Single Review: Garbage – ‘No Horses’
1 min read
Coinciding with the release of their autobiography, This Is the Noise That Keeps Me Awake, and their Rage and Rapture tour with seminal new-wave outfit Blondie, Garbage has released the dark, dystopian single No Horses.
The Wisconsin based quartet have never been ones to adhere closely to convention, and indeed No Horses is almost the quintessential anti-pop song, clocking in at nearly five-and-a-half minutes of semi-industrial drone and fuzz. Refreshingly, No Horses eschews the tendency towards songs being heavily chorus oriented with the track being musically progressive while the meditatively repetitive stream of consciousness lyrics feel like the love child of George Orwell’s 1984 and Patti Smith’s Land.
Butch Vig’s mechanistic drumming – of which I am not usually a fan – provides a rigid backbone from which Duke Erikson and Steve Marker weave their bass and guitars into a gritty tapestry of dark, ominous tones, while Shirley Manson’s vocals are characteristically understated, conveying a resigned menace appropriately. After the success of last year’s Strange Little Birds, it seems that Garbage are set to confirm that their best years are not behind them.
