Shirley Manson Leads Garbage at Webster Hall Willie Davis for The New York Times Garbage With Shirley Manson fronting, the band brought songs from its new album to Webster Hall. "This is my cougar song," Shirley Manson told the audience at Webster Hall on Tuesday night, where her reactivated band, Garbage, was on tour behind its first new album in seven years, "Not Your Kind of People" (StunVolume). She looked more proud than rueful. Then she sang "Battle in Me," a stomping, predatory, drunken come-on: "Lets take a torch to the past and the future," she sang. And let's make out/I won't tell your girlfriend. Temptress, lover, sufferer, scrapper - those have been Ms. Manson's personae since Garbage started in 1995. In other eras she might have been a pop torch singer, a soul belter or a new-wave frontwoman: a Shirley Bassey, a Dusty Springfield, a Chrissie Hynde. There's a little of each of them in her voice. But in the mid-1990s rock was pushing darker thoughts and heftier beats. Garbage's drummer, Butch Vig, had produced the grunge spearhead, Nirvana's 1991 album "Nevermind"; Nine Inch Nails had emerged with its blend of dance-music electronics and dire hard rock. Garbage rode both approaches to million-selling albums. Songs like "Stupid Girl" used pop structures as they seesawed between electronics and power chords, while Ms. Manson exulted in goth-girl depressiveness or vengeful bluntness. But by the early 2000s pop had moved elsewhere, and Garbage's solid songwriting met diminishing returns. Yet the old songs were memorable enough to draw loud singalongs more than a decade later. And on "Not Your Kind of People" Garbage returns without attempting some major makeover; at Webster Hall a handful of new songs fit easily alongside the older ones. On the new album electronics pump, drums crash, guitars blare and choruses home in for the kill: "I won't be your dirty little secret," Ms. Manson sang in "Automatic Systematic Habit," denouncing a lying lover. The change is in the lyrics, which at times acknowledge some growing up. "Rage against the dying light," she urged in "Big Bright World"; in "Blood for Poppies" the narrator was a soldier in Afghanistan. While pop has gone happily electronic, Garbage did the opposite onstage, where it was an unabashed hard-rock band. There were some electronic drumbeats mixed in, but Mr. Vig steamrollered over them with live muscle. The rest of the band - Duke Erikson and Steve Marker on guitars and, on this tour, Eric Avery on bass - plowed into the riffs while leaving Ms. Manson plenty of room. With her hair up in two coppery tufts, she stalked the stage in high-heeled boots, sometimes pacing in a circle like an animal in a cage. In the course of each song she let her voice rise in anger, contempt or passion. Back in the 1990s Garbage linked those messages to what was mainstream rock. Now, in a way, the band is even more defiant.