Album: Garbage

Beautiful Garbage, Mushroom

By their own admission, Garbage had to really work to make a success of Version 2.0, and the first impression of Beautiful Garbage suggests they may be touring hard for the next couple of years, too. It's not a bad album as such, but it lacks the idiosyncratic character that made their earlier releases such distinctive alternatives to the indie-pop norm. There are still traces of the old Garbage swagger in "Breaking Up The Girl" and "Till The Day I Die", but many other tracks find them casting around for alternative approaches. The best of these are probably "Can't Cry These Tears" – an exercise in Sixties beehive pop with Shirley Manson coming over all Dusty against an epic backdrop of sweeping strings and ringing chimes – and the closing "So Like A Rose", which recalls the languid intimacy of The Velvet Underground. Less impressive is the Prince-style twitchy funk of "Androgyny", which doesn't play to their strengths as much as, say, the bubblegum kitsch of "Cherry Lips", where they take on the rash of prefabricated pre-teen pop bands on their own territory. Lyrically, Shirley Manson's still sending dispatches from the frontline of the sexual battlefield, from the gender-blending of "Androgyny" to the disillusion of "Till The Day I Die" ("Making love became the waging of war/No peace, no tenderness, no fun any more"), but the edgy ambivalence of previous skirmishes has become slightly blunted with time. It's all put together with Garbage's usual skill and taste, but the immediacy and sheer vitality of sound that marked their earlier albums is in noticeably shorter supply here.