by Sheri Fink

Created on: February 06, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

Garbage's album, Beautiful Garbage, was released October 2, finally appeasing the prolonged anticipation of Garbage fans everywhere. Garbage's album came almost three and a half years after the release of the band's second album, Version2.0, in the spring of 1998. However, the band's latest album has been a labor of love since they began recording back in April 2000. To coincide with the release of their recent opus, Garbage has unveiled the redesign of their marvelingly innovative, Flash-intensive website (http://www.garbage.com). Much like the previous design, the latest overhaul coordinates the color and graphic schemes of the Beautiful Garbage album cover art into the design of Garbage's official website.

So how IS the new album? To put it simply (and subjectively), great. However, discerning fans of lead singer Shirley Manson and her band (Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson) will hear a distinctly different side of Garbage's musical abilities throughout Beautiful Garbage. Perhaps the overall sound to Garbage's latest release cannot be summed up more appropriately than in the album's title, "Beautiful Garbage." Even a quick study of the album's cover seems to parallel the sounds within the way individual, jagged pieces can come together to form the luscious red rose front and center on the album cover.

If Garbage had any problem proving its sound to be far from "virgin" in their first album, their follow-up, Version 2.0, should have eliminated all doubts of the band's ability to successfully and seamlessly combine the sounds of heavy guitaring with synthetic rhythms. But where songs like "Hammering in my Head" and "Push It" in Version 2.0 pushed the sound and musical limitations of the band (as well as kept Garbage on the frontier of the increasingly bland rock genre), the tone and songs of Beautiful Garbage provide the band a certain amount of purity that the band has never previously been able to rest upon and enjoy. Shirley Manson still sings of Garbage-familiar themestroubled relationships, self-loathing, self-celebration, and inner turmoil, but the 13 tracks Garbage has assembled in Beautiful Garbage express all of these themes with more delicate rhythm and carefully crafted tempo than ever before. While past albums and B-sides have certainly reflected this side of Garbage before now (i.e. You Look So Fine, Can't Seem to Make you Mine, Supernatural), this is the first time the majority of the songs compiled on one of the band's albums have all

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