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=> GENERAL DISCUSSION => Topic started by: HoyaSaxa03 on July 09, 2007, 10:53:00 pm
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this is a classic Erlewine review: total context, barely talks about the actual music, completely rips the album a new asshole, and is totally right on.
good stuff.
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(paragraphs added for reading ease)
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:jcfoxzu5ldde~T1 (http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:jcfoxzu5ldde~T1)
Way back before the Smashing Pumpkins were superstars, right around the release of Siamese Dream, it was already an open secret that they were not a democracy; they were a dictatorship, ruled under the iron fist of singer/songwriter/guitarist/conceptualist Billy Corgan. He came up with their sound, equal parts metal and dream pop, he wrote the songs, and, according to most reports, he recorded almost all the guitars and bass on their albums, masterminding their sound down to the littlest details.
Anybody that meticulous was also sharp enough to know the value of image too, so Corgan knew it was better to present the Smashing Pumpkins as a full-fledged band, not a solo project, and he came up with a diverse lineup ideally matched for the alt-rock '90s: he was the skinny misfit leader, surrounded by female bassist D'Arcy, Japanese-American guitarist James Iha, and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, who came across like an old metalhead on the prowl for freaky chicks.
They didn't look like a band; they looked like the idea of a band, which was appealing in its own right, but for as photogenic as they were, the reason the Pumpkins turned into stadium-conquering monsters was Corgan's outsized music, which was nothing if not deliberately, self-consciously dramatic.
His commitment to grand gestures was cemented when he disbanded the Smashing Pumpkins at the turn of the millennium, about a year after former Hole bassist Melissa auf der Maur replaced D'Arcy and just as Iha was beginning to bolt. The group was beginning to fracture, but the retirement of the band's name seemed like confirmation that the Pumpkins were a concrete idea for Corgan, that they were a band that served a particular moment in time, and once that moment in time had passed, so had the band. The very fact that he pretty much was the Pumpkins lent this move integrity, since it was clear that Billy could keep the ball rolling, ushering new musicians in and out under the same moniker with nobody but the hardcore being any wiser, but instead of taking that easy road, he decided to make a clean break and pursue other projects.
As it turns out, the Smashing Pumpkins era did mark a phase in Corgan's career: the time that people paid attention to him. Without that name, Corgan started playing to an ever-more selective audience, first as the leader in the deceptively sunny Zwan and then on an icy, alienating 2005 solo album, The Future Embrace, where Corgan channeled his inner Martin Gore.
Neither was a radical musical departure from the Pumpkins -- even The Future Embrace had its roots in Adore -- but that didn't matter, since taken together they had the cumulative effect of marginalizing Corgan, and if there was ever a place Billy didn't want to be it was on the margin. From the very beginning, he wanted to lead the biggest, most important band in the land, eventually getting his wish as he used the indie rock underground as a catapult to mainstream stardom, but once his star began to wane he panicked and played the one card he had left in his deck: getting the band back together.
On the day The Future Embrace was released, he took out a full-page ad in his hometown paper the Chicago Tribune announcing that the Smashing Pumpkins were reuniting. The only hitch was, he didn't tell any of the other members of the impending reunion, but as it turns out, only Chamberlin -- who was already drumming with Corgan -- was interested in signing up, leaving the Smashing Pumpkins as a band in name only, a Billy Corgan project at its core.
This was precisely the very thing he seemed to avoid when he retired the band at the turn of the millennium, and returning to his marquee name gave this reunion a sense of desperation, as if he had nowhere else to go, and the ensuing 2007 album Zeitgeist does nothing to erase the suspicion that Corgan is anxious to regain his status as rock & roll god.
To this end, he makes Zeitgeist the hardest, heaviest Pumpkins album ever, layering the record with endless guitar overdubs that wind up feeling like overcompensation, not just for the synth-driven Future Embrace but as a blustering retort to any skeptic who questions the validity of this reunion.
Of course, bombast has always been par for the course for Corgan and the Pumpkins, but at their peak they truly did achieve sense of majesty, either in their dreamy, softer psychedelic side or their towering torrents of metallic guitar. Here Corgan has blunted his attack, removing any sense of beauty either in the ballads (which invariably are icy, stilted synth sculptures, not the quivering, gentle pop of "1979" or the strings and acoustic guitars of "Disarm") or the rockers, which was a key to the Pumpkins' appeal.
What made "Cherub Rock" or "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" work is how the sighing melody acted as a counterpoint to the ferocious guitars, but on Zeitgeist he repeatedly buries his threadbare melodies beneath squeals of guitar that are too processed to either soar or sear.
More than anything, it's this digitally dulled sound that saps Zeitgeist from any impact it may have, but it's also true that there's import to the title: for the first time, Corgan is trying to address the wrongs of society, which is a big change for a writer who has spent his career turning the intimate into the operatic, and it doesn't quite work.
It's a long way from complaining that the world is a vampire to detailing how it sucks your blood away, and this blatant attempt at capturing the mood of the era -- evident in the very titles of "Doomsday Clock," "United States," and "For God and Country" -- backfires, only emphasizing the desperateness behind Corgan's music here.
At his peak, he never seemed to strive for relevance -- sure, he strived to make art, but his music never seemed weighed down with being part of the, well, zeitgeist; it just came naturally to him. As the title of this purported reunion makes all too plain, Corgan is now all too consumed with being relevant, with being part of the discussion, with being part of the zeitgeist, and never has he has seemed less relevant or interesting than he does here.
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again, whether or not you're going to like this album comes down to whether or not you're a fan of Billy Corgan. If you are, you're going to like the record. If you're not, you probably won't.
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I loved the first two Smashing Pumpkins records. Loved them. After that though, all of it got old, in my opinion. (with a few gems here and there)
Truthfully, I could give a crap about them "reuniting", and the songs I've heard so far off the new album are terrible.
Also, the reviewer forgot to mention Billy Corgan's shamefull attempt at poetry a few years back.
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I think Billy Corgan must have the smallest penis ever.
Brian
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The pitchfork review is also pretty accurate.
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I read the Erlewine review (he's usually spot-on) but i'm still excited about picking up the record today. I really like 'Tarantula' and i'm sure the record will be enjoyable.
Pitchfork writers are so fucking bad I make it a point to avoid their reviews..
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Originally posted by Hoya Paranoia:
this is a classic Erlewine review: total context, barely talks about the actual music, completely rips the album a new asshole, and is totally right on.
in which case it's not an album review, it's a band history overview, or catalogue appreciation, or something else. i want to hear about the album, not about the mindset of those peripherally associated with the scene to which the artists belong. maybe i'm asking too much.
Originally posted by callat703:
again, whether or not you're going to like this album comes down to whether or not you're a fan of Billy Corgan. If you are, you're going to like the record. If you're not, you probably won't.
really? this is my biggest complaint about the review - can't an album stand on its own? i can admit that sometime douchebag and/or talentless artists can occasionally produce something good, and my artistic heroes occasionally lay turds. i don't get how you can completely write something off because of what someone has done in the past.
i've listened to Z twice now, i think it's a solid album - 8/10. being a occasional guitarist, i like what billy has done on the 6's. and i have a soft spot for anyone who can play that many instrument that (relatively) well. oh, wait, i forgot to incorporate the band's political leanings :roll:
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Originally posted by sweetcell:
this is my biggest complaint about the review - can't an album stand on its own?
i take it you don't read allmusic.com very often? as i said in the OP, erlewine's reviews are always 90% context ... especially when the band itself is about 90% hype (do you really think ole bill wants this album to "stand on its own"?)
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Originally posted by Hoya Paranoia:
Originally posted by sweetcell:
this is my biggest complaint about the review - can't an album stand on its own?
i take it you don't read allmusic.com very often? as i said in the OP, erlewine's reviews are always 90% context ... especially when the band itself is about 90% hype (do you really think ole bill wants this album to "stand on its own"?) [/b]
I'd rather hear what YOU have to say about the album, Erlewine be damned, I live for YOUR comments...only reason I come on the board.
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am i the only one that loved the zwan album?
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Originally posted by walkonby:
am i the only one that loved the zwan album?
Yes.
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Originally posted by walkonby:
am i the only one that loved the zwan album?
Love? Yes probably, but many were entertained.
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Na man. That ZWAN record was GREAT! Happy Music!!
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maybe i liked it so much because it was sort of like the only gay album in the village.
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David Fricke reviews Zeitgeist:
http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/15237933/review/15523986/zeitgeist (http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/15237933/review/15523986/zeitgeist)
Four Stars:
Zero: That is the exact number of doubts singer-guitarist-songwriter Billy Corgan has about this controversial resurrection of his old band. "I never felt so right and good. . . . You'll never need another sound," he crows in that bleating voice against the titanic fuzz of "Bring the Light." It is classic Corgan bravado, but the cumulative effect of his distortion-orchestra guitar and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin's pinpoint thunder is impressive and convincing, a return to the big pop-wise din of 1993's Siamese Dream. Original members James Iha and D'Arcy Wretzky are not part of this reunion, but they were hardly on Siamese Dream â?? Corgan played their guitar and bass parts.
By that standard, Zeitgeist, performed entirely by Corgan and Chamberlin, is a Pumpkins record â?? and a good one. Lyrically, Zeitgeist is the least self-absorbed record Corgan has ever written, although not quite the electric newspaper some song titles suggest. There is more fear of frying than actual fight and social remedy in "Doomsday Clock" and "For God and Country," the latter sounding more like Corgan's pledge of allegiance to the Cure. The closest thing to victory over Dick Cheney is the promise in "Starz" â?? "We cannot die. . . . We are stars/We are" â?? which rocks better than it reads, with Robert Fripp-like snakes of guitar and a closing frenzy of staccato power chords and Chamberlin pummeling his cymbals into splinters.
The best thing about Zeitgeist is that Corgan is back to what he does best: hard-rock architecture. His wall-of-guitars overdubs are exhilarating in their details: the harmonized squeals in "7 Shades of Black"; the creeping buzz of "Tarantula"; the long, howling solo, sinking in echo, in "United States." The Pumpkins were never more exciting in the Nineties than when Corgan unleashed his inner Tony Iommi all over his inner Robert Smith. That is what happens on Zeitgeist, which makes it a strong new start for Corgan and Chamberlin, no matter what they call themselves.
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Rolling Stone Magazine. hahahahahahahahaha
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Originally posted by Charlie Nakatestes,Japanese Golfer:
Rolling Stone Magazine. hahahahahahahahaha
Note that I said David Fricke, not Rolling Stone Magazine.
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<img src="http://www.rosa.org/v3/uploads/gallery/1/1535_full.jpg" alt=" - " />
Originally posted by callat703:
Originally posted by Charlie Nakatestes,Japanese Golfer:
Rolling Stone Magazine. hahahahahahahahaha
Note that I said David Fricke, not Rolling Stone Magazine. [/b]
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Originally posted by callat703:
David Fricke reviews Zeitgeist:
The Pumpkins were never more exciting in the Nineties than when Corgan unleashed his inner Tony Iommi all over his inner Robert Smith.
I like that line.
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haha - FOUR STARS?? Did he get a diff. version than i did??
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Didn't Fricke give My Chemical Romance's last album 4.5 stars??
Originally posted by Charlie Nakatestes,Japanese Golfer:
Rolling Stone Magazine. hahahahahahahahaha
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Originally posted by wanderlust featuring j. marshmallow:
Didn't Fricke give My Chemical Romance's last album 4.5 stars??
and the cassette tapes released the jug band that plays on irregular Thursdays in West Central Park 5 stars?
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Originally posted by wanderlust featuring j. marshmallow:
Didn't Fricke give My Chemical Romance's last album 4.5 stars??
Originally posted by Charlie Nakatestes,Japanese Golfer:
Rolling Stone Magazine. hahahahahahahahaha
[/b]
Actually, no. He did like it though:
http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/11371130/review/12046573/welcome_to_the_black_parade (http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/11371130/review/12046573/welcome_to_the_black_parade)
And he wasn't the only one:
http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists/mychemicalromance/blackparade?q=My%20Chemical%20Romance (http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists/mychemicalromance/blackparade?q=My%20Chemical%20Romance)
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This is actually a really solid review, and one that I think straddles the line between fan and reviewer. I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but I think its the best attempt a writer has made at putting the record in some kind of real perspective without being unnecessarily smug.
http://www.cokemachineglow.com/reviews/smashingpumpkins_zeitgeist2007.html (http://www.cokemachineglow.com/reviews/smashingpumpkins_zeitgeist2007.html)
Lester Bangs couldn't handle the Rolling Stones. Bangs was never a dispassionate critic anyway, but when the subject was Mick and Keith, any pretense of detachment flew out the window, and with it his surgical insight and analysis. That may be why I love his work on the band so much. Read in chronological order (as one can in the 2003 collection Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Tastes), one can see in Bangs not so much a disillusionment, but rather a steadfast refusal to bring truth to his illusions. They remain the gods that saved his life when he was fourteen, and as they continue to make bad record after bad record, it's not so much their own reputation they are sullying, but his own memory. And that's why he's pissed off, and it's no small wonder: Bangs' work on the Stones is an example of what happens when your private obsessions no longer correspond to cultural ones; a sustained note of fear that as your avatars and heroes become irrelevant, so do you.
But of course he was always a good writer, even when he wasn't a good critic, and he knew enough to recognize his shortcomings. "If you think I'm going to actually review It's Only Rock N' Roll," he wrote in 1974, "then you are crazy. But I am going to swim in it." And if anyone wants to get a succinct, blow by blow account of the new Smashing Pumpkins album, they're in the wrong place. Let's leave alone the fact that the band sold zillions of records in the '90s. Depending on who you are, they were either the paramount example of moral bankruptcy and cooption of Alternative Rock -- the flashpoint where a smattering of vaguely interesting and successful bands became a wildly marketable format, with Billy Corgan and his band acting as corporate funded, lip-stick'd swine -- or they saved your life, providing you with doors to anything from indie rock, shoegaze, post hardcore and heavy metal, or else just another map of your adolescence, a way to imbue the banalities of your teenage years with cinematic grandeur. Whether the latter is patently ridiculous is also totally irrelevant: it applies to enough of us to make it matter. When the object of your own private obsessions sells ten million copies of something, it necessarily becomes a public one. This involves a lot of unpacking. Get comfortable.
Of course, I recognize that you're busy, and, much like the reviewer, may even be embarrassed at expending any kind of mental energy on such a subject. You needn't look any further than the citation, which I will repeat here:
Zeitgeist is Corgan as rock n' roll trickster, cramming his songs with as much harmonies, stops and starts, chromatic riffs, gee-whiz production gimmicks and loud guitars as he can to mask a crop of fairly weak hooks. In spite of the anticipation, he has made a fairly ordinary -- and also fairly decent -- Smashing Pumpkins album.
Enjoy your breakfast. Unless the judgment "fairly decent" sticks in your craw, in which case Mark Abraham has a built-in counterpoint:
With all of the great music in the world today, does it really matter whether fucking crazy Billy Corgan's new album is any good or not? 20%
Mark was half-joking when he suggested that be the review, but I won't be able to top it. It contains a feeling in twenty words I won't catch in two thousand. Because there's no way he would actually listen to this album, but he would rate it anyway. Because it's a firm negation of any significance -- cultural, emotional, whatever -- that Corgan might have or might have had, the ultimate retcon. Because it means something to hate the Pumpkins, and because that sentence doesn't even betray his hate, f-bomb not withstanding. Because it's a yawn in the face of the Roman Coliseum, a shoulder shrug to the manufactured consent of teenage mobocracy. Because change some of the names around, and you can say the same thing about record sales and life salvation about Bon fucking Jovi.
So I tip my hat, but he asks something rhetorically that has been on my mind very literally: does it matter whether fucking crazy Billy Corgan's new record is any good? And, why would any sentient person care?
Another person who seems to have asked the same thing was Corgan himself. On TheFutureEmbrace (2005), he sounded and acted like he expected the world to listen to his every fart, accompanying a practically unlistenable album with behavior churlish and embarrassing, even by his standards. Perhaps the terrible performance of the record (less than 50,000 copies sold) knocked some sense into him, because Zeitgeist is the sound of a man who has showed up to work. He's responsible for every sound on record that isn't Jimmy Chamberlain hitting a drum, and it reflects the fine tuning of a true craftsman. Whiplash tight breaks, chromatic riffing, solos ping-ponging across the stereo picture, volies of harmonies: this is the work of people who know your attention wanes, and are willing to attract it. For the first time in a decade, Corgan has decided to bring something heavier to the table than you or your memory.
Bringing something heavy to the table does not, however, mean that it's new. At first blush the music seems like it was piped in directly from 1996, rife with dense, multitracked and downtuned guitars. If your favorite Smashing Pumpkins song is the b-side "The Pastichio Medley," twenty-six minutes of out-of-context riffing, then this is the album for you. Nor should one read a hell of a lot into the supposedly outward and political lyrical themes. Corgan is still ego-centric, concerned with "you and me," some far away light, and generally speaking it traffics in much of the new-age gobbledygook that characterized his solo album. Not that there aren't attempts: "United States," the album's best song, is an attempt at ironic caricature of the self-absorbed American consumer. "Revolution, what will it do to me?" But it ends with this deal breaker: "Let me embrace every single thing / Let me embrace every single thing I've misunderstood." Oh, brother, someone turn up the guitars already.
But that's the thing: he does. Hell, the album's best tracks don't dial in the nineties as much as they do Black Sabbath's Masters of Reality (1971). These are the guitar work-outs: lead single "Tarantula," album opener "Doomsday Clock," the nine-minute plus "United States," all of them feature the kind of brooding, dense sound mapped out by Sabbath in the '70s. (See also the video for "Trantula," which directly rips off the Sabbath clip for "Paranoid.") It's here that the feint of the political concept album becomes most frustrating, where one senses the band missed an opportunity. If anyone can translate melodic rock into halfway convincing apocalypita, it's the Smashing Pumpkins. Not the world's most original idea, to be sure -- "ooh, guitars simulating a dive-bombing airplane! Tense minor chords evoking ineffable dread and paranoia!" -- but in the mainstream Corgan is trying so desperately to swim, it's one that could stand some revisiting.
If that sounds like the band retreating into its comfort zone, it also sounds to me that Corgan, for the first time, is willing to meet the audience half way. Zeitgeist is tailored for mainstream rock radio, certainly, but what I hear is less the work of an unaware has-been then someone hungry again. You want loud guitars? You want Jimmy Chamberlain? You want the Smashing Pumpkins? He's here to give it to you. So this is him reaching for the brass ring, walking to work with the usual compliment of big, ungangly, fusty ideas, but sitting down the unusual willingness to sharpen them. This is why I'm so close to giving this a critical pass, because it's a lot closer to the original idea of the Pumpkins than I had a right to expect: Billy Corgan wants to take over the world.
And that's cool and all, but I sure wish I could hum anything that he actually sings. At first blush one is tempted to lament Roy Thomas Baker's downward mixing of Corgan's voice, but after repeated listens it becomes clear that he doesn't give the producer much to work with. The fatal flaw of the Pumpkins' arithmetic has always been his voice, but even on Siamese Dream (1993) freakouts like "Silverfuck" and "Quiet," he always had strong melodies. He occasionally gives himself a hook that has as much room as his guitars -- notably "Starz" and "Bring the Light" -- but when stops letting his Fender do the talking, which is pretty much everything after "United States," the record stops talking too. Worse, Corgan is still the cynical snake in the grass who would revive his old band to help flogging record sale: "That's the Way (My Love is)" reeks of laziness, a turgid pandering to what he perceives as the mopey, sad ballad buying record public. It's the kind of thing you want to ignore when considering the Pumpkins, but considering it's placed fairly high in the running order (track 4) it has single written all over it. It stinks.
The Rolling Stones clinging to their youth was a ridiculous sight in the 1970s, and Lester Bangs laughed them out of newsprint at every turn. But I think Bangs would've looked past all of that had the Stones not committed the ultimate sin: making bad records. No amount of fan alienation and general douchery matters: you're unstoppable as long as you keep doing good work. Zeitgeist isn't a good record, but it is good work, and somewhat relieving after a decade or so of embarrassment and Corgan's smug entitlement. Because, let's be honest, I'll keep coming back, and if you've made it this far, so will you, even if we hate ourselves in the morning. The Smashing Pumpkins will never return our youth to us, but it's not unreasonable to demand of them a record worthy of our time.
Christopher Alexander
July 18, 2007