Garbage
Bleed Like Me (Geffen)
Playing May 5 at Ryman Auditorium
Ivy
In the Clear (Nettwerk)
I'm no Barbie doll," Shirley Manson snarls in "Why Do You Love Me," the first radio track from the new Garbage album, Bleed Like Me. An array of distorted guitars backs her up with a sonic demonstration of all the "ugly things" she's done, a warning to potential suitors that she's trouble. This opening verse is state-of-the-art alt-rock—a nervous holding pattern of unresolved riffs and clipped vocals, a bleak dismissal of romance's possibilities.
But the chorus comes and Manson, sounding bewildered that someone is still pursuing her after all the warnings, finds a rising melody and asks, "Why do you love me?" The guitars cast off their indecision, lock into a riff and charge forward, clearing the way for Manson's delirious cry, "It's driving me crazy," the sound of someone giving into pleasure against her better judgment. The sound of pop music.
Something similar happens to us as listeners. We know we're not supposed to respond to something as old-fashioned as a sledgehammer guitar riff or something as cheesy as a Barbie doll chorus hook; we're too sophisticated for that. But somewhere south of our brains, the rhythm and the melody grab hold and turn our insides into that liquid mix of ecstasy and embarrassment that comes whenever we fall in love with the wrong person.
This happens again and again on Bleed Like Me. A native of Scotland, Manson and her three bandmates from Wisconsin (Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson) do their best to remain cool and tough, but they always end up giving in to the temptations of pleasure, not only the sexual pleasures described in the album's lyrics but also the aural pleasures of ear-grabbing tunes and body-swaying grooves. Garbage lure their hipster audience with weird studio loops, clashing guitar textures and raw-edged lyrics, but once they have us, it reminds us that we're as susceptible to gooey desires as the most wide-eyed teenybopper.
This is hardly cause for embarrassment. We don't need romance any less just because we've discovered its deceptions. We need music that reflects both experiences—both the pleasure of romance and the pain, the hope and the disappointment of love. A lot of music offers one or the other, but relatively few acts offer both. That's why Garbage are such an underrated rock 'n' roll band and why Bleed Like Me is one of the best albums of 2005.
Garbage's brand of pop-rock is nothing new. Bands from the Beatles and the Beach Boys through Nirvana and Green Day have been at their best when they've combined rhythm and melody, realism and desire, studio strangeness and pop accessibility. Garbage guitarist Butch Vig produced Nirvana's pop-rock masterpiece, Nevermind, but the most obvious antecedent for Garbage is Fleetwood Mac. After all, the Mac were also a pop-rock band with a charismatic female singer, a genius guitarist-producer and a muscular rhythm section.
Fleetwood Mac have been getting some belated acknowledgement, what with the Dixie Chicks turning "Landslide" into a country hit and Destiny's Child sampling Stevie Nicks' solo hit "Edge of Seventeen" in "Bootylicious," but both of those songs preserved the pop while discarding the rock. What was most interesting about Fleetwood Mac was not Nicks' moony musings but rather the tension between the yearning voices of Nicks and Christine McVie and the buzzing-with-frustration guitar of Lindsey Buckingham. Garbage recapture this tension as few others have.
Of course, because Garbage record in a microchip era, the band's arrangements boast the industrial beats and precision of hip-hop and techno-pop. The basic idea, however, is unchanged from the ancient 1970s, when Fleetwood Mac updated Phil Spector's girl-group sound for women going through divorces. When Manson shouts out, "The boys wanna fight, but the girls are happy to dance all night," the guitars form a wall of sound behind her, throbbing to a beat that just begs for a dance remix. "The Boys Wanna Fight" is sock-hop fodder, even if the lyrics seem to describe a warmongering world leader as well as a no-good ex-boyfriend.
The juxtaposition of pop hooks and dirty guitars only works, of course, if the hooks are catchy and if the guitars are playing fresh changes and rhythms through the noise. Garbage's Bleed Like Me is a terrific record because the hooks are insanely tuneful and the guitars are an unceasing fountain of invention.
"Run Baby Run," for example, begins with one guitar playing a high-pitched, siren-like stutter while the other guitars wash below it in waves of harmony. Manson's vocal picks up on the jittery riff to admit, "Life is so cruel / Doesn't it astound you?" But the tension breaks open on the chorus as Manson cries out for her lover to "run from the noise of the street and the loaded gun"; the harmony guitars grow louder and faster as if carrying him along. Manson's lyrics aren't very good, but they serve as effective markers for the musical drama—the threat implied in the knotty verses and the escape implied by the sprinting chorus.
Song after song on Bleed Like Me provides variations on this drama. When Manson tells her lover to "stay alive" in "a cruel, cruel world" in "Right Between the Eyes," she convinces him not by her words but by the pell-mell rush of the high-register and low-register guitars and her trilling vocal melody. She's blunt about the likelihood and price of romantic betrayal on several other songs, but that's no reason to give up on pleasure, she insists. "Sex Is Not the Enemy," she declares, and she proves it not by her simplistic sloganeering but in the breathless, bone-rattling cries of the guitars and of her voice, the sound of desire fighting its way through everything that would deny it.
Like Garbage and Fleetwood Mac, Ivy feature a European chanteuse surrounded by one or more American guitarist-producers. In Ivy's case, Dominique Durand, a Parisian, is surrounded by Adam Schlesinger and Alan Chase, who come from New York and Maryland, respectively. If Garbage pursue the noisy, anthemic, British side of the Mac legacy, Ivy go after the quieter, lusher, Southern California side. The trio's new album, In the Clear, recalls those early Brian Wilson ballads like "In My Room" and "Please Let Me Wonder," where the harmonies seemed to be reaching for an idealized romance. When they inevitably fell short, an air of melancholy filled the songs.
Schlesinger, who is also a co-leader of Fountains of Wayne, has fashioned a New Jersey version of a surf ballad, "Ocean City Girl." The bikini beauty stands on the boardwalk as the sun sets in a warm glow of guitar arpeggios, descending piano figures and string harmonies. But as the sun disappears, she drops the façade of beer-commercial vivaciousness. "The cracks begin to show," Durand croons, and the harmonies curdle. Even the bouncy "Corners of Your Mind" ends its first stanza with this typical paradox: "You smile but there's something wrong." Like most of Ivy's songs, this one wraps us in pleasure and then warns us not to trust the sensation.
All of which works because the pleasures are so vivid and the warnings so incisive. The rise and fall of Durand's breathy soprano over Schlesinger's Beatlesque piano figure in "Nothing but the Sky" is intoxicating, as are the restlessly shifting chords beneath the contagious melody on "Tess Don't Tell." Still, a disquieting musical element enters each song to support the doubt expressed in the lyrics. Like Garbage, Ivy know that we can't live without pleasure, even if it disappoints us almost every time.
