Fifteen years and three albums after their previous greatest-hits compilation,
Garbage released another hefty collection for listeners in search of the band's biggest moments and overlooked late-era fare.
Anthology packs a punch -- on the CD version anyway -- with 35 prime cuts spanning all their albums from 1995's seminal
Garbage to 2021's excellent return-to-form
No Gods No Masters. Longtime fans will notice that 2007's
Absolute Garbage comp is replicated almost song-for-song. The most notable additions on
Anthology give just due to
Version 2.0's atmospheric stunner "The Trick Is to Keep Breathing";
Beautiful Garbage's ahead-of-its-time "Androgyny" (a baffling omission on the 2007 set) and "Breaking Up the Girl"; and
Bleed Like Me favorites "Sex Is Not the Enemy" and "Run Baby Run" (though it fails to include "It's All Over But the Crying," which would have made this perfect). From there, it's fresh territory with band-favorite B-sides/stand-alones, a slew of tracks from
Not Your Kind of People, and a smattering from
Strange Little Birds and
No Gods. As an entry point to the group's multi-decade career,
Anthology is an obvious place to start, justifying Garbage's placement in the '90s pantheon with a near-perfect first disc and a second disc that shines a spotlight on their underrated 2000s-2010s period that the non-faithful may not have had the chance to hear. ~ Neil Z. Yeung
