Billy Corgan
“*LONG NASAL WHINE*” – Billy Corgan
“Dude, you can’t recycle quotes from old pages! That’s not cool!” – Some Douche
“*Slugs Some Douche in the face*” – Several members of my posse
Albums Reviewed:
With this page, I now have three complete pages devoted to the music of Billy Corgan on this website, which is quite ridiculous if you think about it, especially considering he’s only made two records in his life that I ever get the urge to listen to anymore (go ahead, take a guess which two!). I suppose this page also, once and for all, illustrates my M.O. concerning whether to give “first album” artists their own page or banish them to the Miscellaneous Netherworld until they get off their asses and make a second record: i.e., if a band or act has a direct connection to an artist already reviewed on this site (Zwan, Audioslave, this one here), I will immediately place them on their own page. If an artist has no such connection, however, I will place them randomly between the Darkness and Our Lady Peace to fight for table scraps until I obtain album #2 and deem them worthy of their own place (so watch for that Franz Ferdinand page coming soon! Aiiieeeeee!). And that’s all I have to say about that.
Anyway, for the three people that don’t know this, Billy Corgan, his bald head, and his nose were once the lead singer, guitarist, and driving musical force behind the seminal nineties band the Smashing Pumpkins, who ruled the alt-rock roost for a while back there a decade ago before Billy got all enamored with eighties goth music and shitty-sounding synthesizers, after which time their albums slipped from decent (Adore) to mediocre (MACHINA) to downright crap (the thankfully unreleased double-album monstrosity Machina II). Then he did what no one expected and formed a sunny-happy good-time alt-rock band called Zwan and made a really darned good album with them. Then he did what everyone expected and broke up that promising collective (while trashing everyone in it outside of Jimmy Chamberlin on the way out) to pursue a solo career that sounds exactly like all the Pumpkins’ Machina material, only somehow less fun. And that brings us to today, September 10, 2005. Many rational people hate the man’s voice because it’s incredibly nasal and he actually can’t sing worth crap. I like it if the music’s good. I don’t so much if the music’s bad, but either way it’s still better than Geddy Lee’s.
And, onto the review(s)!
By the way, why are his hands like three different colors?
TheFutureEmbrace (2005)
Rating: 4
Best Song: “The
CameraEye”
OK, I’ve had it. Billy Corgan and his Depeche Mode fetish must be stopped. See, the Smashing Pumpkins were cruising right along in their admirably ambitious alt-rock yumminess for a while back there in the nineties, but then Billy just had to fuck with their sound. But at first it was OK, right? Adore might have been long and unwieldy and in serious need of editing, but parts of it were just as strong as anything he’d ever done, and, hell, it was even nice in its quietude. An agreeable change of pace, let’s say. So we all figured he’d get that out of his system, then go back to making big, loud, slick guitar rock anthems and all would be right with the world.
WRONG! We had to sit through all that Machina crap, too. Like, three albums worth! And don’t tell me two of those albums didn’t count because they were “unreleased” and “only available for illegal downloading” and “not at all good music.” Billy made them and wanted to put them out, so they count. “Oh well, Billy’s done, guess I’ll move onto Radiohead now. They’re a better band than the Pumpkins ever were, anyway!” So we all figured we wouldn’t have to listen to Billy’s whinings anymore and all would be right with the world.
WRONG! He went and formed some band called Zwan. And Zwan played big, loud, slick guitar rock anthems like we’d all been wanting since we wore out our copies of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, only the songs sounded all happy and relaxed! So now we all figured Billy’d really gotten that electro-depressive eighties goth synth crap out of his system and would thus go back to making big, loud, slick guitar rock anthems with this strangely named band with the latently homosexual album cover art, and all would be right with the world.
WRONG! Zwan broke up like a week after their album came out, Billy went solo, and now we’re all left with TheFutureEmbrace, the logical continuation of the sound Billy was cultivating toward the end of the Pumpkins’ career, in that it’s all on synths and drum machines, it sounds like third-rate Depeche Mode outtakes, and it’s BAD, BAD MUSIC. You hear me? Bad! Bad music! You go sit in the corner now! No treats for you! Because you’re bad music!
Crap. So it turns out Zwan wasn’t a welcome, surprising return to form like I and the five other people who still care about what Billy Corgan’s doing in his musical career thought. It was a bump. A hiccup, if you will, along the road to irrelevancy that Billy’s been careening down since 1998 when he pretentiously claimed Adore would singlehandedly change rock and roll and it instead ended up as the worst-selling album of the Pumpkins’ career. This album is boring, melodically lacking, and musically uninteresting. If you’re in love with the depressing synth-heavy goth-y music of the mid-eighties, maybe you’ll like this album. Maybe. I personally haven’t heard too much of the music that Billy’s referencing here, but if it’s as plodding, boring, and ugly as monstrosities like the opener “All Things Change,” “Now (and Then),” and “Sorrows (in Blue),” then I can’t see how bands of that ilk ever sold any records at all. Much of this record is a middling, annoying mess of drum machines (a retarted idea considering Billy could’ve gotten Jimmy Chamberlin to drum on this album in about five seconds), horrible-sounding synth washes, and guitars treated to sound like more ugly synth washes, over which Billy mumbles incoherent mush with very few melodic ideas in his patented over-emotive nasal whine that makes Mark Prindle break out in hives. Fuck this shit.
However. before I continue the bash-fest and make you wonder why I was generous to give the record a rating as high as a 4, let it be known that this album is not without decent songs, and that one song is actually fantastic. One time on this record, during “The CameraEye,” the synths, drum machines, treated doohickies, and nasal bellowings actually achieve something not only good, but extremely tasty, almost as much so as “Ava Adore” back in the Adore days. See, the problem with Billy’s use of drum machines on this record is that he has no idea how to use them! In his hands, they plod and plod and plod and are just about the most uninteresting things on earth. But not here! Here they KICK! This is possibly the most electronic-sounding song on the record, but the drum machines work up a real good rhythm and Billy does away with the ugly, fuzzy synth washes that permeate the rest of the album, instead relying on a clever little bassline, something that sounds like woodblocks deep in the background, and then synths and treated guitars that actually play neat, interesting melody lines instead of being grinded together into an unattractive, gloppy, retarted mass. Those goofy *bloop* synthy things that sound like recent Radiohead are ace, too. And the melody Billy sings is catchy! Really a very good song here. Impressive indeed. Besides that one, a few of the others that have a modicum of spunk (specifically “Mina Loy (M.O.H.)” and “Walking Shade”) are decidedly OK, and the strangely upbeat and happy (despite being full of fuzzy synth wash annoying crap) “Pretty Pretty Star” is fun in its own way. However, at this point I will end the discussion of the album’s passable material and move onto another paragraph.
After the four songs mentioned above, you’re left with just about nothing. The standout examples of badness are the criminally underdeveloped and useless closer “Strayz” and the totally out-of-place BEE GEES COVER (seriously) “To Love Somebody,” which I didn’t even know was a Bee Gees cover until about fifteen minutes ago because it’s turned into a horrid, ugly dirge, just like nearly every song on this album. If I haven’t mentioned a particular song yet, it’s because it sucks dick and you shouldn’t listen to it, so with that I’m gonna stop mentioning particular songs. If Billy’s brief flirtation with actually making happy fun music that was his time in Zwan was a bump in the road to irrelevancy, this record shows Billy hitting the accelerator and heading toward it faster than ever before. Except for a handful of decent songs and one surprisingly excellent one, this album is slow, meandering, ugly, messy, pseudo-goth electro-shit that will soon be finding its way into used cheapy bins en masse. I now officially do not give a crap about Billy Corgan.
Pedro Andino (pedroandino@msn.com) writes:
never dismiss billy corgan
just because he is an egomaniac! despite his control freak problems I still say
the fangirls love the man! billy's smile will melt the fangirls and his body
has the kind of sexual animal rock star posing that drives them wild! you may
think I am really gay but fuck it! I do not care cause billy is my man! that
and the lovely daniel radcliffe! oh boy did you see that movie brokeback
mountain? it is a gay cowboy flick!