If you google for "garbage", you get 17.8 million options.
 Since the past week and longer have seen my head regularly filled with the stuff (some deposited here), I'm glad the first of those millions is the Garbage from Edinburgh, with Shirley Manson up front, a sexy lady.
Be warned, if your computer sound is turned right up when you click that link, you get one hell of a noise! That is what I wanted the instant I became Factory-free for a whole day.
After more than three years of hassle and pain before an almost wrecked band got a fourth album out last month, the title track on 'Bleed Like Me' says it all, neatly summed up by Aidan Vaziri:
"Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl sits in on the drums for the menacing 'Bad Boyfriend' [and, wow, do you notice! Grohl pounds that kit, and also helped Shirley and the boys get it together again, she told 'Les Inrocks' (issue of April 13-19, 2005] but it's the confessional title track "Bleed Like Me' -- part 'Walk on the Wild Side,' part therapy session for former cutter Manson -- that shatters Garbage's image as the ultimate non-stick studio band. 'You should see my scars,' goes the chorus. And, for once, Manson is actually willing to reveal them" (Amazon UK).
If you're into hard rock and often biting lyrics telling tough sides of our times -- 'Why Do You Love Me?' and 'Boys Wanna Fight', for instance -- Shirley comes up with the goods and is on fine form. Bitter the album may be sometimes, but that's not always a bad thing. Especially when there's anger and bitterness about politics and liars: a great comeback.
Being increasingly bored by politicians and stupidities doesn't mean being switched off to the people who yell at them, but 'Bleed Like Me' is a good dose of mental hygiene about messes between the rest of us too.
I don't mind the occasional "rewind" to make out what Manson is singing when the band breaks in at its loudest. I reckon Marianne will love this; where would I be if the Kid had not many moons ago done me the favour of hauling over to the Trash can, along with Death and other modern musical horrors at a Virgin shop? This is a favour I can repay now in kind with some VoWs she's not yet heard.
Garbage isn't always heavy, indeed 'Sex is Not the Enemy' (as one song has it) and they have a good fansite in the 'Garbage Box'.
On the iPod, by the way, I much prefer to leave the equalizer switched off and listen to good songs as they come rather than filtered by fiddling. After several months with the things, I'd add that the EarJam clip-ons provided by Griffin are the cheapest of the range of indispensable improvements to Apple's earbuds, a real improvement on already good sound. In the Métro, I only say this to the most attractive and interesting-looking fellow travellers I spot.
They invariably prove approachable. I enjoy such underground sharing of tips, tunes and "what do you think of that book?" etc, but won't write another entry about how iPods make it very easy to talk to the right kind of strangers who take no offence and don't feel threatened until Cathy has fine-tuned my findings. She's begun explaining how it's different for her on suburban trains. Attitudes! Such details are important if you chat people up as often I do when both parties are in it for the fun.
 Readers have been so bored of late by mental rewiring matters I've raised I'll head straight for another changed soul, Alanis Morissette, who's so famous a singer-songwriter already, good at encouraging others, that what's really worth pointing out is that if you go to the iTMS and pick up her own iTunes Originals collection, even the few words of introduction she gives to each song are worth the effort. The picture with Steve Mitchell's © was nicked from 'Musicpix.net,' which is also good for interviews and things.
Morissette used to be a very angry woman, still is, but channels it entertainingly and even talks about spiritual development without being a pseudo-hip slime-bag. Her selection ranges from songs off 'Jagged Little Pill', including the blistering 'You Oughta Know', of 1995 to recent, cautious "let's have a love-in" offerings. The latter are tinged with enough revisited cynicism and realism to spare non-Americans that otherwise inescapable feeling they can give us there's so much cuddling, soul-bearing and light you want to be sick over the toilet or them. I know she's Canadian really and they don't like being mixed up.
Incidentally I reckon Alanis knows what to tell people who are not Garbage and ask "but why do you love somebody?" when the answer is "because I do. Don't ask such idiotic questions, I've got no explanations." That was an aside.
Nâdiya. I promised.
It's hard to forget a VoW who takes you by storm. Somebody English remarked that he hadn't got a clue what she sings about on '16/9' and couldn't care less because "it's not wotcha say, it's how you say it!"
Quite. In fact -- no, you may not have another picture of this Algerian-born stunner -- Nâdiya is one of the closest I've got to singers where you could just throw in the towel and simply tell iTunes to stick her under "unclassifiable". These categories are a nuisance as it is, but I suppose some of them help.
She uses big-screen movie style soundbits, rap, hip-hop, orchestral gushing, plain modern pop and electronica as well as some great singing about love and its muddles to take you on a roller-coaster ride. One minute, you're stuck in the Wild West, another you're on an aircraft carrier, the next you're so far out in space you've no idea where you'll be when you hit planet Earth again with a bang.
Somebody once composed 'Theme for an imaginary Western' (actually, several people have) and Nâdiya reminds you there's no need to bother with the cinema when you can have it all in your head and, with luck, in bed. She's also decidedly sexy and again that's not all; she's no dumb blonde whose body alone makes you (me, anyway) feel extremely imaginative.
There's a combination of fragility and genuine self-assurance that makes her one of those people you'd like to get stuck with on a desert island, not just for the disc, but since she could probably get you off by twisting time or warping space. Meanly, I'll not translate this:
"Happé par les trous noirs qui résident au sein de mon regard
Tu recherches cette lueur qui se révèle à la faveur du soir
Le doux parfum d'un kiss ... qui s'échange sans gravité
Décollage pour les abysses de ma véritable personnalité
Refrain:
Space ... Mon amour est space .... Mais si tu peux ...
Entrer dans ma dimension c'est ok pour un vol à deux
Space ... Mon amour est space ... Mais si tu veux
Ressentir mes vibrations c'est moi qui mène le jeu"
There's wicked wordplay in the inviting opening of her song called 'Space'.
The VoWs admired here are very different one from another, though someone asked "Why do all these women on your iPod look so good?" (an iPod Photo is worth the extra for that alone) but that's another silly question.
These three have one thing in common: a likeable habit of throwing contradictions and paradoxes at you and saying: "That's the world, that's me, that's life. Live with it."
Such invitations in musical form are irresistible. Like many other singer-songwriters, they're an enjoyable way of living with everything nobody can explain.
BJ said "There must be a verbal equivalent of tone-deaf for people we sub who simply can't put the right words in the right places."
I was tempted to admit I often put the right words in the wrong places, which annoys other people, but didn't and said "What about 'word-blind'?"
This led to some fuckinfilosofy I'll leave out, but I did add "I simply cannot get into the heads of people who treat music like wallpaper."
We had to agree there's no accounting for people's differences. Me, I am going to the movies.
1:19:26 AM link 
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