closer– fashion Manson's philosophy into an olive branch extended to her already-“doomed” loves: “There is nothing you could say/To cause more hurt, or cause me shame/Than all the things that I have thought about myself,” she admits.
*Strange Little Birds *lands less than a year after Garbage’s 20th-anniversary reissue of 1995’s landmark self-titled debut, and while the new album’s sessions predate Garbage’s commemoration festivities, their temporal and stylistic overlap sets it apart from the similarly-styled but unevenly executed band have released over the past fifteen years. Indeed, the sonic parallels between the two albums are frequent, and far from subtle: “Empty” and “Supervixen” share the same glam-industrial DNA, and the dreary “Blackout” employs the same skittering trip-hop showcased in “A Stroke of Luck.” Despite these superficial similarities, repeat spins of Strange Little Birds ultimately belie an older, wiser reincarnation of that youthful rage, not just a cheap retrospective. Twenty years on, Garbage are still grappling with their demons, but they’re disarmingly zen–even ecstatic– about the battle. With material like this, they’ve got a right to be.
