Album Review: No Gods No Masters by Garbage

Garbage made music for '90 teens on the hunt for mild subversion but wanting sharper hooks than Nine Inch Nails or Smashing Pumpkins proffered. They weren't so much a band as a proposition: Nirvana and Pumpkins producer Butch Vig, together with friends Duke Erickson and Steve Marker, hooked up with Shirley Manson, the keyboardist of Scottish non-starters Angelfish, to record an amalgam of goth, shoegaze, and '60s girl groups, all held together by electronically processed guitars. On two platinum albums released during the dotcom era, the deal worked.

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For Garbage's seventh studio album No Gods No Masters, original fans of a band indelibly borne of the 1990s may be somewhat bemused. Poppy melodies synonymous with the band's early guise - well, particularly Version 2.0 at least - are largely harder to locate; instead, there's a darkness here that Gary Numan or Depeche Mode are more renowned for than Shirley Manson and her esteemed bandmates. It's not exactly a political record, although many may see it that way; it's more accurately an album crafted from current affairs including racism and capitalism.

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Bona-fide grunge goddess Shirley Manson and her group of accomplished Wisconsinites are back with their seventh studio album, 'No Gods No Masters', unabatedly plunging into political territories not yet traversed by the band in previous years. Greed is excoriated in 'The Men Who Rule The World', as the album's dynamic opening sounds are punctuated by slot machines and hyper-techno samples. Lyrics are peppered with tales allegorising The #MeToo movement, as Manson bites "The king is in the counting house / He's the chairman of the board / The women who crowd the courtrooms are accused of being whores" then proceeds to demand an end to climate change.

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