Smashing Pumpkins

The unnatural transplant of Robert Smith's raven-black mane onto Billy Corgan's bald skull. That's more or less what much of the critical establishment wrote at the time about "Adore", the album with which the Smashing Pumpkins caught everyone off guard in 1998, spectacularly distancing themselves from the sound of their previous work and from anyone desperately trying to file them under "grunge". And yet that transplant - far from unnatural - was only one face of this many-hued prism, as mysterious as it was captivating, which blindsided the generation raised on "Bullet With Butterfly Wings". Though the key clue had already been hidden in the dazzling opening line of that global hit: "The world is a vampire".

Enter, then, the darkwave turn taken by the ineffable Chicago pumpkins. A Halloween night done their own way: emphatic, acidic, dissonant, yet also romantic and melodic enough. After all, Corgan himself had described their music since the very beginning as "gothy and pretentious". Now this new metamorphosis laid it all bare, with the sturdy Marshall distortion replaced by crisp arpeggios, piano chimes, lush blankets of techno-pop keyboards and injections of wave-flavored electronics, weaving together twilight moods, dark and melancholic, also fueled by the frontman's own painful personal circumstances (his separation from his wife and the death of his mother, to whom he dedicates the wrenching "For Martha"). These troubles piled onto the band's own no less harrowing ordeals: the overdose death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin midway through the previous tour, and the deteriorating relationship with longtime drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, increasingly unreliable due to his alcohol and heroin addiction and eventually, reluctantly, pushed out of the group.

This left the Smashing Pumpkins without their pulsing engine, with drum parts handled partly by a drum machine and partly by a trio of new drummers: Matt Walker, who had already stepped in for Chamberlin toward the end of the "Mellon Collie" tour, Joey Waronker, previously with Beck's band, and Matt Cameron (Soundgarden and Pearl Jam). A shift that was bound to leave its mark on the songs, which were assembled and mixed with the invaluable help of Flood, the Midas of the era's alternative rock, brought in by Corgan to the bedside of "a band falling apart", as the frontman himself put it. Add to that the towering expectations of the vampire-world at large, considering that the previous, epoch-defining "Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness" had sold more than 10 million copies in the US alone. How could they possibly live up to that?

But, as often happens, rebirth is forged one step from the abyss. Ideally embodied by the witchy features of Amy Wesson, the Tupelo model pictured on the gorgeous black-and-white cover shot by photographer Yelena Yemchuk, Corgan's girlfriend at the time. This, then, is our new vision cast onto vinyl: that of an unsettling muse/siren urging us to cross the threshold of déjà vu and plunge into the new, mysterious world of Billy Corgan, ever more alone and alienated within a band crumbling in his hands (besides being the first album without Chamberlin, "Adore" is also the first with no compositional contributions from guitarist James Iha). And that this is a twilight world is clear right from the start: "Twilight fades through blistered avalon, the sky's cruel torch on aching autobahn", run the opening lines of "To Sheila", the overture that foreshadows the shadowy, romantic moods that will dominate the record.

Sure, but what about the anthems - the average fan might well ask back in June 1998 - whatever happened to them? The heirs, that is, to "Cherub Rock", "Zero" and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings". There is actually one, albeit muffled beneath the drum machine's throb: the single "Ava Adore", which seals the perfect synthesis between the early Smashing Pumpkins and the melancholy-stricken version of 1998. A mysterious track that unwinds, disorienting, over a synthetic wah-wah-drenched riff until the guitar bursts in on the chorus, screamed at the top of his lungs: "We must never be apart!". There's the new slogan-line, declaimed by a darkened Corgan in his acrid, nasal voice. This is the Smashing Pumpkins updated to the era of Nine Inch Nails's apocalyptic industrial music and the equally shadowy trip-hop concoctions of Massive Attack's "Mezzanine". A modern, dark, electronic, visionary version of their fiery hard rock from the start of their career. Perhaps too sophisticated for the time, but one that still managed to win people over through blistering live renditions that would make it one of the Chicago band's live war-horses.

"Ava Adore" finds its calmer counterpart in the other single, "Perfect", a kind of minor-key "1979", still catchy as it drapes melodic electro-pop layers over the tale of a failed romance, caught between nostalgia for what might have been and hope that things could go differently next time around.

But the (black) heart of "Adore" lies mostly elsewhere, in episodes hastily dismissed as "minor" by short-sighted critics, who struggled to grasp the new path Corgan had taken and settled for pointing an accusatory finger (as if it were a fault) at the echoes of The Cure and Depeche Mode. Take the tender "Daphne Descends", with its chill-inducing build - distorted riff, cyclical, obsessive rhythm driven by the drumwork, and the forceful entrance of Corgan's vocal - as a prelude to a new, aching love story with no happy ending (“On some gentle dawn/ This boy is here and gone/ You love him/ You love him for yourself”). Another melodic triumph, in which Iha limits himself to a handful of added chords while the frontman shoulders the whole pessimistic weight of the lyrics, his despondent voice underscored by flashes of neon-lit electronics. Or again, the moving diptych Corgan dedicates to his mother: first "Once Upon A Time", an acoustic ballad set to a tambourine's cadence with an almost Christmas-like atmosphere, where memory turns sweet and painful in a kind of impossible dialogue (“Mother, I hope you know/ That I miss you so/ Time has ravaged on my soul/ To wipe a mothers tears grown cold”); then the devastating "For Martha", painted in piano strokes through depths of grief that become universal, almost cosmic, as the singer weeps out lines like "If you have to go don't say goodbye, someday I'll follow you and see you on the other side", before exploding in the second half with Iha's searing guitar solo that leads into a vocal crescendo and the subdued stillness of the ending, where the piano's melancholy returns to close the circle before a hypnotic, dissonant coda. Eight minutes, more intense than their most rocking anthem. And to think that someone, grasping (tooth and nail) at the theory of a "backward-looking" record, dared compare the final keyboard solo to Keith Emerson, as if that weren't the best compliment imaginable...

Then come other scattered fragments of sweetness in noir: the graceful opening of "To Sheila" (delicate arpeggios, hushed vocals, synthetic textures, piano, mandolins and sparse plucking in the distance); the electro-pop minimalism of "Tear" (written for the "Lost Highway" soundtrack but rejected by David Lynch in favor of "Eye"), with its stately bolero-like gait marked out by drums and its main theme carried by the guitars while a faint "ticking" accompanies Corgan's vocal in the background; the electrowave jubilation of "Apples + Oranjes", built entirely on a relentless drum machine, amid Nine Inch Nails-style dissonances and echoes of the ultrasonic U2 of "Achtung Baby", and of the following "Pug", a "minor-key blues funeral march" propelled by an obsessive beat and scarred by feedback; the piano tolling mournfully once more on "Crestfallen", backed by sampled drum bits and D'Arcy's blonde-haired vocals on the chorus ("Who am I, to need you now/ To ask you why, to tell you no/ To deserve your love, and sympathy/ You were never meant to belong to me).

All of them tiles in a mosaic of styles and colors never so varied for the Chicago band, who also indulge in hazy, tipsy nightclub moods (the subdued rhythm'n'blues of "Annie-Dog", about self-harm), do their spin on the most dazedly pop version of Robert Smith ("Shame"), and slip a Beatles-esque break in among the gothic clouds of "Behold! The Nightmare"; or channel the poppiest Fleetwood Mac in the acoustic waltz of "The Tale Of Dusty & Pistol Pete", wrapped in a smoky haze of 8-bit flutters.

And, just as it began, the album closes wrapped in a haze of hushed sweetness, in a spiral of melancholy: the pianistic elegy of the dreamlike "Blank Page", a trembling duet with D'Arcy set to a circular melody, while the drums fall silent this time, leaving room for the whispered lines of a desolate Corgan (“Blank page, is all the rage/ Never meant to say anything/ In bed, I was half dead/ Tired of dreaming of rest”), which flows naturally into the eighteen seconds of "17" (a wordplay on numbers that's anything but accidental), the precious music-box outro, once again on piano, drawing a black curtain down over the dark, unrepeatable sonic universe of "Adore".

What makes the record magical, in fact, is also its uniqueness: the Smashing Pumpkins had never sounded like this before, and never would again. "Adore" is the melodramatic sprawl of "Mellon Collie" drained down and transplanted into the era of raves and end-of-millennium electronic rock, the same era Radiohead managed to immortalize once and for all on "OK Computer". A record of simpler, less over-arranged songs, yet with a more layered production, pushing it beyond the banks of rock into an experiment in electronic hybridization not so far removed from those of contemporaries Bowie, R.E.M. and U2.

On the surface, many have fallen for the temptation of dismissing it as "a transitional album". In truth, it's the fruit of one of those magical middle-grounds that, throughout rock history, have often provided the fertile soil for masterpieces. And beneath its crackling layers of drumwork, feedback, electronic effects and sampling lies nothing less than the purest heart of the Smashing Pumpkins - the very one that Corgan and co. would never again manage to find in their subsequent chapters.

It's never too late to rediscover it. And to bury, once and for all, the prejudices and misunderstandings that have dogged it. A trap that Corgan himself fell into at the time: "I made the mistake of announcing it would be a techno record", he'd later admit. "I wouldn't have run into the same problems if I'd called it the Pumpkins' acoustic record". After all, "Adore" was misread from the title onward, a play on words standing for "A Door" - a new door, a new entry point into the band's universe. With a corresponding shift in target audience, as Corgan himself put it: "Now I'm not talking to teenagers anymore. I'm talking to whoever wants to listen to me". But the message was more filtered, more indirect. And not everyone got it.

All of this fed into the misconception that "Adore" was the first failure in the Chicago band's - until then infallible - career path. That, too, is false, considering it reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart in the United States and No. 5 on the UK Albums Chart, even if sales certainly fell short of the stratospheric heights of "Mellon Collie". But what matters most is the musical wealth packed into its 73 minutes, which has never lost an ounce of its allure. A bold experiment for a band that had built its success on grunge adrenaline and stadium-sized anthems, and which chose instead to reveal the other side of its universe - the darker, more melancholic one. The last great album by the Smashing Pumpkins, who would, indeed, soon fall to pieces.

Come and Adoremus.

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15/02/2026