billy corgan

I fear that I’m ordinary, just like everyone – Five From The Smashing Pumpkins

/ Tony / 24 Comments

I’ve been spending a lot of time with The Smashing Pumpkins’ music recently. To be more specific, that of their first ‘run’. You know, that glorious period captured on Rotten Apples from 1991 thru 2000. My wife – in true enabler fashion – got a bit trigger happy in Rough Trade last year when she saw the Melon Collie And The Infinite Sadness box and, with a couple of purchases since their albums to that point now sit in my record collection and indulged in a plenty.

Never knowingly non-grandiose, there was always something different about Smashing Pumpkins that stood them apart from the pack in that golden era of alt. rock in the early nineties. There’s wasn’t the raw angst of those bands hailing from the Pacific North West, instead they proffered a more richly layered and often, well, fucking gorgeous sound propelled by the distinctive voice and brilliant guitar work of Billy Corgan. The rest of the band – James Iha, Jimmy Chamberlain and D’arcy Wretzky – always looked cool as hell while Corgan maintained the look of someone apart. I was chatting about the band this weekend with the owner of my record store of choice and he maintains that Billy, while alway a bit weird, went full-on knobhead when he shaved off his hair. I think he has a point.

So, harkening back to a time when he was just a bit of a pretentious control-freak rather than full-on David Icke supporting lunatic, I thought I’d drop five examples of tunes from that period they could do no wrong while steering clear of the obvious, but still great, choices of ‘Today’, ‘Tonight, Tonight’, ‘Disarm’ etc. It’s also worth pointing out first that ‘Mayonaise’ remains the single best thing they’ve put to tape but having already blogged about that, I won’t do so again here.

Bury Me

First album Gish is full of absolute belters of which ‘Bury Me’ is a great example of the band’s harder side – delivering pummelling riffs that would be at home on a Soundgarden album underpinned with Corgan’s innate ability to unleash a guitar solo and drop down to a nagging melody and expansiveness of sound inside of four and a half minutes.

Drown

Eight and a bit minutes of brilliance complete with feedback and an E-Bow solo, on an already unimpeachable collection, ‘Drown’ felt like an outlier then on the Seattle-focused Singles soundtrack and still feels like one today in the same way as Paul Westerberg’s cuts. It is, however, a massive early highlight. It was written after Gish and serves as a bridge between that album and their next. Due to label politics – Alice In Chains etc were on Epic as was the soundtrack – it was never released as a single despite radio love. Second only to Mayoinaise for me.

Soma

A rare Corgan / Iha co-write, ‘Soma’ is the centrepiece of Siamese Dream – a six and a half minute song that manages to encapsulate every characteristic of the band’s sound, managing to move from the tender to ferocious with a dynamic few could muster.

Starla

They’d only released two studio album when Pisces Iscariot arrived in 1994 as a collection of B-sides and previously unreleased songs to demonstrate that The Smashing Pumpkins had tunes to spare before we even knew what 1995 would bring. With songs that are almost as strong as those released as many already released, Pisces Iscariot is that rarest of things – an ‘odds and sods’ album that’s nearly essential. ‘Starla’ is an 11-minute epic that should be entered as evidence that Corgan was one of the era’s greatest rock guitarists.

Muzzle

How to choose a song from the behemoth that is Melon Collie And The Infinite Sadness? A 28 song double album with very little filler… One of the most ambitious and indulgent albums out there, a slab of great music that’s stocked to folds with tunes songs including ‘Tonight, Tonight’, ‘1979’, ‘Zero’, ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings’, ‘Thirty Three’, ‘Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans’….. well, I really like ‘Muzzle’ so let’s go with that.

In Spite Of My Rage

/ Tony / 2 Comments

I recently had the pleasure to hear listened to the new Smashing Pumpkins album Oceania. Thankfully I did this via Spotify for had I paid more than the % of my monthly premium account it took to sit through it I’d have been a bit cheesed off.

I’m not sure why the media (think Rolling Stone, Pitchfork etc) took the strange step of giving this such a push – aside from the obvious industry politics. The biggest superlative I remember being thrown at it was that it sounded familiar, like Pumpkins of old. If, by that, they mean Billy Corgan not giving a fuck about the rest of the band then, yes, it may well be. In the past this meant playing all the parts now it seems not caring who he is playing with.

smashing pumpkins 2012

Billy & The New Kids

To be honest it’s one of the most disappointing things I’ve heard so far this year from the Big Name Bands. The only passing familiarity to old Pumpkins Gold (surely a worthy a blog of its own soon) is the vocal dynamics available thanks to Corgan taking on another female bassist. In fact, it’s the strange line-up of this band that means I tend to refer to them as Billy & The New Kids rather than besmear the name of that band that recorded Siamese Dream.

Let’s be fair though. The New Kids do a good job. They’re clearly capable musicians – how else would they get the gig – and hold their own. There are some good songs on hear. Some might even be among the finest stuff he’s peddled out in years -Pinwheels, Violet Rays and the title track Oceania in particular stand out. It’s a good country mile stronger than the dire ‘comeback’ album Zietgest. The problem is that while the New Kids try hard, it no longer feels like a band, more one man’s newest backing band. There’s no weight to it. A feeling of clout is missing.

Perhaps it’s for that reason – for the fact that of the faces under the ‘Pumpkins’ banner now only one looks familiar (though as a pale, slightly wrinkled, prune like version of the strangely endearing face that once sung of Spaceboys and Bullets With Butterfly Wings)  – that this album isn’t doing it for me. Or, I imagine, a lot of fans.

So instead of sitting back waiting to be amazed I find myself listening, instead, for things to go ‘ugh’ over – like how when Billy sings the line “never let the summer catch you down” on Celestials it comes out as “never let the salmon get you down”.

I should point out that this is perhaps more upsetting as I’d quite liked some of the recent stuff put out as part of the Teargarden by Kaleidyscope  songs. “Song For A Son” was a slab of what once made me listen to them in the first place.

If this were a Billy Corgan album (even if he called it Billy & The New Kids) or even with a new band, I’d receive Oceania – on this point, seriously; wtaf is with these ridiculous bloody names, you’re not coming across as mystical or mysterious just some strangely creepy old hippy uncle who needs to put the tie-dye shirt away – a bit more warmly. I’m sure critics and fans would be beside themselves too. But to call it a Smashing Pumpkins album despite that there’s only Pumpkin on it, reeks of what it really is: “The new album by Billy Corgan who knows it won’t sell if it’s not called Smashing Pumpkins.”

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just me that hates it when this happens. It’s not the first instance and sure won’t be the last – there’s the on going Guns N Roses chuckle and the new Courney Love’s Hole (though I saw that Hole had a genuine reunion that went without controversy recently) – instance of frontmen realising they can’t pack em in on their own like they do with the band.

Or perhaps it’s nostalgia. The biggest impact the new album had on me was to go back to the older, full-band albums and listen to those again.

Let’s finish this on a comparison.


VS my favourite (and, thanks to a Rolling Stone poll, I see the fan favourite):