This week brings a significant milestone in the long, recently rocky history of the band called Garbage.
The quartet’s strong, back-to-basics fourth album, “Bleed Like Me,” drops Tuesday, bolstered by more than a few potential singles that echo the torrid and torrential dynamics it first developed a decade ago.
“And, of course, we all have high hopes for it,” says drummer-producer Butch Vig on behalf of his bandmates–singer-siren Shirley Manson and guitarists Steve Marker and Duke Erikson. “But these days, it’s very hard for anyone to stay on the pop-culture radar for longer than 15 minutes, and we’re not the fresh face out there anymore.
“We think we made a really vital-sounding record, so we’re hoping there’s still an audience out there that will find it.”
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At this point, though, sales potential is an afterthought. It’s really a wonder this album exists at all.
“To us, it’s a massive success just because we got it finished,” Vig says.
Indeed, “Bleed Like Me” is the album that almost tore Garbage apart, and it may still be the Wisconsin crew’s swan song. To discern what went wrong and how the band finally recovered, however, you have to go back to Sept. 11.
After the terrorist attacks, no one seemed interested in a relatively frivolous pop trifle like “Beautiful Garbage,” the group’s third effort, which appeared Oct. 2, 2001. Consequently, the album quickly sank.
“The hangover effect” from that, as Vig calls it, was soul-crushing, and the tour that ensued was difficult: Plagued by ear infections, Vig eventually had to bow out of remaining dates under doctor’s orders.
“And after 10 years together, the personal drama escalated,” he says. “Nit-picky things that normally you’d just let go of started to become huge issues among the four of us.”
Things weren’t much improved by the time Manson and the boys re-entered their Madison, Wis., studio in summer 2003. They intended to make a quick rock record, largely free from the electronica that dappled their previous two discs, including 1998’s “Version 2.0,” which garnered a Grammy nod for album of the year.
“But then we just started arguing about everything,” Vig remembers. “We couldn’t agree on anything. We weren’t talking. We weren’t listening to each other’s ideas. Shirley was having writer’s block and felt uninspired by the tracks that we were coming up with. It was the culmination of a lot of growing problems.”
So in October, after a half-year of fruitless on-and-off recording, “I just walked in one day and said, ‘That’s it. I can’t take this anymore.’ It was just spiraling downhill. So I got on a plane for L.A. and instantly felt a huge relief–‘I’m free. I’m free from the beast.’ “
It took three months and a confidence boost from Foo Fighter Dave Grohl (who plays drums on one new Garbage cut) for Vig to “clear my head, analyze the situation and decide if it was still important to me to carry on, try to finish another record.”
Still, no one wanted to pick up where things had left off–least of all Vig, who cajoled the rest of the band to leave Madison for studio work in Los Angeles. “Try to breathe fresh air into this,” he says, while, ironically, recapturing their essence.
With “Bleed Like Me,” Vig “wanted to capture what we sound like on stage, which is loud guitars, bass and drums, and also have the record sound more cohesive all the way through.”
Having achieved that, Garbage’s fourth album most resembles the arresting techno-rock of its first. And, so far, the return-to-form approach is working: After a long dry spell, Garbage is back on alt-radio thanks to the Stone Temple Pilots-ish surge of the new single “Why Do You Love Me.”
“We’re over the moon about that,” Vig admits.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Kris Karnopp ([email protected])