BILLY CORGAN
TheFutureEmbrace
Warner
· The emperor has no clothes.
Now that the ’90s are already a half-decade behind us, the time is right for an altogether new inspection of the Alternative Revolution™ intended to save us from boredom and the mainstream. There’s no finer example of where it all went wrong than Billy Corgan – and believe me, this all comes from a place of love. The Smashing Pumpkins were my high school band. The group that "got me through" before I dug deeper and Corgan started whining on about the "cogs of God" and some junk on Machina (the best thing you can say about that album is that it finally broke up the band). Before the marshmallow-soft goth nonsense and silver dresses, when The Pumpkins were good, they were incredible.
In the five years since the Pumpkins called it quits, Billy’s indie superhero Zwan project fell apart at the seams (absolutely not his fault, he claims on his near daily blog posts at myspace.com – a site so sad and spiteful it has to be seen to be believed), and our boy is now a published poet (hands up – who read Blinking With Fists without laughing? Anyone?) and a solo artist embracing a new "direct, honest" approach to writing lyrics. Funny how the anti-stardom cats of the ’90s are doing whatever it takes to maintain at least some shred of their celebrity these days.
TheFutureEmbrace is a record almost entirely without tunes. The pristine studio perfection of Siamese Dream is gone in favour of chintzy sounding second-rate synth goth-rock, the imagination and scope of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness replaced by dreary hook-free filler. There’s next to nothing here, and worst of all, Corgan knows it.
It’s perfectly fitting, then, that silly Billy chose to celebrate the release of his first solo album – so pure and personal he’s graced its cover with photos of the large spackled strawberry birth-mark that crosses much of his left forearm, hidden until now in all publicity photographs – with a full-page ad taken out in one of Chicago’s major daily newspapers to herald the return of the Smashing Pumpkins. I suppose all that’s left to do is just excuse TheFutureEmbrace as a momentary hiccup – Corgan already has, and by simply blinking and letting it pass, you won’t miss out on anything at all.
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