Next is the 'Is It Love?' 7" from 1983. By this point Gang of Four had changed their style fairly dramatically, incoporating elements of white-soul and pop into the sound and although it was an interesting idea at the time, it hasn't aged nearly as well. Indeed the band were in the firing line as sell-outs, charlatans and the album Hard was pretty much panned on its release in any case and its reputation has only grown because it couldn't have got much worse. 'Is It Love?' is a hyper-ironic pop love song but it really isn't a great song and its sound does make you yearn for the spit and fury of their earlier work. B-side, 'A Man with a Good Car' is more of the same.
Finally, the first four album spanning compilation A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, released in 1990 and covering the years 1979-1983, is a fantastic overview, charting their perfect emergence and gradual stylistic smoothing out. The first half is unsurprisingly by far the better, containing glistening, glittering material from Entertainment! and second album Solid Gold ('Cheeseburger' and 'To Hell with Poverty' are just fabulous), and although the later material lacks bite and sounds too audience friendly there are still some amazing songs. Third album, Songs of the Free, had set out a change of style, adding a slicker sheen to the sound and folding in a kind of dance friendly rhythmic style, and it was pretty successful, songs like 'Call Me Up' and 'The History of the World' setting out a blueprint for a moodier kind of pop music that many other bands picked up on. Probably the band's best non-punk song came from this period and 'We Live as We Dream, Alone' is a truly, truly great song. Only the last few songs, from Hard, don't come up to scratch, but it's a little enough failure for a band who had set out new ways of looking at rock music with the simplest of resources.
Unfortunately next we have a few records by the awful Garbage, who for some reason I think I really liked back in the day, starting with their third single, 'Only Happy When It Rains' (1995). Everything about Garbage was like a ready-made parody of themselves and this single proves the point. It's goth-lite, it's silly, it's absurd in its mock-seriousness and it really is mystifying as to what people heard in it. As an absurdist counterpoint to the cheery idiocy of Oasis and the sunny smart-arsery of Blur I suppose it struck a chord but really the bottom line is that it just isn't any good. B-sides 'Girl Don't Come' and 'Sleep' are respectively a terrible dark rock song and a dismal attempt at doing what the Cranes were achieving much more succesfully and the two songs are even less interesting in their attempt to provide a dark pop flipside to the Britpop wave than the A-side.
The self-titled debut album released in 1995 is really still surprisingly bad. It's biggest crime is its total redundancy. There is truly no need for this album ever to have been made and the fact that it was a smash is a damning demonstration of just how polarized the indie scene had become and consequently just how vapid the more commercial side of it had ended up. We can all thank Nevermind for basically breaking fifteen years of astonishing creativity in the indie community, but we'll come on to that later... Anyway, the Garbage album is a lot of hot air blown into a vacuum and it doesn't really warrant any particular attention beyond the fact that something worked for a mass audience. Amazing to think that Curve were much, much better. That's how bad this stuff is. None of the tunes really stick and each one of them may seem to be a powerhouse of production but when it comes down to it this is poorly conceived pop music with uninteresting melodies and a somewhat lacklustre sense of structure and as a result the fact that it's hideously overproduced just leaves it a gluey mass of tiresome noise.
The 'Queer' 7" (1995) A-side is meant to be a creepy, loping gloom-pop song but it's just another tedious dirge masquerading as menace. The B-side is a stereotypical Adrian Sherwood remix which couldn't sound more exactly of its time if it tried (like absolutely everything that Sherwood has ever touched). Likewise with the 'Stupid Girl' 7" (1996). The A-side is at least a half-hearted attempt at a big rock song and the B-side another yawnsome remix of another track from the album, in this case a remix by the band themselves of the bland 'Dog New Tricks'. Similarly we have the 'Milk' 7" (1996) which is not the album version but instead has two boring remixes of the slurringly dull song, this time one by the band and the other by 1996's favourite Bristolian, Tricky.
To be completely honest, the main reason that I bought any of these records was because I got them in their super-limited editions, either entirely encased in plastic, or in cloth covers, or whatever and I thought they'd be worth a ton of money. They never were. Anyway, by the time I had picked up second album, Version 2.0 (1998) I realised that both the band and a rich future were a hopelessly lost cause. Version 2.0 at least has the grace to be unapologetic about its money-grabbing pop ideology and it comes across as more honest (if more essentially unpleasant) as a result. It's a generally easier listen too, although also in fact an even worse record. The pop smarts are more finely tuned and the egregious bludgeoning of the production is more smartly incorporated into the overall structure of the record. The problem is that it's still rubbish. Shirley Manson's gothic self-flagellation is transparently fallacious and the whole thing absolutely reeks of opportunism. And her lyrics, dear lord, are truly appalling. Once again, even the song titles are a parody of themselves: 'I Think I'm Paranoid', 'Medication', 'Wicked Ways', it's all like a joke that wasn't particularly funny to begin with still being told with enthusiasm by a dying comedian. Between Nevermind and The Downward Spiral the truth of "major label indies" was becoming sickeningly clear and although the NME weren't prepared to accept it, Garbage really forced the choice to either give up trying or to dig much, much deeper to find the fertile seeds.
And last for today we have the blessed relief of some challenging avant-composition with Jim O'Rourke and David Grubbs' collaborative Gastr Del Sol and their debut album, The Serpentine Similar (1993). Now this is composition for a modern age, never mind cruddy pop music, if you want to know where should and could be heading, this is the real deal. Difficult, uncomfortable and never prepared to either settle or relax, Gastr Del Sol's sole remit was to experiment, to use every possible resource for manipulation and to create a musical context in which all things are translatable. First tune, the 9-minute piano and vocal workout of 'A Watery Kentucky' shows off O'Rourke and Grubbs' avant tricks pretty adeptly, snakily winding it's way around a central motif which changes only subtly but transforms completely as a result. Essentially that's the trick for all these pieces, from the superb juddering guitar thud of 'Ursus Arctos Wonderfilis' to the staggering piano on 'Eye Street', a central core around which themes wind and unwind with the occasional vocal embellishment (which basically tends to constitute of O'Rourke mumbling about something or other). 'For Soren Mueller' is similar in some ways to the work of June of '44, with rattling drums and jittery, spindly guitar lines which suddenly and unpredictably briefly break out into frenzied spattering rhythm and noise. It's all closest in spirit to post-rock, if you want to classify it, but it really most appropriately sits in a modern classical composition framework than a rock one and it sets out a wealth of possibilities for exploration and innovation while being quite comfortable to exist in its own isolated context.
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