Garbage – No Gods, No Masters
(Liberator Music)
Reviewed by Tim Gruar.
On this new release, Garbage have returned to the gloom, amping up the dramatics and tapping into post-Trumpian, Covid calamity. Where ‘Strange Little Birds’ was a more personal journey, for Shirley Manson in particular, ‘No Gods, No Masters’ is a naked, audacious, and often venomous commentary on the world as it is now.
Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon better watch out – Garbage are back in the saddle and are driving the cattle right over this house of Republican bullshit and greed. Actually, Biden better watch himself, too.
Shirley Manson was never one to suffer fools – be they conservative or liberal. To her, any man in power should have a target on their forehead, but especially those who are white, middle class and entitled. Those that are stupid enough to support capitalism and hypocrisy. She slaps down the manifesto with the first lines of the opener: “The men who rule the world/ Have made a fucking mess/ The history of power/ The worship of success/ The king is in the counting house/ He’s chairman of the board/ The women who crowd the courtrooms/ All accused of being whores.”
The sound of slot machines emptying begin the album, cashing in and clocking out – perhaps a reference to JP Morgan’s despicable practices in the GEC and the unlearned lessons of the current World Bank. Then ‘The Men Who Rule The World’ explodes into a flume of industrial cyber-punk. This is a new Noah’s Ark, one for 2021. “Fuck the patriarchy.” She’s saying, “Their “history of power” and blatant “the worship of success” has left us stranded – save the kids, the animals, then flood the planet, drown the bankers. Start over again: ‘Now let’s save all of the animals/ Let’s save all the squid/ Let’s load them onto the mother-ship’.
Manson certainly doesn’t hold back. You can hear the venom behind the fangs. You know she’s channelling every woman from Mother Teresa to Greta Thunberg. And thing is, she’s right! She always was. Back in the ’90’s Manson had built her brand on calling out fakers and BS artists from Tony Blair to George Bush to the Irish IT industry who opposed a unified Ireland because it ‘might’ upset British financial backers. She has no time for spineless racist cops or filibustering politicians. On Instagram she’s been raging for years.
The album has a centrepiece ‘Waiting For God’, with lyrics that pre-date the murder of George Floyd, is a horror soundtrack set to our grim reality “where black boys get shot in the back” with “no one blinking an eye”.
The edgy digital punk/glam of Depeche Mode pops in during ‘Godhead’. This is sticking it to the man, actually all men in power! ‘Would you deceive me if I had a dick? / Would you know it? / Would you blow it? …You are the Godhead’ (referring to all male leaders as knobs) … The centre of heaven is you/ And the truth keeps weighing me down (I’m such a bitch)” There’s no denying this is full on feminist rage. And not a moment too late. Again, I think of the way world leaders (mostly old, jaded patriarch) brushed away Greta Thunberg, with her ‘apparently’ naive threats of climate doom. Arrogantly they claimed ‘how could this pathetic little girl know any better than us? After all, we have the truth, sponsored by big oil and compromised media.
Occasionally Manson steps down from her podium, flips off the mic to look in the mirror. On ‘Wolves‘ she looks back to moments when she “got a little cruel – I was too brash for you”, when in her own precociousness “we were drunk and we loved attention”.
And there’s at least one anthem for the misfits among us – a connection to our younger days before we grew up and took out a mortgage – gothic number ‘The Creeps’ gives permission to pull on the black stovepipes, gel up the hair, whiten the face. ‘I cannot let my feelings keep on hijacking my brain’. Best lines of regret ever written, I’d think.
The awkward returns in ’Uncomfortably Me’ – ‘spent every day wishing my life away… Always the bridesmaid, never the bride / always the wallflower, never the sports star’. Bowie fans will think of ‘Life on Mars’ when they hear this one. Kitchen sink dramas are endlessly universal.
Musically, Garbage have called on Roxy Music and Brian Ferry as inspiration. Most obviously that appears on dark, satin arrangements on ‘Uncomfortably Me’ and the cold, ‘Bête Noire’ velvet lounge on ‘This City Will Kill You’, which recalls the bands own cinematic Bond theme ‘The World Is Not Enough’. In fact this one might even be better – you can almost picture the animated images of Walther PPK’s and women silhouetted in long, figure hugging slinky cocktail dresses. Is this an ironic twist to Manson’s feminist side?
‘Anonymous (XXX)’ has a blast or two of lounge room sax – the most obvious nod to Roxy Music, in particular, with a splash of the ‘Stop Making Sense’ rendition of ‘Psycho Killer’.
And. if we’re playing ‘spot the influence’, then you’d better chuck in a bit of Peter Hook’s garden path wandering bass and sweet Bernard Sumner melancholic vocals on ‘Flip The Bird’. Oddly, that brooding tone runs in contrast with the vicious sentiment of the lyrics which unapologetically gives it to all and sundry. Read into it what you will. I think it’s a blatant kick in the googlies to all those trolls and spoilers – a long overdue bash up of media morons like Pierce Morgan (or in our case, Mike Hosking), who shout for their white, conservative opinions to be kept relevant. ‘Woke’ up and smell the manure! Play this one the next time they dare to stick their necks above the parapet, especially these lines: ‘I stopped listening to you years ago / You always think that you know best, I know … I am flipping you the bird again.’ You can almost hear Jacinda Ardern in the opening lines of ‘No Gods No Masters’ – ‘Be kind, beware/ Be good, don’t be scared/ Nothing lasts and no one stays/ The same forever so accept the change/ Where the wind blows runnin’ ’round in circles’.
The sum of the parts are clear: a bleak, cynical take on this past year and a collective sigh of exasperation that, despite our ‘years of progress’ on gender equality, closing the poverty gap and finding one’s own peace in amongst chaos, nothing has really changed. Thanks to the internet and media hysteria this is a bleak present we live in and our potential future is, quite frankly, fucked.
This album has been in the pipeline for a while, beginning during the summer of 2018 in Palm Springs with producer and long time collaborator Billy Bush. The release contains many overt protest songs that call out the injustices of Capitalism, Sexism, Racism, and misogyny.
Seven albums over twenty six years and Garbage is as relevant as it ever was, with a slinky, seductive sound of hate, horror and harrow. Clearly, Manson, et al are still only happy when it rains.
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