Now You are Supposed To Like Garbage

RECYCLing: "We're not trying to do something that's completely different," says guitarist Steve Marker (second from left). "It's more trying on a lot of different pop music traditions."
Photo By: Frank Ockenfels

by Michael Pelusi

Why do we trust sunblock? The people who told us about sunblock are the same people that when I was a kid said eggs were good. And then they said eggs were bad. And then they said they were good. Then said they were bad. Then, they actually said that the yellows were bad, the whites were … MAKE UP YOUR MIND. It's breakfast, we gotta eat. --Lewis Black

It's not easy being a follower, a sheep. People, am I right, or am I right? Back in the '90s, they said: The mainstream sucks. Indie is king. Stephen Malkmus or Scott Weiland, who do you trust?

For a hopelessly confused budding rock critic, where exactly to tread wasn't clear.

Some people told us to listen with furrowed brows to indie rock that had no words or melodies. Others told us the wave of the future was electronica and it went like this: boomkaboomkaboomka. Both groups scared us, like the Beatles-hating metalhead in high school scared us.

So we let lapse our interests in Pink Floyd (good idea) and The Who (bad one, since rectified) and commenced wading through the stuff we were supposed to like. We got used to noisy shows in uncomfortable rooms with people who looked cooler than us. We prayed our college radio station would suddenly gain relevance. We pretended The High Llamas had something interesting to say.

Sometimes, we scored one for our team. We got to Belle and Sebastian maybe a month before you. We started liking The Beach Boys and The Kinks ages ago (though not as many ages as those bands' actual life spans).

Then, slowly but surely, everything changed: Indie sucks. The mainstream is king. Yay popular pop. While some of us weren't paying attention, the zeitgeist blew right by. And all we have to show for the journey are dead-end streets, having followed bands no one noticed, gone to shows no one saw, immersed ourselves in albums no one bought.

Perhaps we could follow The New Way and have important things to say about the latest sweet young thing — just in time for the pendulum to swing back to whatever it was we tried to get a bead on five years ago.

All right, maybe it's not that dire. But if this is a column about rock music — or how one freak defines it — we might as well try once in a while considering rock music that actually registers in the outside world.

As Franz Ferdinand taught us last year — and continues to teach us, thanks to PlayStation Portable — it sure doesn't hurt for rock bands to mix and match genres from time to time. This, not some staid concept of purism or authenticity, is actually an intrinsic element of rock 'n' roll. Listen to Elvis Presley's Sun sessions if you don't believe me.

Or listen to Garbage. When their 1995 debut album slowly worked its way up the charts, they seemed a glossy anomaly in pop-rock's post-Nirvana confusion. They looked like a Bond girl backed by three of the kinds of studio tans Top 40 hadn't seen since the heyday of Steely Dan. (And one of those studio tans belonged to the producer of Nevermind and Gish, for Pete's sake.) At that juncture, Garbage might've appeared too sleek, too poppy, especially when the rock world still had some serious, um, issues with the genuineness thing. (Pearl Jam had the balls to take on Ticketmaster, yet their commitment to music was still questioned just because Kurt Cobain once said so.) In hindsight, Garbage's gleeful juggling of genres — dance, new wave, girl-group, goth, grunge — deriving the maximum pop hook potential from each, seems prescient, by showing just how all-encompassing rock can be.

"We're just huge history-of-pop-music fans," explains guitarist Steve Marker. "We're not trying to do something that's completely different from anything anyone's ever heard, I think it's more trying on a lot of different pop music traditions, whether it's classic Frank Sinatra songs or Clash songs."

Their new album, Bleed Like Me (Geffen), contains more pitch-perfect allusions, such as the New Order strum of "Run Baby Run." But this band's songs have always stood on their own; even without the Pretenders and Fab Four references, "Special" (from 1998's Version 2.0) would still be one of the best singles of the last 10 years.

The best tracks on Bleed Like Me boast indefatigable summertime hooks, brought to brilliant light through the laser-sharp production. Shirley Manson imbues the perilous scenarios with a sense of fun that's not entirely ironic, via her hair-flipping syncopations on "Bad Boyfriend" and "Right Between the Eyes." "It's All Over But the Crying" is a masterfully coiffed breakup ballad that sounds like somebody shooting out Hollywood lights.

If the album sounds a tad '90s, that may be because the band wound up characterizing the sound of so much of the decade's second half. Not only that, they've watched their production techniques become not only de rigueur but also more affordable.

"When we started out, that was the most interesting thing to us, was how you could take the ways dance music was using electronics and people like Public Enemy were taking samplers, and use them in a rock 'n' roll way," says Marker. Now, "If you get a new PowerBook, it comes with this free Apple software [GarageBand] that's way better than anything we had when we made our first record. You can get a version of ProTools for free, download it and have this fantastic recording studio in your bedroom.

"As that's become easier for everybody to do, it's become a little less interesting to us. And us being us, we could easily spend 10 years in the studio messing around with synth sounds. We didn't want to do that this time. We wasted enough time on other things," he says with a laugh. "We just wanted to get back more to a guitar-based thing."

Speaking of guitar-based things, there are few better or more promising than Queens of the Stone Age. They've become the Band Most Likely To without really being a band, more a rotating collective pivoting around singer-guitarist Josh Homme. They've managed to unite the headbangers and the withdrawn indie-rockers, thanks to Homme's varied gifts. His expertise in sludge riffs and digit-spraining solos is as awe-inspiring as his keen sense of melody and haunting croon. His persona in interviews doesn't hurt either: The Cool Jock, the football player who'd rather lend you his Minutemen albums than stuff you in your locker.

All the same, the band's most recent album, their fourth, Lullabies to Paralyze (Interscope) has not come without some controversy, mostly related to Homme's firing last year of his once-partner in crime, pointy bearded bassist-singer Nick Oliveri. And although Lullabies is the work of a four-man Queens with plenty of cameos (longtime part-timer Mark Lanegan, Billy Gibbons, Shirley Manson), it finds Homme edging back to the "robot-rock" (his term) of the band's self-titled debut from '98, on which he played everything but drums.

Lullabies lacks the galvanizing heaviosity of their breakthrough, Songs for the Deaf (perhaps due to the absence of Oliveri, as well as Deaf's drummer, one Dave Grohl). And for all intents and purposes, the album does not begin till track five, "Burn the Witch." Spare yourself the four duds inexplicably chosen to front the album. Once Lullabies gets well under way, it's apparent Homme and friends still have the goods, with treats like the radio-ready "In My Head," the alluring "I Never Came," the utterly effed-up "Broken Box" and the trance-inducing "Long Slow Goodbye."

Garbage plays Sat., April 16, 7 p.m., Theater of Living Arts, 334 South St., 215-922-1011, www.thetla.com.