Absolute Garbage

Reflection of the bygone musical age

Despite the enormous quantity of bands and artists whose hey-day fell at 90’s there are still not so many names that could serve as appropriate reflection of that musical epoch. If we’ll try to cast all the stereotypes and personal inclinations aside and choose the best example that could hold post grunge and Britpop, ethic of trip-hop and softness of pop mainstream of that period than the most suitable variant could probably be Garbage. They used to play rock soaked with the moods of American grunge but they never avoided qualitative pop sounding. The band was led by Butch Vig – a producer who recorded Nirvana’s Nevermind and Smashing Pumpkins’ four-platinum Siamese Dream. And Scottish origin of their singer Shirley Manson has somehow connected Garbage with flourishing at those times Britpop. Of course it is hard to assert about historical importance of this band but Garbage were a bright product of post grunge era, a distillation of ideas of those days and therefore a compilation of their best songs released this year under the title Absolute Garbage may serve as a peculiar reflection of the bygone musical age.

Most of the songs were taken from the first two albums

The album represents 18 tracks – a number pretty capacious to fit not only those hits that serve as Garbage’s trademarks but also the songs that are known lesser. Besides Garbage recorded one brand new song called Tell Me Where It Hurts especially for this compilation. All the tracks are represented in the chronological sequence that is in the order of the albums’ releases, which is actually can be a great help for those who’d like to get acquainted with the band from the point of view of historical accuracy. For the time of the band’s existence Garbage sold about 12 millions of copies of their albums and the overwhelming majority of sales fell right on their first two records – Garbage, an album that brought them immediate success and Version 2.0, which solidified the band as the worldwide stars. So there is nothing astonishing in that fact that most of the songs represented on Absolute Garbage were taken from those very albums. And honestly speaking they just couldn’t avoid doing so as these are the best Garbage’s songs indeed and this album simply couldn’t exist without such things as Only Happy When It Rains, Milk, Stupid Girl or I Think I’m Paranoid.

The album offers songs not only from the official albums

It is worth mentioning that the musicians didn’t ignore those tracks that are not on the lists of official albums. Particularly the song #1 Crush was initially released as a be-side for their debut single Vow and later was included on the multi-platinum soundtrack to the movie Romeo + Juliet so it is not that easy to find this song today. The same refers to The World Is Not Enough. The song was written specially for the eighteenth film about James Bond and soon became a real world hit, which brought Garbage another portion of fame and honor. The songs taken from the recent albums of the band are not represented that lavishly; there are only five of them. It is quite audible how far Garbage shifted in the direction of pop music here, although such songs as Why Do You Love Me or Cherry Lips still remind you Garbage’s early style. As concerns the new song Tell Me Where It Hurts, it may serve as a pretty convincing marker of the fact that Garbage are still full of great ideas even despite a prolonged gap in their career. The song has a very characteristic Garbage style, which mixes pop, rock, some grange and amazingly qualitative production and successfully fits in with other hits of the band.