Crashing Cucurbita

So it looks like The Smashing Pumpkins (well, Billy and Jimmy at least) are going to record a new album. I’ll wait to actually hear the album before I say either “they were doomed from the start, trying to rehash their past success” or “Damn the nay-sayers, I knew they had another great album in them!”. But I did want to say something about the Pumpkins towards the end of their previous incarnation.

Lots of people seemed to view Adore as a big misstep for the Pumpkins: Jimmy was gone, and they abandoned their traditional wall-of-guitars sound for synthesizers and drum loops. The move was viewed by some as cashing in on the late-90s “electronica” bandwagon. Their followup album, Machina: The Machines of God was then hailed as a “return” to the classic Pumpkins sound, with lots of big guitars everywhere. Fairly soon after the release of Machina, the Pumpkins imploded.

In my own view, in rock as in life, you can’t go home again. Adore definitely had its weak spots - the first single, “Ava Adore”, is totally awful. But that song sticks out like a sore thumb on the album. The rest of the album is really quite good, but not in the same way Siamese Dream or Mellon Collie were. Where their previous work was epic, sort of like a soundtrack for conquering the Universe, Adore is a quieter album. While loneliness was always a predominant theme for the Pumpkins, the loneliness explored in the songs on Adore is much more mature. Whereas Billy is lonely on Siamese Dream because he’s a bit of a geek still, and people always thought he was a weirdo growing up, on Adore he explores the loneliness that comes from losing a parent, or facing death alone. There’s also hope, and redemption, and all that good stuff if you want to dig into it. The music is often quite beautiful also - “To Sheila” strips away almost everything we previously knew about the Pumpkins, using bare keyboard and guitar lines alone, while “For Martha” has Matt Cameron on it (no further explanation required). To my mind, Adore marks a transition for the Pumpkins similar to what Pearl Jam accomplished with No Code, or Wilco with Being There, two of my absolute favourite albums.

But as I said before, people didn’t really like Adore. So a few years later, with Jimmy back and D’arcy on the way out, we got Machina. The giant waves of guitars were back, and the openness in the lyrics of Adore was replaced by obscurantism - a story that listeners were supposed to decipher from the lyrics and booklet. I believe there was actually a contest - the person who could “most correctly” infer Billy’s vision won some prize. In sum, the album felt like a calculated attempt by the Pumpkins to recapture their former glory. Where Adore was risky, Machina was safe, and there’s nothing more dull than a rock band playing it safe.