A quarter of a century has passed, and Shirley Manson still wants to tear your little world apart — especially if you support the patriarchies and idiocracies destroying the planet. On Garbage’s seventh offering, No Gods No Masters (a slogan for anarchists and labor unions alike), Garbage’s redheaded Molotov cocktail explodes at evangelicals apathetically offering prayers after shootings, “The Men Who Rule the World,” shitty men in general (in case they don’t rule the world), and, as is often the case on a Garbage record, herself. She broods her venom with glorious vigor throughout, as her bandmates teeter between new wave and industrial stomp depending on the mood of the song, and together they command one memorable pop melody after another as if nothing has changed since 1995 in the best way possible.
On No Gods No Masters, Garbage finally have a sure footing in the sounds and sentiments that made them great originally. After Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera coaxed the spotlight away from Garbage as pop hit makers in the late Nineties, the band toyed around with their sound, which started out as a beautifully bizarre mixture of trip-hop, grunge, and synth-rock on their self-titled 1995 debut. Sometimes they’d go a little too pop (the supremely catchy “Androgyny”) or a little too punk (“Why Do You Love Me,” their last Top 100 hit). They always sounded like Garbage, but it wasn’t until 2016’s Strange Little Birds that they made an album as consistently Garbage since 1998’s Version 2.0.
That flame still burns on No Gods No Masters. Part of the fuel is Manson’s turgid contempt for injustice, but what makes the record so good is how the rest of Garbage matches her tone perfectly with keyboard glitches, buzzsaw guitar, and clever but never obtrusive rhythm loops. On “The Men Who Rule the World,” they reimagine Bowie’s Young Americans as an industro-pop funk while Manson rails against the Richie Riches funding the destruction of Earth’s environment. It’s like Nine Inch Nails’ downward spiral if Trent Reznor turned his hatred outward and used a mirror ball. Garbage summon the same power, in inverse proportion, on the quiet “Waiting for God,” a powerful Black Lives Matter–inspired elegy for black Americans who died “riding their bike or [for being] guilty of walking alone.” It’s chilling, arresting, and beautiful at the same time. “Who have we become?” Manson asks, her voice harmonizing with itself like a chorus of angels.
Manson’s personal demons present themselves on “The Creeps,” an ode to how depressing it is to see a cutout of yourself at a front-lawn yard sale set to new-wave keyboards à la Berlin’s “The Metro,” and “Wolves,” an apology for letting friends down in the past with a chorus (“No one can say that I didn’t love you”) that she sings in a quirky, instantly memorable way. On “Godhead (Dick 101),” she whispers vulgarities like, “Would you deceive me if I had a dick?/Would you know it/Would you blow it?” with the intention of skewering religious leaders who decided God is a man.
Her breakup-revenge fantasy, “A Woman Destroyed,” is set to a piercing, horror film score, and the album closer “This City Will Kill You” pairs sweetly descending guitar, Bond-theme horns, and a light trap beat as Manson wonders “Why was I the one to survive?” But those two are separated by “Flipping the Bird” and “No Gods No Masters,” a couple more new-wavey middle fingers directed at conceited men, that show how adept Garbage are at pairing sweet melodies with noisy textures. But for all of the group’s abundant signature moves on No Gods No Masters, the record never feels like a nostalgia bid. That’s because after 26 years, Garbage know who they are and are comfortable with themselves. It’s the men who rule the world who should feel uncomfortable.
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More than most bands that began in the backseat of the family car, Car Seat Headrest seem well-suited for a high-concept rock opera. From the band’s earliest days, when the project was just Will Toledo recording alone in Virginia, songs were never just as simple as singer and subject—his 2011 album Twin Fantasy was a romantic epic sheepishly masquerading as a ramshackle emo record. His 2020 record Making a Door Less Open was essentially a treatise on fame itself, and culminated in Toledo adopting the persona “Trait,” a gas-masked, bunny-eared protagonist previously introduced in a Car Seat Headrest side project called 1 Trait Danger. When Car Seat Headrest began teasing their new record, The Scholars, via an alternate reality game-style website, it felt like an appropriately elaborate rollout for a band who’s rarely taken reality at face value.
And yet, Toledo was hesitant to dive head-on into the full-scale world-building of a rock opera. To hear him tell it, he seemed afraid that he might stumble into one of the genre’s many pitfalls. “You pull something off of The Wall—it’s not necessarily going to be banging on its own. It needs that context,” he told the podcast How Long Gone. “I like when you can pull a song out and have that individual piece.” It’s a brutal assessment of Pink Floyd, though it comes from a deep respect (the original version of Twin Fantasy’s “High to Death” interpolated “Jugband Blues,” after all).
On The Scholars, every song aims to be an “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2”—nine self-contained epics that, Toledo hopes, will sum to a greater whole. But overburdened by a confusing plot, with no room for a listener to digest the bevvy of settings and characters he’s just introduced, The Scholars is mired in and muddied by the madcap impulses of its creator, drowning out what would otherwise be some of the band’s most inspired, experimental compositions to date. The Scholars is a rock opera for the playlist era; it wants to contain both a richly textured narrative—with all the character development, internal motivations, and rising and falling action required therein—and also nine songs that can stand alone, plucked out of context and jutted up against whatever other songs happen to land on Spotify’s autoplay.
So, the plot: The Scholars takes us to the imaginary Parnassus University, where we meet a cast of students who are all on parallel searches for meaning: our narrator, the Chanticleer; Beolco, a playwright who’s paranoid his best ideas are behind him: “A thousand ideas piled up in the tomb,” he says on “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)”; Devereaux, the “son of a backwaters religious conservative” who hopes to find higher meaning on the libertine lawns of the American university (“Devereaux”); and Rosa, a medical student who can revive the dead (“Gethsemane”). There is also, of course, a local community based on dressing in furs and feathers (“Lady Gay Approximately”), which I’ll let the Redditors decipher.
These plot points matter as much as you care to listen closely: There are pivotal moments in the form of a deadly plant and clown raid that I somehow missed in the first listen, too distracted by the stylistic changeups and clouded metaphors crammed into every song. Most of the key narrative drivers are buried in liner notes on the lyric sheet but aren't represented anywhere in the music. Certain songs carry enough momentum to warrant repeat listens out of the album context: “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)” takes the familiar punk-leaning pop shape that has defined Car Seat Headrest, the chiming strums of an acoustic guitar giving way to drum fills, reverb, and Toledo’s fuzzy, clipped vocals. The same goes for “True/False Lover,” which careens from guitar solo to verse with the practiced ease of someone who’s spent the past 15 years writing hooks.
But the preceding three songs, which range from 10 minutes on the short end to 18 at the longest, test the premise of the album and the patience of the listener. “Gethsemane” begins quietly with just a synth and Toledo’s voice; “Reality” brings to mind Air’s Moon Safari; “Planet Desperation” is the most forthrightly self-serious, with somber piano and the slow beat of a kick drum. Yet they all manage to wind up in about the same place at their halfway points—stuttering prog interludes, towering electric guitar solos, belted refrains that seem to come out of nowhere and fade just as quickly. Storylines are lost in the mayhem: I feel like I’m catching the plot but then as soon as guitarist Ethan Ives, as Parnassus’ Liberal Arts school dean Hyacinth, sings “I would go out/But there’s a world war,” I feel totally lost again. It’s almost impressive how much these disparate modes seem to converge on a central sound, and how much that sound boils down to: play loud, play fast, repeat. There’s a reason, it seems, that The Wall includes comparatively quieter tracks like “Empty Spaces” or “One of My Turns”—if every song needs to stand alone, they each require some sort of internal climax, a summit that feels exhausting to climb song after song.
Still, The Scholars is filled with compelling experimentation and glimpses of greater potential. Toledo’s voice sounds stronger than ever here, warmly recorded in analog, and songs like “Devereaux,” which lean into power pop influences like the Cars and Cheap Trick, feel like the most successful attempt to combine narrative with concise songcraft. “CCF,” one of the album’s standout songs, sounds like a potential future path for Car Seat Headrest—one that introduces elements of jazz and funk to his fundamentally scrappy sound without overpowering it with heavy-handed signifiers and seemingly endless trips up and down the neck of his guitar. Car Seat Headrest is a band almost predestined for the kind of high-stakes storytelling a rock opera requires—if only Toledo could let his own ideas breathe.
