Tuesday, February 29, 2000
Pumpkins back in guitar and drum attack mode in 'Machina'
BY LARRY NAGER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Billy Corgan really does think he's God.
At least for the opening track and first single from the new Smashing Pumpkins album, hitting stores today.
He takes an apathetic Supreme Being's point of view for “The Everlasting Gaze,” singing “You know I'm not dead. I'm just living inside my head, forever waiting.”
The next three songs also confront larger powers. In “Sunshowers” it's the “rain (that) falls on everyone, the same old rain.” In “Stand Inside Your Love” it's the transcendence of love, “Who wouldn't be the one you love? Who wouldn't stand inside your love?” In “I of the Mourning,” Mr. Corgan is a supplicant to the great god of the airwaves. “Radio, play my favorite song,” he pleads.
Spirituality runs through much of the 15 songs on the Pumpkins' first set of new material since 1998's Adore. They may be pretentious (a Mr. Corgan trademark), but his serious themes come as a relief in the age of teen pop and rap-rock.
But what really makes Machina worth the ride is the sound. It's a welcome return to the guitar-and-drums attack of pre-Adore Pumpkins.
@subhed:Chamberlin back
@body:
Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin is back after the heroin death of sideman Jonathan Melvoin and his own addiction. The other members of the quartet are expendable (Melissa Auf Der Maur has replaced bassist D'Arcy; no one cares), but the Pumpkins will be the Pumpkins as long as Mr. Corgan's guitars and Mr. Chamberlin's drums create their densely driving, sonic storm.
And from “The Everlasting Gaze,” the Pumpkins are in full swirl. It's a sound to get lost in, as Mr. Corgan's adenoidal tenor howl rides a hypnotic wall of sound.
It's hard to maintain that intensity for a 73-minutes-plus disc, and Mr. Corgan doesn't. Machina bogs down in the middle with the slogging filler, “This Time.”
“The Imploding Voice” is much better, a comparatively straight-ahead rocker with a some metaphysics thrown in, “Everywhere you are, is everywhere you've been.”
Then it's 10 minutes of moody art-rock with “Glass and the Ghost Children,” using processed vocals and spoken words to little effect. It sounded much better when the Pumpkins did it at Bogart's last April.
Perhaps realizing he has stretched listeners' patience to breaking, Mr. Corgan follows with the galloping love song “Wound.” “If you love, I will love; run, I will run, to my last breath.” Mr. Corgan's abrasive vocals save “Wound” from corniness, but it's Mr. Chamberlin's propulsive percussion that makes its heart beat.
In “The Crying Tree” Mr. Corgan crosses into clumsily adolescent, attempted poetry. “I've been waiting like a knife, to cut open your heart and bleed my soul to you,” he shrieks.
“With Every Light” finds him back in love of the spiritual sort, enjoying a transcendent moment amid a bouncy backbeat. “And every light I've found, is every light that's shining down on me. I'm never alone.”
The mercurial Mr. Corgan follows that with the dark “Blue Skies Bring Tears” and its opening line, “Unleash the Armageddon.”
In keeping with the bipolar nature of Machina, the disc closes with the jaunty “Age of Innocence,” mood-swinging into its chorus, “Desolation yes, hesitation no.”
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