THE SMASHING PUMPKINS: Shiny and Oh So Bright Vol. 1
"We're gonna make this happen," sings Billy Corgan on Knights of Malta, the opening track of The Smashing Pumpkins' new album. The lyric is intended to be hopeful, but by its third or fourth recitation, begins to ring with an undercurrent of desperation. It's the same subdued desperation that seems present in so much of the press Corgan has done lately. It's like he's not just making music for himself, or even for the Pumpkins purists. It's more like he's determined to shoulder his band right back into the limelight of the mainstream, even if it means making nice with original guitarist James Iha.
Shiny and Oh So Bright Vol. 1/ LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. is an album that deserves to be reviewed on its own merits. But it's difficult to judge this album as a success or a failure without putting it alongside the Pumpkins' phenomenal early work. If you're holding your breath for an incendiary masterpiece along the lines of Siamese Dream, keep holding. Even if you're hoping for something as quirky and adventurous as Pisces Iscariot, you're going to be disappointed, because let's face it: The Pumpkins' 90's b-sides were better than any of their 21st century a-sides.
However. If you're one of those diehards that's been here for the long haul, devoting time to anything that bares the Pumpkins' name, slavishly consuming all of Billy Corgan's cumbersome, unfinished concept albums and song cycles, well, here's some good news: Shiny and Oh So Bright is the most consistent batch of songs they're made since the year 2000. It's more hummable than Zeitgeist or Oceania, and it's a huge improvement over the dreadful, Pumpkins-in-name-only Monuments to an Elegy.
Silvery Sometimes (Ghosts) calls to mind the midtempo polish of 1979, even if it’s not destined for radio domination. Solara could pass for a deep cut from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness; it's Zero without the enormous hooks. Seek and You Shall Destroy would make a fine middle track, but it’s certainly anticlimactic as an album closer.
Dig into some of his interviews and you'll find that Corgan is not particularly modest about his ideas on the band's legacy. He wants so badly for the Pumpkins to be revered on the level of contemporaries like Pearl Jam or Radiohead. There's just a little problem of continued relevance. Both Pearl Jam and Radiohead are on occasion still writing tunes that hold up to their early work, without trying to recreate it. And note that both of those bands very deliberately abandoned commercial pretense in the late '90s, around the time alternative music in general was in a tailspin.
Maybe Corgan should spend less time world building, and more time in whatever dingy Chicago crash-pad Gish was written in. Put less work into elaborate song cycle concepts with ponderous titles and drop the Volume 1 stuff. Because, let's face it, we already know that there’s not going to be a Volume 2; the ambition now clearly outweighs the follow-through.
There was a ferocious sincerity when Billy Corgan sang let me out back in 1993.And again, Shiny and Oh So Bright Vol. 1 is an improvement over the last few albums. But the desperation is hard to miss. These days, Corgan might as well be singing: Let me back in. C
