(100) Days of Soundtrack: #12 – The Smashing Pumpkins – Oceania
A friend noted yesterday that they were considering seeing the Smashing Pumpkins live, and I, for my part, had to recommend it. I’d seen them back on their Oceania tour, and they were still wonderful despite being just Billy Corgan and some other folks. It wasn’t just the fact that their legacy tracks are so good… the Pumpkins have just few enough legit Stone Cold Hits that you can bet your bottom dollar you’re gonna get some deeper tracks throughout a set, and those deeper tracks are the money tracks. Even legacy bands tour in support of new and ignored albums, though, and what I recall most about last time I saw the Pumpkins was that the Oceania tracks fit the mood of the night. They were enjoyable and listenable, which was welcome after Zeitgeist. And then I went home and promptly ignored the album. Seeing the band touring again, and recommending the show based off my last experience, it seemed like it was time to give a proper listen.
It’s a weird sort of bias, that which I brought to this album. On the one hand, longtime readers know I love the Smashing Pumpkins. At their best they can go toe to toe with any other band I love. On the other hand, though, there’s that solo career. There’s the dicey post-Machina output from Corgan across the board. There is Corgan’s own personality, which is getting to be a lot more pro-wrestling and cat-obsession than rock-god and voice-of-a-generation. I brought a lot of baggage to this album: I wanted desperately to love it, while expecting deeply to be underwhelmed by it.
“Quasar” opens the album in the tradition of “I Am One” or “Cherub Rock,” if not being remotely as strong. Corgan’s guitar flourishes sound more like classic rock noodling, and the pounding of the back beat sounds a bit too chaotic, but Corgan himself is in as great a voice as his voice could be. It makes a good case for a return to form, even as it inevitably falls short of that form. “Panopticon” does a much better job of capitalizing on this bombast while sounding, if not quintessentially Pumpkiny, then certainly in the proper Pumpkins vein. Even this is one-upped by “The Chimera,” which blazes along and is possibly the best of the bunch. Elsewhere, “My Love Is Winter,” originally written off in my mind as one more in an interminable line of songs about what Corgan’s love is, ends up being one of the highlights, and “Glissandra” continues the catalog of Pumpkins tracks which sound like they’re named after unfortunately named women.
Throughout the album, though, it’s obvious just how much the Pumpkins benefited from its classic foursome. The drums do not have Chamberlain’s punch. The guitars feel flat without Iha punctuating Corgan. D’Arcy was never really a bassist, and yet the bass feels weird in the mix. It’s not hard to feel the disjointed nature of the mixes. The band doesn’t gel the same way. And of course, there are the eccentricities of later era Corgan lyrics. Must half the songs be about the most doe-eyed love possible? Did he just say “I will be Special K?” Do I want to know that Corgan will “kiss anyone tonight”? In some moments, it’s arguable that the others helped rein in some Corgan frivolity… there are more than enough space-sounds on this album, beeps and boops and laser-shots… it’s an album of excesses, and if it is, on the whole, not unsuccessful, it doesn’t mean some of these synth-tinged moments wouldn’t be better pared out. Corgan has always been inspired and a fan of the 80s, but incorporating the sounds of the era so deeply in some of these tracks feels like just one more reason the ol’ WPC can’t really capture the old fire. That’s not to say this is all bad, of course… “Pinwheels” transfers from a riff on “Baba O’Riley” to video-game music and fades down into spiritualist hooey, but still manages to be a highlight of the album. I wish it had kept crescendoing into absurdity, but the way the combination works makes it clear that, even in excess, Corgan is better than many more minimal peers.
If I had to pick a representative track here, it would likely be the title track. “Oceania” the song is full of ideas, but not necessarily a cohesive group of them. It goes too many places. At the end, just when it gets to the best bits, it ends far too abruptly into nowhere.
And so it goes with the album. It’s not bad… far from it. It just never feels fully together, and by the time it gets its act together (it’s the odd album which actually has the majority of ass-kicking loaded toward the back end, instead of a succession of tired filler), it’s closing time. As a fan, I’m excited to have some new songs to go back to and add to the catalog, but it’s also hard to listen to something which is so deeply not what it once was.
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