Smashing Pumpkins - The World Is a Vampire

Chicago's Smashing Pumpkins are one of the defining bands of the Nineties. Straddling the line between alternative band and bona fide rock stars, they managed to merge the instincts of one of the most creative indie scenes in the United States with hard-rock tradition, forging a sound that combines punk and pop, psychedelia and grunge. Their lyrics, anguished testimonies of a generation on the verge of a nervous breakdown, struck a chord with the mood of the times, winning over massive crowds of fans across the globe.

The band was formed in 1988 in Chicago, out of the meeting between Billy Corgan, James Iha and D'Arcy Wretzky, soon joined by jazz drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. Signed to Caroline, the Pumpkins recorded Gish at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, under the supervision of Butch Vig (the producer of "Nevermind" by Nirvana). It's a dazzling debut, one that won over the alternative rock audience. Harsh sounds, descended from the savage proto-punk of the Stooges and the hardcore grit of Jane's Addiction, pile up relentlessly, amid Iha's violent guitar blasts and the obsessive rhythms laid down by Chamberlin and D'Arcy.

Corgan sings tormented melodies accompanied by ferocious riffs ("Siva", "Bury Me"), but also tender psychedelic textures ("Crush", "Suffer") and long acid ballads ("Rhinoceros", "Window Paine" and "Crush"). During the supporting tour for the album, which saw them open for Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam, the first tensions among the band members surfaced, partly due to the troubled romantic history between Iha and D'Arcy, and partly to the drummer's drug and alcohol problems.

In 1993 Corgan and co., once again with Butch Vig, recorded Siamese Dream in Georgia, a more mature and complex work that earned the band near-unanimous critical acclaim and new crowds of fans. The Smashing Pumpkins' sound was now a perfect blend of melody and noise, hardcore violence and psychedelic trance.

Their models were heavy metal, punk, grunge, but also the new wave of Jesus and Mary Chain. This gave rise to songs like "Cherub Rock", with Corgan intoning a subdued melody over a backdrop of sizzling guitars, the bittersweet three minutes of "Today", the unforgettable ballads "Disarm" and "Mayonaise", and a "Silverfuck" constantly poised between the most dreamlike Led Zeppelin and the most apocalyptic hardcore progressions.

In 1994 the Pumpkins were the headline act of Lollapalooza, but they hadn't yet reached the summit. A year later, the rock world would crown them rock stars thanks to the monumental double album Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, produced by two studio wizards: Alan Moulder and Flood. The record is an extreme demonstration of the band's ability to move from "infinite sadness" to bursts of pure adrenaline, from dreamy contemplation to virulent invective. All of it arranged in rather grandiose fashion, enough to recall something of Genesis's symphonies and Bowie's glam-rock.

The irresistible track is "Bullet With Butterfly Wings", destined to become one of the anthems of the entire decade with its knock-out chorus: “The world is a vampire, sent to drain/ Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames/ And what do I get, for my pain/ Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game”. Little gems of songwriting, like "Take Me Down" (written by James Iha), "1979", "Zero" and "Tonight Tonight", recycle evocative pop melodies through an "acidic" hardcore lens; while the nursery-rhyme cadences of "We Only Come Out At Night", accompanied by player piano and harpsichord, and "Cupid De Locke", with its soft harp, echo psychedelic atmospheres not far removed from those of Syd Barrett and the early Pink Floyd. The album closes in a dreamlike mood, with the poignant ballad "By Starlight". Despite its undeniable wordiness and a few stylistic missteps along the way, the record proves to be a well-judged fusion of styles, a compendium of 90s rock that brought Corgan's band widespread worldwide success.

Five singles were pulled from "Mellon Collie", each spawning an EP packed with further unreleased material, a testament to the sheer quantity of songs written during the sessions for that monster of an album. All the EPs were later collected in an elegant, limited-edition toiletry-bag-shaped box set, The Aeroplane Flies High.

At the peak of their popularity, however, something seems to have broken for good within Smashing Pumpkins. Before a concert at Madison Square Garden, touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin was found dead of a heroin overdose; drummer Chamberlin, who had been with him, survived by a miracle but was immediately pulled from subsequent shows. Filter drummer Matt Walker was brought in, but the Pumpkins now needed a period of rest. Until Billy Corgan announced that "the time has come to give up rock" and that he "no longer wants to play music that makes him and everyone else cry from boredom."

The following album, Adore, released in 1998, marked a lightning-fast turn in the band's sound, veering toward twilight, electronic textures (guitars are almost entirely absent), close to certain strands of new wave from the Eighties (Cure, Depeche Mode, New Order, Pet Shop Boys). It's a brilliant as well as courageous experiment for a band that had made hard-rock energy and stadium anthems the key to its success: not everyone, however, would manage to understand it, as is the fate of records that dare to take risks.

Proof that this is their most underrated album can be found in the acidic, poignant melody of "Daphne Descends", the electric digressions of "Appels + Oranjes", "Crestfallen" and "Ava Adore", or the evocative bolero of "Tear". The band thus paid the price for its leader's self-assurance and the excessive esteem earned with the previous records.

Machina, The Machines of God (1999), despite Chamberlin's return, is the band's de profundis. A bland, toothless record that merely churns out faded copies of past successes. It's a new flop, this time fully justified. After the album's release, D'Arcy left the group and would face fresh drug problems, including an arrest for drug possession.

In an interview given a few years later, D'Arcy stated she no longer felt able to sustain a career as a musician. After living for a time in Austin, Texas, she moved to a farm in Michigan, and her relationship with Billy Corgan remained tense, to the point that she was the only one left out of the original reunion, which took place in 2018. Her place as Smashing Pumpkins' bassist was taken, starting with the Machina tour, by former Hole member Melissa Auf Der Maur.

At the end of 2000, Corgan plunged fans into despair by announcing the end of the band, marked by a farewell tour and the release — online only and free of charge — of Machina II – The Friends And The Enemies Of Modern Music, an album of unreleased material drawn from the Machina sessions. Corgan would accuse James Iha of being the real culprit behind the breakup, only to retract the claim several years later.

James Iha had already launched his solo career in 1998 with Let It Come Down, which would be followed by Look To The Sky in 2007 and several soundtrack contributions. In 2003 he became a permanent member of A Perfect Circle and, at the same time, founded the band Vanessa And The O's, with whom he would release an album. He would rejoin Smashing Pumpkins in 2018.

In 2001 came Greatest Hits, a compilation celebrating the history of the Chicago band, available for a limited time also in an edition bundled with a second CD, Judas O, packed with b-sides and assorted rarities, the ideal follow-up to the successful Pisces Iscariot, another compilation dating back to 1994 containing outtakes from the first two albums.

In 2002, Virgin kept the catalogue cash cow going by releasing Earphoria, the soundtrack to a VHS dating back to 1994 documenting the band's live activity in its early years. The VHS was reissued on DVD at the same time as the album.

Corgan tried to relaunch himself with the Zwan moniker, but despite a star-studded line-up, Mary Star Of The Sea failed to recreate the magic of the past.

In 2005, then, he played the solo card with The Future Embrace. He turned to synth-pop with some rock drive, immersing himself in shoegaze territory. The opener, "All Things Change", is the manifesto of this new chapter's poetics: a relaxed, romantic and hopeful Corgan chanting a heartfelt "we can change the world" on loop. It's one of the best tracks, with a sweet, pleasant melody, but really the whole opening quartet is on point: the rock pulse of "Mina Loy" is certainly less immediate, but undoubtedly effective, while "The Cameraeye" boasts a dark, killer riff, even if it never fully develops its own potential and paranoia. Best of all is the cover of "To Love Somebody" by the Bee Gees: a dreamy, aching atmosphere that exploits a wall of background distortion, arrangement that rises to the occasion, and keyboards peeking through.

Bit by bit, though, the album fizzles out: "Dia" has a decent chorus and a good string progression, but never quite breaks through. Only two more tracks are worth saving: "Now", sweet and gothic, in a sacred, enchanted atmosphere, and "Pretty, Pretty Star", which crosses not only the line between sweet and saccharine, but also the one between saccharine and comic. Among the worst are the fast little pop number "Walking Shade", so harmless it becomes irritating, and "Sorrows", an unbearable lament. Overall, it's an album that doesn't sting and tends towards monotony, in which the author shows he still has something to say, but struggles greatly to turn it into songs.

Corgan as a solo artist wouldn't find greater inspiration or fortune with Ogilala either, released in 2017 and built around acoustic ballads from a middle-aged artist, stylistically straddling John Lennon and Coldplay.

In 2007, good old Billy went for broke, reforming Smashing Pumpkins to give life to Zeitgeist. Of the original line-up, in fact, only two remain, with Jimmy Chamberlin alongside the leader himself. The new songs, however, no longer bleed, or at best they bleed molten plastic. The production, polished to an implausible degree, fails to disguise a disconcerting creative void, nor does the little game of ironic, (self-)referential posturing work here, descending as it does into a bleak, caricature-like imitation.

"Starz" briefly rekindles some hope, landing a decent melody, perhaps "Bleeding The Orchid" too with its granite riffs, but the rest doesn't even try, coming off as well-packaged junk made for consumption by the MTV generation. In the absence of inspired songwriting, even those sugary kitsch deformities that made Zwan an entertaining sideshow are missing. Zeitgeist is instead flatly ugly, with no redeeming charm to justify its existence in any way.

In 2008, Smashing Pumpkins returned with a four-track EP, American Gothic, which holds a few pleasant surprises. Nothing new on the horizon, aside from a more pronounced acoustic approach, yet this time it's the songwriting that makes the difference. In short, you'll find the usual melodic ups and downs and predictable harmonic progressions here, but Corgan remembers he was (is?) a good songwriter and turns out at least three tracks of decent calibre.

"Rose March", psychedelic and shrewdly crowd-pleasing, glides by pleasantly in the vein of "Disarm" and "Cupid De Locke". "Pox" flexes its muscles with a sturdy rhythmic progression, without betraying the acoustic imprint of the context. The clearly singer-songwriter-like structure of the first two tracks shows how minimal the band's contribution is. Indeed, the EP seems like the grown-up singer-songwriter record Corgan has (perhaps) always dreamed of making. This is confirmed by the melancholic shoegaze elegance of "Sunkissed", built on voice, acoustic guitar and little else, marking the album's high point. "Again, Again, Again (The Crux)", on the other hand, is a little ditty fit for a retirement home for grunge veterans. Overall, though, American Gothic is not the same old reheated soup.

In 2009, the Teargarden by Kaleidoscope project kicked off, a crazy scheme made up of forty-four songs offered as free downloads, and in 2011 Billy Corgan took Smashing Pumpkins back on tour. Meanwhile, EMI put deluxe reissues of the albums Gish and Siamese Dream on the market, supervised by Corgan himself, expanded and remastered digitally.

2012 brought Oceania, an album that, compared to the previous Zeitgeist, more forcefully returns to the mood of twenty years earlier. The opening minutes almost manage to give us the illusion of having found the monstrous band of the good old days again: the explosive one-two punch of opening tracks "Quasar" and "Panopticon" is heart-stopping, but one wonders what the point is of bringing back that so-well-organised chaos and feeding it to new generations who, in all likelihood, are looking for something quite different from Seattle grunge. The line-up no longer has anything in common with that of the golden years, except for the one and only boss: guitarist Jeff Schroeder is confirmed, while the new entries are Mike Byrne on drums and Nicole Fiorentino on bass. The players change but the sonic approach and overall vision don't. The first ballads on the record aren't bad: "The Celestials" and "Violet Rays" represent the band's more melodic side, historically embodied by the unreachable "Disarm" and "Mayonaise", but by the time we get to the following "My Love Is Winter" and "One Diamond, One Heart" we've already had enough: better to shuffle the deck with a bit of electronics ("Pinwheels"), even if the guitars, when they kick in, sound so plasticky they seem fake.

As the tracks go by, Oceania settles into rhythms that are too reassuring, losing itself in a few too many longueurs, even if the obligatory light-prog epic (the title track, clocking in at nearly ten minutes) is more bearable than in other cases. In the end, we're faced with a product that's certainly not to be dismissed: even the filler tracks ("Pale Horse", "Wildflower") are assembled with great craft, although some good rock ideas ("Glissandra", "Inkless") deserved a better fate than receiving those sugar transfusions that make them fit only as loud rock songs for teenagers (if, in 2012, there were any teenagers willing to sit through a new Smashing album!). Paradoxically, Corgan showed more courage when he dared to surprise the world with the icy approach of "Adore", which still worked live in electric form. Oceania sits halfway between full-blooded rock and dream-pop, in the great tradition of the Chicago band, but despite a few genuinely successful songs, it's little more than a hologram of that wonderful line-up capable of conceiving the gems of the past.

After the negligible Monuments To An Elegy, released in 2014 and passing almost unnoticed, the unexpected news finally arrives: James Iha will return to perform with Smashing Pumpkins. The spark is relit and the band quickly gets to work on new songs with a line-up that includes, alongside Corgan and Iha, Jimmy Chamberlin and Jeff Schroeder.

The result was released in November 2018 as the hugely anticipated Shiny And Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. Had it not been for the friction with D'Arcy Wretzky, perhaps excluded by Billy Corgan due to her persistent, never fully overcome struggles with drug addiction, the reunion of the original Smashing Pumpkins line-up would have been complete. Originally conceived as an operation made up of two four-track EPs, in the end the comeback record turned into a full length that serves as the first chapter of the "Shiny And Oh So Bright" series, of which a second act, according to Corgan, was already ready for 2019. The most significant and positive notes of this long-awaited comeback lie in the two tracks that preceded the album. First and foremost "Silvery Sometimes (Ghosts)", the perfect radio-ready single, the one that more than any other justifies listening to the album, the modern-day update of the long tradition of catchy alt-rock inaugurated by "Today" and "1979". The nastier "Solara" instead attempts to revive the glories of Smashing Pumpkins' more electrically brutal side, now smoothed over by the passage of time and the extra pounds accumulated by uncle Billy. Hearing those two guitars intertwine again as they did so many years ago is without doubt the most thrilling aspect of this entire first volume of "Shiny And Oh So Bright", the shortest project ever made by the long-winded Corgan, at just 31 minutes.

Several tracks, however, remain only halfway there, partially successful, nice and well-written without ever truly making you cry miracle: among them stands out the effective "Seek You And Shall Destroy", capable of reopening nostalgic windows onto the Nineties. Then, of course, if you've always been in love with Corgan's voice and his innate melodic gift, you'll also find charm in the harmonies of "Travels" and "With Sympathy", and if you like big guitars, you'll discover that "Marchin' On" isn't so bad after all. Production comes courtesy of Rick Rubin, the expert in "resuscitations". Strings are scattered pretty much everywhere, reinforcing an intact taste for grandeur. The mood tends to be sunny, as well highlighted by the title chosen for this collection of songs which, amid (admittedly few) truly successful moments and (too many) others that aren't exactly memorable (see the negligible "Alienation", but also the needlessly pompous "Knights Of Malta"), still stands out as the best record produced by Billy Corgan with Smashing Pumpkins since the days of "Machina". That this is largely thanks to James Iha's return is pretty much a certainty: with him in the band, it also feels much more natural to call them Smashing Pumpkins. After so many false starts, welcome back.

Two years later, at the end of November 2020, comes Cyr, with which Corgan returns to explore those synthetic paths already trodden on "Adore", but without ever managing to match its emotional surges, its pathos and its grandeur. The guitars of James Iha and Jeff Schroeder fade into the background, and at times even Jimmy Chamberlin's drums are sacrificed to leave center stage to the synths and software handled by Corgan himself, who not only wrote but also entirely produced the album. The aesthetic and the deployment of forces, both dictated by the all-powerful Corgan, make Cyr a product so compact that it's hard to tell one song from another. There's a clear lack of strongly distinctive elements, beyond a general idea of stringing together up-tempo tracks meant to emulate a certain strand of Eighties synth-pop. The raw anger of the past is thus replaced by alternative-dancefloor rhythms that completely redefine the dreams of the former Illinois kid.

Good ideas emerge from the "pop" energy of "The Colour Of Love" and "Cyr" (the title track), from the vaguely alt-rock traces of "Wittch" (a favorite among longtime fans) and "Anno Satana", and from the unconvincing darkwave forays of "Black Forest, Black Hills" (here he should have dared more). Then regret takes over: the sweetness of "Dulcet In E" isn't even a distant relative of, say, "Disarm"; the anemic easy listening of the flimsy "Haunted" or "Schaudenfreud" becomes downright embarrassing with the implausible "Tyger, Tyger". Half the record was already familiar, since ten tracks were released, two by two, in the weeks before the release. Corgan tries a few small effective tricks, like the cute wordplay used in generating titles ("Starrcraft", "Adrennalynne") or the recurring female choruses entrusted to Australian Katie Cole and American Sierra Swan, two singers who already have notable collaborations and solo records under their belts. The carousel ride ends with "Minerva", which at the eleventh hour tries to restore some of old Billy's prestige. Too late, and too little, to grant Cyr a place of any significance within the Smashing Pumpkins' imposing discography.

In 2023 things don't improve with Atum, yet another fruit of the creative bulimia afflicting Billy Corgan, a clinical condition that leads him to release, with no filter whatsoever, anything that crosses his mind: 33 tracks split across three discs, a work in three acts that struggles along, preventing a few decent tracks (the grunge vibrations of "In Lieu Of Failure", the romantic abandon of "Space Age", though nothing that could ever make it onto a hypothetical Smashing Pumpkins greatest hits) from really standing out. A sprawling mess that outdoes, in sheer pretentiousness, any album the Chicago band has put out so far.

Amid numerous anemic moments ("Embracer", but really pretty much the entire first act), appalling drum choices ("With Ado I Do" cries out for vengeance), blunted hard rock ("Empires"), cut-rate wave ("To The Grays"), even more cut-rate synth-pop ("Night Waves", "Neophyte", "Pacer") and pointless Eighties-style guitar bombast ("Beyond The Vale"), it's a real shame that Billy Corgan's story keeps unfolding in such an inane way. As has happened before, it would have taken no more than boiling the record down to about ten tracks to make at least a decent album.

"Embrace the beautiful death". That's roughly the translation of the title of the new Smashing Pumpkins album, Aghori Mori Mei, conceived by blending Japanese and Sanskrit. Meanings and signifiers aside, to borrow from Carmelo Bene, the historic American band led by Billy Corgan (voice, guitar, bass, keyboards), flanked by the ever-trusty James Iha (bass, guitar, backing vocals) and Jimmy Chamberlin (drums), feels like a return to the past but also carries dark fascinations evoking the splendor of the divisive Adore.

In short, even this time around there's no shortage of demons to exorcise along life's path, across ten songs whose lyrics often deliver rather "obvious" curses in the face of the inexorability of time and things, as in the opener "Edin".

If the words here and there spell out what was just described, the sound of the Smashing Pumpkins, however unchanged and as meticulously crafted as ever, aims, as on the previous Atum, for an ideal reconnection with the epic crescendos of unsurpassable (and obviously unsurpassed) masterpieces, chief among them Mellon Collie And Infinite Sadness. That happens on the melancholic "Pentecost", but also on the more hard-rock tracks which, however commendable on paper, do little to liven up a record that was ambitious to begin with ("War Dreams on Itself").

At the album's presentation, the "old" Corgan nonetheless laid out his intentions clearly: "While writing the new album I became intrigued by the worn-out axiom 'you can't go home again', which I personally found to be true in form, but which made me think 'what if we tried anyway?' Not so much looking back with sentimentality, but rather as a means of moving forward, to see whether, in the balance between success and failure, our way of making music from the early Nineties could still work". The obvious question arises, though: does it still work? At times it almost seems to, dear Billy, as for instance on the lead single "Sighommi". But quite often, no. Because, as much as songs like "Who Goes There" would have made sense back in the day and could have had a shot at becoming a hit, in 2024 they inevitably come across as b-sides dug out of a drawer just to "epically and melodically" glue together an otherwise sterile album, tangled up in itself and incapable of offering anything genuinely new.

Contributions by Ciro Frattini ("The Future Embrace") and Antonio Ciarletta ("Zeitgeist", "American Gothic"), Giuliano Delli Paoli ("Aghori Mhori Mei")

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