I generally enjoy reading the Pitchfork Review. I enjoy the concept -- in general, it's a deep dive into an album that was underappreciated in its time. I can also respect the use of creative license by building up an album into something greater than it was, after all, that's what hooks the reader and gets them invested in songs or artists they may not be too familiar with. But on one hand, there's mild exaggeration and overreach to drive home a point, and on the other hand, there's this ludicrous review of Garbage's second album by Sadie Sartini Garner.
The first few paragraphs are devoted to woefully overheated prose about the purported trailblazing greatness of Shirley Manson, falling somewhere between a publicists' cry for attention and fanfic-lite. "Female fronted rock band" was a tired cliche by the time Garbage hit the scene, smart and engaging women leading male-dominated bands was well understood and completely accepted by all. Manson wasn't the least bit more interesting than anyone else, she was merely more successful than most. Let's move on, because that's the least of this article's problems.
The article then struggled to attribute an iota of originality to Garbage. They were one of the most derivative major bands of the 90's! Garner even lists all the bands whose ideas they lifted, albeit in an offhandedly vague way, e.g. "Curve had already bridged the worlds of shoegaze and UK club music". Garbage's entire act -- their sound, image, and attitude -- was a near carbon copy of Curve, and everybody who listened to Curve in the 90's knew it!
Then there's this howler, "No band did more to shape the techno-utopian vibes of Y2K than Garbage did with Version 2.0." Even by the logic presented in this article, that sentence is nonsensical. The final two paragraphs are about Garbage's rapid descent into irrelevance just two years later. They shaped the future, but when the future arrived (a whopping 24 months later?!) they were unwelcome in it? Garner tries to write a weepy ending by blaming other bands for overtaking Garbage and stealing the future out from under their noses. No, Garbage were copycatting poseurs who sold millions of CDs by successfully marketing the ideas of other, better bands, and when their narrow window of commercial opportunity closed, they were done. They were overtaken by fresher, hungrier bands that sounded different than them. Everyone got what they deserved. As for the "techno-utopian Y2K" vibes, it's almost as if dance-rock hybrids with a dash of end of the millennium uncertainty wasn't being peddled by ... just about every rock band that dabbled in electronica from 1997 onward.
