Real 90s kids remember Billy in this role too…
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[6.12]
Josh Langhoff: There was a time in early ’90s alt-rock, ca. “Plush” (that dumb song about a woman being smelt by dogs) and “Summer Babe” (that dumb song about a woman eating her fingers), when the density of riff and tone seemed like it could be all. Like it could tell the whole story. This density didn’t just compensate for hapless lyric writing; it benefited from the union. Typical virtues like “coherence,” “observational detail,” and “choosing the right word” would’ve mired these songs in the real world. And that would’ve distracted from the singularity of riff and riffmeister — in the Pumpkins’ case, a mysterious being who resembled The Thing From Another World but with more skull. It made sense that this braying creature would rhyme “honey” with “money” as he flattened the earth — what did he care for our standards? Now, after too many years spent wandering the wilds of semi-coherence, doing things that humans do, the Great Pumpkin returns with a song of eternal youth, which he has heard humans say they want. “Let’s get heat,” he apparently sings, the guitars congealing around him like Arctic ice.
[6]
Cédric Le Merrer: After the Zwan-esque “Being Beige”, these grungy-guitars-on-washing-machine-drone-mode can only be welcome. This would have fit perfectly among the b-sides of “Zero,” which is as much as you can expect from the Pumpkins post-Y2K bug. The sore point is the lyrics. Corgan once explained his writing method this way: sing “bullshit” lyrics over your demo, then change the words around until they’re “poetic” and “mysterious”. This is how you get to great nonsense like the “1979” lyrics, which technically may still be bullshit lyrics, but were way less dull than these “we are so young” boilerplate inanities. Still, good guitars.
[6]
Thomas Inskeep: Tonight, tonight, Billy Corgan’s gonna party like it’s 1998. And all things considered, that’s not such a bad thing. This could be an outtake from the Adore boxed set.
[5]
Brad Shoup: The buzzy lurch is structure enough, but Corgan sounds lost in the space, at least until he constructs a staircase on the refrain. It always was the swoon that got me, not the bark.
[6]
Abby Waysdorf: In high school I was obsessed with the Smashing Pumpkins. Obsessed in the way that only teenagers can be, and fairly typically so — posters on the wall, every single record/CD single collected, all the facts known, etc etc. Of all the things I was in high school, being Smashing Pumpkins-obsessed is the one I talk least about. It just seems more embarrassing than everything else. It was out of time — I was fifteen in 2000, when they broke up the first time — and they weren’t mainstream enough for it to be a part of group nostalgia (as, say, a Backstreet Boys obsession would have been) or cool enough to make me seem precocious. Billy Corgan’s move into even more grandiosity didn’t age well, and he, along with the music from the chaotic years of my actual fandom, became a punchline. I lost touch. 15-year-old me would be distraught that this is the first post-2000 Smashing Pumpkins song I’ve heard. But she would be pleased to know that I like it, both from what I liked then and what I like now. Corgan’s vaguely inhuman vocals and lyrical theatricality are met here with a tight structure, the dark grunginess of the guitar matched with an almost soaring sensation of the chorus and bridge. You can never go back to who you were, but maybe you can remember why you were that person.
[7]
Patrick St. Michel: The meme-ification of Billy Corgan has resulted in The Smashing Pumpkins’ newer material being… well, I don’t know, because I didn’t want to engage with what I perceived to be the lolcat of the rock world. But “One and All” does what it sets out to do really well, and it’s better than a lot of the “modern rock” trickling out of America recently. It chugs along and lets Corgan do his growly thing and it’s all fine, over before it turns stale.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Wave after wave of reissues, as scary as any of Billy Corgan’s multitracked guitars, and it’s nice to know they or he can still summon their old sturm und drang and terrible poetry. Slap it on a David Lynch movie soundtrack and it’s Friday night again.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: First listen: their best song since “That’s The Way (My Love Is),” as low a bar as that is. Second listen: No, wait, best single since “Stand Inside Your Love.” Now I think you might have to go back to “Perfect” to find a better specimen — the guitars buzz-saw effectively, admittedly with a bit of rust showing, but the song feels dense as well as loud. Corgan sings of youth like the bitter asshole he always was and will be, but if you get into the chorus, it’s a quality bit of seething irony. Put this way, in that dated and not-good episode of The Simpsons where there’s a cartoon moshpit moving awkwardly to “Zero,” you could substitute this and it would work just fine, thanks. And it works just fine for me.
[7]