Album review: Garbage; Not YOur Kind of People

WE ARE in an age of reunions, with increasing numbers of bands saddling the horses again, some in capitulation to overwhelming demand and a bulging paypacket, some to settle unfinished business, some for kicks, some because everyone else is doing it, so why not us?

Garbage, the transatlantic collaboration of three seasoned altrock sessioneers and Scottish supervixen Shirley Manson, have described their return to action as the scratching of a seven-year itch. When we last heard from them, on their 2005 album Bleed Like Me, the commercial juggernaut had slowed down somewhat and their gleaming grunge chassis was losing its shine. The group were tired and disillusioned with the whole merry-go-round and it was evidently time to disband.

Manson, inevitably, tried out a solo album, on which she collaborated with Blue Nile frontman Paul Buchanan – who, coincidentally, releases his long-awaited solo album next week – but the finished article was shelved by her label. That’s got to hurt. So she left music, and took a role in Terminator spin-off series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, instead. Then the itching began.

The hope would be that Garbage have come back hungry and ready to show the world what it has been missing. Instead guitarist Duke Erikson has likened their reunion to “getting on a bicycle… with three other people”.

True enough, this comeback album is a pretty seamless return to form – that form being the reanimation of their efficient but formulaic Frankensteinian creation, with its checklist of regulation Garbage elements. Not Your Kind of People is ringing with superficially scuzzed-up guitars, driving drums and would-be dark lyrical matter, wrapped in the flinty industrial sheen of a production job which tightens all the nuts and bolts so that there is no possibility of any messy spillages, spontaneous thrills or actual rock’n’roll chaos.

How little has changed becomes apparent from the opening clamour of Automatic Systematic Habit with its catchy chorus, vocoder vocals, whiz-bang effects and Manson in steely dominatrix mode, intoning “I want to be your dirty little secret”. The band keep up the hammer-and-tongs momentum on Big Bright World but leave a modicum of space for Manson to move into her sultry mode.

The trick throughout is to keep proceedings busy and buzzy enough so no-one has any time to clock the sheer sterility of the operation. But there is an obvious disconnect between medium and message when Manson sings “I confess I’ve lost control, I let my guard down” on Control, a track which is as carefully constructed and calibrated as anything on the album with its woozy, downtuned guitar sounds.

Blood For Poppies, inspired by – though not strictly about – the opium trade, is a feisty but streamlined radio rock track, but there is at least the mild diversion of a reggae-influenced rhythm. Felt is more of a driving jam than a song, packing distorted guitars and forward momentum but lacking core excitement.

The tooled-up single Battle In Me musters a degree of derangement thanks to Manson’s attempts at an abandoned vocal approach, and the curt, punky, pugnacious verse of Man On A Wire channels some urgency, but they just can’t resist throwing all their old maximalist tricks at the chorus.

Likewise, the industrial torch song I Hate Love is fitted with a skittering rhythm to keep the pace up, up, up, even though it might have been more interesting to give the track a bit more room to breathe. You should be careful what you wish for though – the band sound like they’ve given up all over again by the time they get to the lethargic filler number Sugar.

The title track is a better example of Garbage’s more seductive side. Made in the same image as their slinky but underwhelming Bond theme, The World Is Not Enough, it features plangent, twanging guitars and Manson at her most feline and derisive. How does she despise you? Let her count the ways. “We are not your kind of people, don’t want to be like you ever in our lives” she hisses.

Manson has spoken often and encouragingly about her fight with poor self-image and feeling like an outsider but, however genuine her sentiments, such a declaration of otherness is still quite difficult to stomach coming from a beautiful, internationally successful rock star.

Similarly, her band make a point of highlighting that they have never fitted in to prevailing rock trends, yet closing ballad Beloved Freak – such a Garbage title that they must have been holding it in reserve for such an occasion – is far from freakish. Actually, it’s completely mainstream and none the worse for it. But just as it seems like they might finally be prepared to drop the artifice and stand before us bare, vulnerable and quite normal, someone leans way too heavily on the chorus pedal and drenches the song with superfluous embellishment.

Garbage: Not Your Kind of People

STUNVOLUME, £13.99

Rating: ***