Garbage needs no introduction. Garbage gets one anyways. Since 1995 the band has sold over 20 million records, garnering popular attention with songs like ‘Stupid Girl’ and ‘I Think I’m Paranoid’. Their sound packages the milder sides of punk and rock music into pop tunes built for radio play. Garbage’s earlier music, songs like ‘I’m Only Happy When It Rains’, reflected the nihilist sentiments in pop culture at the end of the century. Now, Garbage recognizes our need for optimism and reliance on technology, by singing about optimism while relying on technology.
An undercurrent runs through the album. The band’s industrial sonic clangings reflect our contemporary fascination with the inhuman and metal. Shirley Manson’s vocals perform as Optimism. Her long time band Duke Erikson, Steve Marker, and Butch Vig play Desolation. If Shirley Manson was only happy when it rained in the nineties, now she will not settle until a storm unravels around her. Let All That We Imagine Be the Light summons electricity and power for Garbage’s journey towards solace in a chaotic world, a world Garbage views dichotomously between good verses bad and love versus hate.
1. There’s No Future In Optimism
Released as a single, the echoey opening lyric, “If you’re ready for love/ If you’re ready for lo-o-ove,” warmly welcomes us into Garbage’s cinematic soundscape. A static distortion reverberates from the guitar, like the frenetic vertical scratchings on a Richter Scale, to complement the song’s Orwellian overtones: dark night full of terror, people marching, cop swarming, sirens are screaming, etc. Unlike in Orwell’s novel 1984, in the universe of Garbage love can imagine new futures. If the song’s message could be put succinctly, aided by images from the thrilling music video (that warns of AI domination), it would be: Grab somebody by the hand, and, as the nineties mantra goes, kiss and run.
2. Chinese Fire Horse
‘Chinese Fire Horse’ addresses Manson’s misogynist critics who say she’s too old for public life and performance, but it comes across as Shirley Manson’s homage to Shirley Manson. Born in 1966, the year of the Fire Horse in the Chinese Zodiac calendar, known for birthing matricidal women, Manson repeats the refrain, “I’m not done.” The title is oddly singular, and comes across as a diss track. She addresses her haters sardonically: “I should do the right thing by everybody/ And I should just retire,” after which a guitar slips down the fret creating a womp womp/sad trombone sound. This decrescendo intends to say, “Hell no, I won’t go,” but falls flat. The song walks awkwardly in clunky boots, empowerment for one.
3. Hold
A song on the run, closely related to ‘There’s No Future In Optimism’, ‘Hold’ fuses industrial noise with desire: “Take down my hair/ untie my shoes/ undress me.” The incompatibility of the mechanical and human teases with excitement and drama, like lusting after someone you can’t have.
4. Have We Met (The Void)
Garbage shows us that if the void had a soundtrack, it would be the echoes of a Moog synthesizer, dancing up and down a minor scale. This song recalls Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor album, but no one does reinvention better than Madonna. The void, to Garbage, is not a vacuum of emptiness ad nauseum. It houses our reflections, our histories, in ways we can’t see for ourselves.
5. Sisyphus
Shirley Manson’s voice shines like a lone human form in a field of tetanus. The industrial orchestral recording shimmies through rusty cans and electric shakers in a post-human landscape stifled with wind (Manson’s whispered backing vocals). This album seeks to exude optimism, a bundle of hope for the age of extinction, but optimism never got Sisyphus very far. Although the beat elicits compulsory head banging as Manson repeats the line, “This little body of mine is gonna make things right,” I can’t help but recall Sisyphus’ doom.
6. Radical
‘Radical’ enters as the most poetic song on the album, churning out lyrics like, “We need language for the small things,” and “Grief is love turned inside out.” It is easy to picture the band on their instruments, grounding the song in the electro-grunge style that Garbage emerged from. Manson repeats the album title, “let all that we imagine be that light,” a tour de force of a slogan sung over the band’s controlled exertion.
7. Love to Give
When it’s easy to be cynical, Garbage pins another needle in optimism: “This is a cold, cold world” followed by an emphasis on “love to give/ love to give.” The band creates a sound evocative of early 2000s dance beats, easing the song onto the dance floor even though te band wants it blasted at protests.
8. Get Out Of My Face AKA Bad Kitty
Finally an anthem, and this song really is an anthem, for exhaustion as resistance: “Get out my face don’t mess with me/ We’re exhausted.” Garbage has “long lists” and you, whomever the song addresses, haters “ha[ve] problems.” The sentiment is hilarious, and refreshing. The droning guitar and bass play with a tinge of fatigue under Manson’s drained vocals: “I wanna scream.” Though she does not scream, and never really has, staying true to Garbage’s anti alt-rock tendencies.
9. R U Happy Now
Garbage gets political, albeit vaguely, as vague as the term “post-election” can be. The song opens with “Everybody loves a winner,” a line borrowed from the musical Cabaret, in the classic Garbage style, picking from this and that. It is obvious who Manson refers to when she sings of “golden sneakers and alternative facts,” though she avoids any names. The band creates a sound as full as a sloshing bucket of water, and the chorus is wildly catchy as Manson chants in a monotone, “All is said/ All is done/ R U Happy?”
10. The Day That I Met God
Alien feet putter across the mixing board. The producers roll up music magazines and sheet music, frantically smacking them off the machines, whack-a-mole style, as Manson sings an electro-ethereal whisper with closed eyes from the recording room, blind to the chaos on the other side of the glass: “Face to face with God/ It was everyone I’ve ever loved.” This is a pop album full of guitar riffs and mechanical noise where lyrical clichés abound. The message of Let All That We Imagine Be The Light is reminiscent of the relatively quaint politics of bygone political eras. Perhaps we yearn for a simple message such as love heals all wounds, a message Garbage firmly advocates for.
