Garbage - 'Strange Little Birds' Review
Garbage - 'Strange Little Birds' Review
By Rhian Daly - June, 8, 2016
Online on NME
The electronic rockers return with a sixth album as cool and caustic as their 1995 debut
Release Date
10 Jun, 2016
Producer
Garbage, Billy Bush
Last year, Garbage celebrated the 20th anniversary of their self-titled debut album. The timing was impeccable – pop culture’s ever rotating wheel of influence had already spun back to the ’90s post-grunge scene that birthed them – but it raised the question. What does a veteran band do when a new crop of exciting artists, like Wolf Alice and Black Honey, are mining your back catalogue for inspiration, whether that’s Garbage’s multimillion-selling debut or guitarist Butch Vig’s instrumental work in producing Nirvana’s era-defining second album ‘Nevermind’. ‘Strange Little Birds’ quickly answers that question: you zoom back to 1995 with the rest of them.
On the slinking electronics of ‘If I Lost You’, she’s jealous (“There are times when I see you talking to other girls / I feel insecure”) and fatally in love (“Sometimes I believe that I might die if I lost you”). On ‘Empty’, a true ’90s rock throwback, she proves even icons can struggle with ego and self-doubt (“I’ve been feeling so frustrated / I’ll never be as great as I want to be”). But the album’s rawest lines come right at the start. “Sometimes I’d rather take a beating / Sometimes I’d rather take a punch / I learn more when I am bleeding,” she admits on sinister and stormy opener ‘Sometimes’.