The idea at the time seemed a bit ludicrous. But little did we know then that a decade later the same thing was going to be what humourless PR execs would probably regularly refer to as the “crown jewels” of Saturday night ITV. Only Pete Waterman, Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell never shook a maraca, strummed a guitar, or wiggled their arses onstage behind Gareth Gates et al as their backing bands. Small mercies. But Garbage succeeded in the first instance not because they were created from the small print of 90s alt-rock albums of note, with a fresh bit of skirt upfront helping the aged, but because their debut was a bona-fide ball-breaking exercise in mega rock for the post-grunge age. With tunes, lots of beautiful fluffy pop tunes with teeth, obviously well kept teeth. Which made the fact that Butch Vig, Duke Erikson and Steve Marker were all major league producers seem like a selling point rather than a curse.
But the passage of time, and their insistence to continue flogging the potentially lame donkey in the face of personal differences and serious health scares, has required things be reappraised. Taking Garbage on face value today they’ve clearly fallen headlong into traps that they set for themselves in the first instance. As the albums have stacked up the bravado smokescreen and well-crafted pop padding have subsided, falling back to reveal the bare bones of their functional assembly. Everything is shackled, measured, held in constraints. You can follow rules to the letter, and that they do, but if you can’t beat your own path or push the rules in such a way that there’s at least the threat that you might break them, you’re never going to get beyond the predefined standard.
It’s hard to accept some of these tunes were arrived at via anything more complicated than a favourite keyboard shortcut on one of the boys’ laptops. These are nothing more than the same tunes they’ve given us before with replaceable covers. ‘Boys Wanna Fight’ is ‘I Think I’m Paranoid’ re-jigged, ‘It’s All Over But The Crying’ is ‘Milk’ without the calcium. Every guitar on ‘Right Between The Eyes’ feels like its there to fill space, unadventurous, convenient. Even ‘Why Do You Love Me?’ which presses some of the right buttons, feels like it was arrived at in a frantic unnecessary rush when there could be much more below the surface if they’d just stopped to look. ‘Run Baby Run’ is much the same, with some yearning vocals just slapped onto a bed of expected beats and treated guitar, and Dave Grohl adds nothing of note to ‘Bad Boyfriend’. This is rock controlled by quangos, checked and double checked to within an inch of its life.