NOT YOUR KIND OF PEOPLE by Garbage

‘Not Your Kind Of People’ is smug (an album that tries to alienate you into loving it, beginning with its name itself, seriously?). It is also over-produced and formulaic. Most significantly, keeping abreast of recent patterns, this album is not the radio-friendly pop-art rendition of goth/doom that we saw with ‘Beautiful Garbage’, but rather a thorough and comprehensive schooling of Lana Del Rey, who gets a lesson or twenty from Shirley Manson in melancholy droning and sex appeal in ‘Big Bright World’, among other songs off this record. Of course, the curse of Garbage, which is that the sheer force of personality of Shirley Manson obliterates all distinctiveness of the rest of its members (even Butch Vig), is also its saving grace, inasmuch it would be very, very difficult to dismiss any album with her as intolerable. 

‘Blood For Poppies’, for instance, is fairly easy on the ears with a decent motif relaying between the verses and as a ballad, features an interesting story of a man stationed behind enemy lines on a mission, which from the title, I gather would be in respect of narcotic trafficking. ‘I Hate Love’ is electro-emphasized, menacing and vivid, but very forgettable, if it weren’t for some wonderful verses, of the ilk of, “They lay all their dreams on you, they let you in and you start to believe yourself as a miracle. Unfurled, I was new and unfurled, innocent and open as any lamb and hoping for paradise”. 

However, if you survive the mindless, cheap digital thrills and fast-paced strums of ‘Automatic Systematic Habit’ and the allegedly gloomy piano section lacing the empathetic, synthetic soliloquy on hope and perseverance that is ‘Beloved Freak’, you might just look through to the rare moments of this record. ‘Battle In Me’, for one, is just a really neat song; edgy, power-chord-packed, the sort of song that brings about the urge to jump around inanely. This is closest to the Garbage we fell in love with, circa ‘Only Happy When It Rains’. 

The steal on this album is the trip-hop/Bristol-sound influenced ‘Sugar’, with its atmospheric phrases poured over the brazenly sexual cooing of that crimson-goddess-we-refer-to-as-Shirley-Manson, as she teases, “If I sound better or if I’ve come too late, please reconsider, I don’t need much on my plate, just give me some sugar”. It’s insufficient to make me cherish this record, of course, but it does serve to remind me of the bewitching dominion that woman-fronted alternative rock bands held in the last decade of the previous century.