Second Coming
Garbage talk trash about Version 2.0
“I just managed to get into a horrendous e-mail misunderstanding,” announces Shirley Manson, looking over her menu at LA’s Wyndham Bel-Age cafe. “I have this friend in the press who asked me to make a comment about a certain artist. So I sent an email back as a laugh saying, ‘FUCK OFF!’ in really big, huge letters. And he sends this really curt reply back; he thought I was being serious! And I didn’t have time to e-mail back and explain; it was awful. ‘FUCK OFF!’ — I thought it’d be funny.”
The other members of Garbage — Butch Vig (drums, production, samples), Duke Erikson (guitars, keyboards) and Steve Marker (bass, guitar, samples) — can relate. For the past twelve months they’ve been struggling with technology, too. Holed up in their own Madison, Wisc. studios, Garbage has been cutting, pasting, writing, and recording their heavily anticipated sophomore release, aptly titled Version 2.0. And the past four months alone have been dedicated to mixing and remixing. Clearly they are obsessing, enmeshed in a sort of techno option anxiety. Hey gang, ever thought about going lo-fi?
“Yeah, and we kind of did that this time,” says Vig. “Some of the tracks on our record were recorded lo-fi, but by the time we were done adding and subtracting and mixing, it goes through such a mixed bag of high-tech and low-tech, digital and analog, that it all kind of ends up ‘garbagized,’ I guess. But too much production is usually worse than too little; it gets in the way of the song. We kind of struggled with that when we mixed this record, we had so much information — some of the songs had over 100 tracks.”
It’s a candid remark coming from a band sporting three former producers. Especially so considering that Vig himself was once alt-rock’s producer cause celebre (having overseen Nirvana’s Nevermind, Smashing Pumpkins’Gish, and every loud-guitar band from the Cosmic Psychos to Urge Overkill). Still, the kind of “lo-fi” Vig refers to here isn’t exactly live-to-four-track, Teengenerate-style.
“We used a lot of high-tech equipment,” explains Manson in her thick Edinburgh brogue, “but we transferred it all onto analog tape, so there’s this weird mixture of cold, clinical, hi-fi stuff and warm, organic sound. We love what’s happening in music now — all this dance music that’s finally made it to America. But we’re not trying to ‘take on’ drum n’ bass so that we look ahead in the field; we still pull a lot from the past. We tried to make the field fit us, rather than fit ourselves to it.”
“We didn’t make a cold, electronic record,” says Vig. “We still used a lot of old guitar pedals and things. I think we went more high-tech and more low-tech on this record.”
Version 2.0 is certainly a breezier, poppier record than its brooding (and multiplatinum) predecessor, but the scope has been increased dramatically. While “I Think I’m Paranoid” shows that the band hasn’t entirely bleached-out its punk roots, songs like “Hammering in My Head,” “Temptation Waits” and “Push It” mutate techno/electronica in ways Garbage barely hinted at before. And “Wicked Ways” is something thoroughly unexpected from Manson and company: honky-tonk fun.
“Hopefully we would never have a single that just summed up everything about us perfectly,” says Erikson. “I think we are more interested in moving around quicker than that, trying to keep people guessing and keep ourselves interested.”
“I think we have a sound though, and that’s good,” clarifies Manson. “We struggled very hard in a world where there’s millions of bands to come up with our own niche. It’s really hard to do that nowadays. I think that maybe people didn’t know what to expect with this second record, like we were going to take off into some unfamiliar territory. But it sounds like us.”
Despite the thousands of hours spent within studio walls, the 100-track tunesand the maddeningly endless possibilities of cut-and-paste songwriting, Garbage has put out an album they’re pleased with, which they say is even more emotional than their first. This in the face of one web-surfing Garbage fan, who posted a worry that Version 2.0 (scheduled for a May 12 release) might be “too techno” — a notion Mason would certainly poo-poo, even while giggling over the fallacy.
“I like that though,” she says. “That’s part of the joy of it all. I don’t care what anybody thinks about me — so if there’s an inaccuracy, it doesn’t freak me out. It protects me, also, sets up a certain barrier. The more lies and deceit there is, the safer you are, the less you know about truth!”
“But the truth about us is a lot better,” smiles Erikson.
JOHN PECORELLI
source: rollingstone.com