I\u2019ve spent the past week knee-deep in Garbage.<\/p>\n
With the Madison band\u2019s eponymous 1995 debut celebrating a milestone anniversary<\/a>, I\u2019ve taken it upon myself to listen to it. A lot. And even if I\u2019m not going through the full album, I\u2019m cherry picking tracks and playing them on repeat. Even after two-plus decades, Garbage <\/em>still slaps pretty hard.<\/p>\n Garbage\u2019s first album came out only one year after Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain\u2019s suicide. Grunge was devolving into unmemorable butt rock, and the pop punk boom<\/a> of the early 2000s was still a few years away. Garbage was a breath of fresh air for a radio rock landscape in deep need of one.<\/p>\n And making it fresher still is the fact that Garbage co-founder and drummer Butch Vig \u2014 who famously produced Nirvana\u2019s Nevermind<\/em> \u2014 could easily be considered the architect of the grunge movement. Garbage is a direct response to the aggro, grumbly dude bands that populated alternative nation. The fact someone so deeply ingrained in the genre could shuck it completely is an impressive feat. Garbage\u2019s debut is one of the unheralded classics to emerge from the 1990s, but I personally don\u2019t think it gets anywhere near the recognition it should.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s remedy that by digging through Garbage<\/em>, track-by-track.<\/span>\n