The Pumpkins were my JAM in high school, but by the time this came out in the post-Adore, post-Zwan hangover, I was completely done with Billy Corgan's shit. So here I come back around, old as shit, ready to give a fair shake.
Everything you read says this was about doing what the Pumpkins wouldn't. The dead-simple drum machine beats are the opposite of Chamberlain's jazzy skitters, the single-take guitars are the opposite of the meticulously crafted walls of noise, and the strange fractured take on track composition, well that's just in defiance of how you're supposed to make music.
You can feel Corgan flailing: the guitar rock well's run dry, the patience for his shit is run out, so he's constructed a Rube Goldberg machine for making records hoping the radical process will make a radical record.
The process worked exactly twice, making two very good songs, and Mina Loy and Camera Eye are put right up front to give you false hope: twisty bass, floating vocals, and gorgeously textured guitars make for some really exciting shit. Those guitars, especially, are a highlight, buzzing with Trent Reznot // Atticus Ross intrigue and thrill. And even at the end a couple of frail tracks remind you of Adore's finest moments of vulnerability.
But in between, it's a mess. There's no heart, no soul, no hooks, no momentum: it sounds, sure enough, made by a Rube Goldberg machine: these tracks are those times a day when the stopped clock wasn't right. I found myself saying "is this song still going?" again and again, as I heard the same limp chorus limp by for the 8th or 9th time while endless tinny snares clicked by.
It's frustrating to see an artist once so prolific reduced to this - I'm reminded of Bowie, as we dare to hope again and again for a flash of that old magic, hear singers wondering Has the world changed or have I changed? 3/5
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