Back to basics

Last week brought a significant milestone in the long, recently rocky history of the band called Garbage.

Mere hours after finishing off a comeback set Monday night before a capacity crowd at L.A.’s Wiltern Theatre, the quartet’s strong, back-to-basics fourth album, “Bleed Like Me,” greeted fans entering record stores everywhere.

“And of course we all have high hopes for it,” says drummer-producer Butch Vig on behalf of his bandmates, singer-siren Shirley Manson and guitarists Steve Marker and Duke Erikson.

“But these days it’s very hard for anyone to stay on the pop-culture radar for longer than 15 minutes, and we’re not the fresh face out there anymore,” Vig adds. “We think we made a really vital-sounding record, so we’re hoping there’s still an audience out there that will find it.”

At this point, though, sales potential is an afterthought. It’s really a wonder this album exists at all.

“To us, it’s a massive success just because we got it finished,” Vig says.

Indeed, “Bleed Like Me” is the one that almost tore Garbage apart, and it may still be the band’s swan song.

To understand what went wrong, you have to go back to Sept. 11, 2001.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks, no one seemed interested in a relatively frivolous pop trifle like “Beautiful Garbage,” the group’s third effort, which appeared that Oct. 2. Despite acclaim from Rolling Stone (which ranked it among the year’s 10 best recordings), the album quickly sank.

“The hangover effect” from that, as Vig calls it, was soul-crushing, and the tour that ensued was difficult. Plagued by ear infections, Vig eventually had to bow out of remaining dates under doctor’s orders.

“And after 10 years together,” he says, “the personal drama escalated. Nit-picky things that normally you’d just let go of started to become huge issues among the four of us.”

Things weren’t much improved by the time Manson and the boys re-entered the studio in summer 2003. They intended to make a quick rock record, largely free from the electronica that dappled their previous two discs – including 1998’s “Version 2.0,” which garnered a Grammy nod for Album of the Year.

“But then we just started arguing about everything,” remembers Vig, who built a reputation in the ‘90s by producing albums for the likes of Nirvana, the Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth. “We couldn’t agree on anything. We weren’t talking. We weren’t listening to each other’s ideas.

“Shirley was having writer’s block and felt uninspired by the tracks that we were coming up with. It was the culmination of a lot of growing problems.”

So in October, after half a year of fruitless on-and-off recording, he says, “I just walked in one day and said, ‘That’s it. I can’t take this anymore.’ It was just spiraling downhill.”

It took three months and a confidence boost from Foo Fighter Dave Grohl (who plays drums on one new Garbage cut) for Vig to “clear my head, analyze the situation and decide if it was still important to me to carry on, try to finish another record.”

“Bleed Like Me” is a definite departure from its predecessor. Leaping as it did from bubblegum to contemporary R&B to the sort of melodic, industrial stomp the band built its name on, “Beautiful Garbage” was a very fractured album.

“Each track almost sounds like a different band,” Vig says. “We made a conscious decision to make it like that.”

With “Bleed Like Me,” however, he “wanted to capture what we sound like on stage, which is loud guitars, bass and drums, and also have the record sound more cohesive all the way through.”

So far, the return-to-form approach is working. After a long dry spell, Garbage is back on alt-rock radio thanks to the Stone Temple Pilots-ish surge of the new single “Why Do You Love Me.”

“We’re just happy to be getting along so well,” Vig says of the band. “Who knows what will come?

“We’d love to keep doing it, but right now we look at it like, ‘Hey, we almost broke up, and this might be our last tour. Let’s go out with a bang and have fun.’ “