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Post by Vow2cutUup on Jul 25, 2007 18:15:34 GMT -5
BBC reviewDifficult to remember now just how oddly perfect Garbage seemed when they burst from left field on the Britpop scene of 1995. While Britpop was overwhelmingly male and retro, Garbage were brazenly modernist and in Shirley Manson boasted an impassioned and very female icon. Debut “Vow” was a buzz-saw riffed statement of intent, but it was “Queer” – with its loops and fluid rhythm – that proved just how sonically interesting and fully-formed they were. That Garbage had in fact borrowed much of their sound (dense, swampy electronic production, topped off with sugar and spite vocals) from the extraordinary but commercially unsuccessful duo Curve didn’t greatly matter. Their self-titled debut was a terrific collection of angry/seductive future-rock songs, mostly skewering male arrogance, while in the slinkily addictive “Stupid Girl” it boasted an international hit. Second album, the wryly titled Version 2.0, lacked the element of surprise but demonstrated tighter songwriting. Both “Push It” and “I Think I’m Paranoid” showcased gleaming riffs and a bustlingly modern pace, as well as Manson at her most forceful and domineering. Fans of the band’s poppier side were catered for by the fierce but melodically lush “Special”. Sadly, Garbage ignored the curse of Bond and – like Duran Duran and Aha before them – their trajectory dipped after contributing the lacklustre, atonal “The World Is Not Enough” to the film of that name. Third album “beautifulgarbage” saw them attempting to escape a sound that was becoming a straitjacket, but the addictive, ultra-poppy “Cherry Lips” aside, it was unfocused and occasionally lifeless. Wisely, drab second single “Breaking Up The Girl” isn’t included here. And while 2005 comeback single “Why Don’t You Love Me?” had some of the old pace and bile, it was a blatant retread of their earlier sound. Garbage were no longer pioneers. The band are now rumoured to have split, though the epic, string-soaked new track “Tell Me Where It Hurts” suggests there might still be blood in the stone should Manson’s solo career stiff. If not, Absolute Garbage is a fine legacy, the sound of a briefly brilliant and always interesting band which sounds like no other greatest hits you own. Jaime Gill LOL, I posted this review already a few pages back in the thread. Good find though.
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Post by acereject on Jul 27, 2007 9:40:00 GMT -5
Scottish Daily Record -
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Post by Tornado on Jul 27, 2007 10:02:33 GMT -5
^nice BLM-era pic above!
But nothing about V2.0, BG and BLM? Only their debut album is the only one that counts?
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Post by acereject on Aug 1, 2007 4:13:49 GMT -5
Heat magazine just made Absolute Garbage their featured review this week - and 5 STARS!!!!
Heat has a lot of influence on young buyers and the exposure in Heat is a big deal - you may recall Heat also giving BG and BLM great reviews back when. Buying it later today, scan tonight hopefully (I'm working till 12am). Pity the review is a week too late.
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Post by Modern Method. on Aug 1, 2007 4:17:36 GMT -5
^^ Ooer!! This might give all the gossip mogels an incentive to go out and buy it!
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Post by Tornado on Aug 1, 2007 6:10:26 GMT -5
5 stars!!!
Finally someone gave the highest rating to this GH (to be honest AG deserves 4.5 of 5 because of missing singles but the quality of the current track listing is 5 stars)
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Post by acereject on Aug 1, 2007 18:26:11 GMT -5
Heat review of AG: Can I just point out that in heat's 5 star review of BLM 2 years ago, BLM was their choice for Best Track...... Word from bar staff in my local was that Daily Star and the Sport gave AG 5 out of 5 and 4 out of 5 respectively, but they didn't keep the reviews for me so can't confirm - It seems that celeb mags, lifestyle and glossy mags and newspapers have all gave AG good reviews - it's the cowed elitist music press who have turned against Garbage. Anyone in agreement?
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Post by Modern Method. on Aug 1, 2007 18:29:21 GMT -5
^^ Hypocrites (in regards to BLM)! haha
They used the same photo as the Kerrang review.
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Post by Fated to Pretend on Aug 2, 2007 10:32:05 GMT -5
I went out and bought that yesterday haha great review #fro# wonder what the other "bad" track apart from BLM was... yay for trashy gossip magazines!! I don't understand why this photo seems to be used as the promo photo everywhere when its 6 years old!
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Post by Modern Method. on Aug 2, 2007 11:48:58 GMT -5
I went out and bought that yesterday haha great review #fro# wonder what the other "bad" track apart from BLM was... yay for trashy gossip magazines!! I don't understand why this photo seems to be used as the promo photo everywhere when its 6 years old! Yeah, I dunno why they keep using that one either! But I love Shirley's hair and eyeshadow in it.
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Post by Modern Method. on Aug 2, 2007 14:27:01 GMT -5
Is Garbage done? After 12 years, four albums and many hundreds of live shows, the ace producers-turned-rock band may be ready for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. If so, the three-disc, multimedia package called “Absolute Garbage” is a wonderful parting gift to the band's loyal fans. Much more than recycled Garbage, this collection is comprised of 14 choice cuts from the group's four CDs (“Garbage,” “Version 2.0,” “beautifulgarbage” and “Bleed Like Me”), plus two tunes from the “Romeo + Juliet” soundtrack, Garbage's Bond-film ballad (“The World Is Not Enough”) and a remix of “Bleed's” “It's All Over but the Crying.” A second, all-remix disc features 13 studio reinventions by production wizards including Massive Attack, Crystal Method and Felix Da Housecat. The companion DVD showcases 15 of Garbage's most memorable music videos, and there's an added treat: a 65-minute-long “documentary” that's more like a home movie – overlong, but tons of fun for Garbageheads. If this is the last hurrah for Garbage (Scottish vocalist Shirley Manson, drummer Butch Vig, guitarist Duke Erikson, bassist Steve Marker), theirs will be a complex epitaph to write. Born out of several skilled but obscure bands (notably, Vig, Erikson and Marker's Spooner in Madison, Wisc., and Manson's far-flung Angelfish in the U.K.), Garbage began as a sheer experiment for the studio-savvy Midwesterners. When they went looking for a smokin' singer, they hit the jackpot with the charismatic Manson, whom Marker spotted in an Angelfish video on MTV. In spite of Manson's gift for theatricality as well as for music, and Vig's alt-rock credentials (he'd produced albums by Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth and Nirvana, no less), the critical and commercial success of the first, eponymous Garbage record, in 1995, came as a surprise to its creators. (We learn this, and more, in the DVD interviews.) The tracks “Vow,” “Queer” and the iconic “Stupid Girl” and “Only Happy When It Rains” from that debut album kick off this anthology. Huge in England and big in America, Garbage nonetheless wasn't regarded as Pumpkins/Chili Peppers royalty, nor did it enjoy the pop stature of The Pretenders or the punk stature of Green Day. But critics respected Vig, Erikson and Marker's technical mastery, and fans adored Manson, whose eye-catching hairstyles, onstage outfits and wide, mascara-painted eyes made her one of rock's most recognizable frontpersons. For my money, “Version 2.0” (1998) is Garbage's quintessential album. “Absolute” resurrects the club-beat rocker “Push It,” the fanciful “I Think I'm Paranoid,” and two of the band's poppiest tracks, “When I Grow Up,” and the Pretenders-like “Special.” “beautifulgarbage” (2001) had the bad luck to be released the week of 9/11, and elicits, in hindsight, the most ambivalence from band members. Still, it did produce the sneering “Shut Your Mouth,” and “Cherry Lips,” which Jack White reveals, on the DVD, is his favorite Garbage song. Should “Bleed Like Me” end up being Garbage's final studio album – it was released in 2005 – it wouldn't be a bad farewell. Recorded amid and after the turmoil of Vig's bout with hepatitis, Manson's serious vocal-chord ailments and acknowledged intergroup tension and ennui, “Bleed” is vintage Garbage. Its punk-speed “Why Do You Love Me” and epic, Velvet Undergroundish title track are two of four contributions to “Absolute Garbage.” While the home movie drags with all its behind-the-scenes, handheld-camera clowning and subjects us to the horrifying spectre of Kurt Loder, we do learn that San Antonio Spur Tim Duncan is Manson's idol, that Garbage played its first gig in Minneapolis, and that Vig sweats away 10 pounds or more every time the band tours – which is a lot. Or, was a lot. Is Garbage done? Hope not. If it is, then thanks for this encore. www.signonsandiego.com/news/features/20070802-9999-lz1w02garbage.html
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Post by Tornado on Aug 6, 2007 2:24:22 GMT -5
This is the best review of AG isn't? PopMatters
Rating: 9/10
Garbage, Bagged
Absolute Garbage is the sound of a band completely destroying themselves ...
... and it sounds awesome.
For those late to the party, Garbage were the mid-’90s poster children for alt-rock angst, all electro-rock fury with a keen pop sensibility. Consisting of three producers (Steve Marker, Duke Erikson, and Nevermind-helmer Butch Vig) and bombshell vocalist Shirley Manson, the group custom-built a sound that was high on melodrama but short on indulgence. Their self-titled debut simply wouldn’t stop spawning rock radio staples, and their high-concept video clips (which only got more elaborate with time) were soon filling MTV’s lingering post-Nirvana void. Though they turned into a tight touring band, the group soon got exhausted by their road treks, a fatigue that bled into the studio, leading Vig to become a studio perfectionist, each album becoming more calculated than the last. However, Garbage—over the course of four full-lengths—has yet to release an end-to-end masterpiece. With this, their long-awaited best-of, they come pretty damn close.
Unlike most greatest hits comps these days, Absolute Garbage is chronologically sequenced, starting with their first single ("Vow") and ending with the dreaded “new recording exclusive to his release!” Yet, the sequencing is what makes this disc such a divine pleasure: we get to hear a band grow from grinning upstarts to tension-battered road warriors. This process is reflected entirely in the music, giving Absolute Garbage a tension that their previous releases flirted with but never fully revealed.
Twelve years after it’s initial release, “Vow” retains its punch. Starting with channel-swapping guitar whiffs, Manson launches into a relationship-destroying tirade that is cuffed to a killer pop chorus, all while Vig pretends that he’s the grunge-era answer to Phil Spector. This feeds right into a string of contemporary classics: “Queer”, “Only Happy When It Rains”, and “Stupid Girl”. In listening to these songs all over again, it’s no wonder that the group’s eponymous debut blew up in the way that it did. This opening stretch is topped off by “Milk” (a great single that never actually charted, even though it painted Manson as a glam-pop balladeer who could easily rewrite Madonna’s “Justify My Love” for a black eyeliner generation) and “#1 Crush” (which itself hailed from the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which [oddly] turned out to be the watermark for every major alt-rock act of the ‘90s).
Yet, already, the group was facing massive pressure. How does one follow up a massively multi-platinum debut that spawned no more than five hit singles? The group locked themselves in the studio and worked non-stop, layering every song with dozens upon dozens of elements, instruments, and vocal tracks. It is in this process that Garbage lost a lot of what made the first album so appealing: the sheer effortless nature of the tracks. Even though “Stupid Girl” totally copped its drums from the Clash’s “Train in Vain”, the group never smirked and said “guess what we sampled!” Each meticulous song felt very off-the-cuff, which was a monumental feat in its own right.
Version 2.0, however, had not a moment of spontaneity. Every single note was in place for a specific reason, and the group wasted not a second of their time. While the album should have been produced within an inch of its life, Marker, Erikson & Vig all knew how to keep things to the point. As a matter of fact, “Push It” remains the group’s single greatest pop achievement to date, even though it has enough synths to kill a horse (or at least Rick Wakeman). The group went as far as to “interpolate” the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby” right into pre-chorus, once again applying the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” model to their own style of traffic-jam distortion.
This is followed by their second greatest pop achievement, “I Think I’m Paranoid”. It’s a rare Garbage track that places up its Guitars Only velvet rope, and it manages to be one of their most pulverizing. Yet, here is where Manson’s lyrical paradigm begins to shift, moving from the middle-finger mantras of their debut to a sense of self-doubt and sabotaged optimism. “You look so fine / I want to break your heart / and give you mine” she coos on mid-tempo “You Look So Fine”, before declaring herself the alpha-female and saying “I won’t share it like the other girls / that you used to know”.
Manson switches yet again by taking the submissive role on “When I Grow Up”—a snotty adolescent guitar-bash that wrote the book that Avril Lavigne so lovingly photocopied a few years later. Though Version 2.0 was a slow-selling album at first, the parade of singles made it another platinum hit, culminating in (of all things) an Album of the Year nomination at the 1998 Grammy Awards. Yes, an Album of the Year nomination part-way bestowed on Shirley Manson, the girl who—as prominently displayed in the video for “I Think I’m Paranoid”—can fit her entire fist in her mouth.
Unfortunately, the fun and games would soon come to a screeching halt. During a European tour, Manson discovered a lump on her breast, leading to doctor visits and group anxiety. It was found out to be a benign tumor, and was soon removed. This gave her a new, happier outlook on life—an aspect that found its way into recording their third effort, Beautiful Garbage. Replacing the grit with keyboards and angst for coffee shops, Garbage transformed themselves into an electro-pop outfit, which, in retrospect, was a huge mistake.
Manson played the bubbling girly-girl role well, but couldn’t match Gwen Stefani’s all-too-blond approach to the same subject matter. Manson works better when she’s dealing with high drama, something that made itself known when the group followed the template of another Shirley (in this case, Bassey) on their top-notch Bond theme, “The World is Not Enough”. When compared to the Beautiful Garbage lead single “Androgyny”, the argument is almost laughably one-sided. Yet, this being a smart greatest-hits compilation, “Androgyny” is completely dropped from the play list. It’s a smart move, especially considering that beneath the colorful exterior of the bouncy “Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go)”, there lied a sinister undertone (which is something that was brought out on that album’s following tour).
A happy Garbage, however, is a poor Garbage. Their third album tanked, the band all blamed each other, and when recording time came, they could barely hold together as a four-piece. So when three of your four members are producers, what do you do to resolve this conflict? Bring in John King of the Dust Brothers (Beck, the Beastie Boys, the Fight Club soundtrack). The group threw out all the bubbly optimism for muddy guitars, like a pissed-off cousin to their debut. This move was no-doubt intentional, as Beautiful Garbage alienated a good portion of their audience. However, King’s dry cut’n’paste sounds didn’t work for a group that worked best as overproduced guitar-rock gluttons. It did wonders on the title track of their fourth album, “Bleed Like Me”. Though the ballad certainly bordered a bit too much on the emo side, it still was one of their best songs in about five years.
Bleed Like Me was a success (even if it didn’t match the commercial heights of their debut), and even the “new recording exclusive to this release!”—the majestic, sweeping “Tell Me Where It Hurts”—manages to accomplish the rare compilation feat of not being completely worthless. The whole set is closed out by a down-tempo remix of the Bleed track “It’s All Over But the Crying”, not sounding lost in the void between Version 2.0 and “The World is Not Enough”. It’s not a firecracker of a closer, but it doesn’t need to be—the journey here was epic enough.
Phew.
One could sit and nick-pick Absolute Garbage all day long, sighing over the fact that a lot of fan-favorites are left by the wayside (like “Medication” and “Right Between the Eyes"), but such a fine-toothed comb criticism belies the point: here we have a greatest-hits compilation that not only rounds up every single the group ever released, but also manages to leave the worst one out ("Androgyny"). It has a Bond theme, a great new song, and—most importantly—you get the voyeuristic pleasure of hearing a group tear itself apart as time goes on. Is Garbage the single-greatest thing to ever happen to pop music? Of course not. More importantly, the group never claimed to be: they just made high-energy rock music with an electronic edge. They have no regrets about their career, and after listening to this album straight through, neither will you.www.popmatters.com/pm/music/reviews/46074/garbage-absolute-garbage/
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Post by ghosts of joy on Aug 6, 2007 9:44:04 GMT -5
Wonderful review for the most part, although I find it strange that "Androgyny" was the only single omitted -- I was sure I'd counted more than that! -- and that, once again, a reviewer notes the lack of inclusion of non-singles.
Oh well. Can't be expecting perfection.
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Post by Tornado on Aug 6, 2007 9:59:13 GMT -5
That means that reviewer knows more about Garbage's music than usual reviewers (just singles)...
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Post by oscillations. on Aug 6, 2007 11:34:34 GMT -5
Finally, a hipster outlet that decided to be loyal to a great act, despite current blog-critic consensus. That PM review reminds me much more of the type of Garbage reviews I'm used to reading. It's a welcome change amidst the deluge of second guessing & "meh" judgements cast upon AG & Garbage's career.
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Post by ghosts of joy on Aug 6, 2007 14:41:20 GMT -5
That means that reviewer knows more about Garbage's music than usual reviewers (just singles)... True, but most greatest hits/best ofs/whatevers compile singles and soundtrack songs plus one or more new tracks. It just irks me when a reviewer criticizes the fact a non-single wasn't included, particularly since there were a number of actual commercial singles that didn't make the cut. Although, I will say, at least the PM reviewer noted that the omission of a number of songs belies the point; despite the numerous ignored singles, for me, AG is right up there with The Immaculate Collection and Once More with Feeling as some of the greatest of the greatest hits collections.
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Post by Modern Method. on Aug 6, 2007 18:09:33 GMT -5
No Doubt: The Singles is one of my favourites.
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Paj Meen Ah
Janitor
That Was Me On The Other End
Posts: 46
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Post by Paj Meen Ah on Aug 7, 2007 17:26:47 GMT -5
Heat magazine just made Absolute Garbage their featured review this week - and 5 STARS!!!! Heat has a lot of influence on young buyers and the exposure in Heat is a big deal - you may recall Heat also giving BG and BLM great reviews back when. Buying it later today, scan tonight hopefully (I'm working till 12am). Pity the review is a week too late. I was flicking through that and was surprised to see it was the top billed, with a big pic. And it got 5 stars! The only good celebrity/media magazine is heat, and them giving AG 5 stars is awesome.
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Post by Modern Method. on Aug 7, 2007 17:38:31 GMT -5
yeah, i'd say it brought AG to a few people's attention who otherwise would've been none the wiser.
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Post by oscillations. on Aug 13, 2007 0:58:33 GMT -5
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