“Adore” by the Smashing Pumpkins – Review

Billy Corgan has done us a favor by concentrating all of the blasphemies and most of the smut in track two, “Ava Adore,” and it’s a shame that he sacrificed such an excellent backing track to such icky lyrics. (And in all six discs of the deluxe reissue [how many people bought this freaking CD the first time?!] there isn’t an instrumental version.) There’s nothing more to be said of it.

Like many American schoolchildren in the past twenty years I owned the Smashing Pumpkins’ Rotten Apples compilation in middle school, and I would blast it on the bus and between classes, identifying with the early songs’ paper-thin alienation and fourth-generation copies of Jimi Hendrix riffs. The Adore excerpts puzzled me, and the title track I found repulsive (children have at least some ingrained morality); I didn’t hear anything attractive in them during my early teenage years.

Now that I’m all grown up I can finally hear it, for two reasons. First, most of these songs play up Corgan and his co-producers’ gift for big pop drama. Billy’s version of that drama inclines gothic, on the title track, on “Daphne Descends,” on “Shame,” on “Crestfallen” and other great songs. In others that drama becomes the stuff of confessional seventies pop, like “To Sheila,” “Dusty & Pistol Pete,” “To Martha” and the piercing “Once Upon a Time,” one of the few really affecting rock-star-loses-parent songs I’ve heard; and sometimes, probably because of his collaborating producers, it comes out in the fake but nonetheless huge emotions of swelling synthesizers, like in “Appels + Oranjes” and “Tear” and “Perfect.” That kind of pop drama was missing from the first couple of Pumpkins records, which are mostly focused on riffs and intricately arranged “rock” songs, and only with the Mellon Collie album do I think they started to work out what pop music (rather than rock) is about. In fact, studying the first four Smashing Pumpkins albums could help a lot of musicians accelerate their own development, sharpen their pop edge.

The second reason I enjoy Adore more is that the stakes seem higher. In some of these songs Billy begins confront real problems, like his mother’s death, his unworthiness of love in “Crestfallen,” and desperately unhappy women in “Annie-Dog.” Of course many of the songs are silly melodramas, like “Behold! the Night-Mare,” “Daphne Descends” and the least gripping murder ballad ever published, “The Tale of Dusty and Pistol Pete.” (Have you ever heard Bob Dylan’s version of “House Carpenter,” or the Anthology original?) But even then, these are a long ways ahead of the generic edginess of the first two records, of the astrology bullshit he’s always slipped in and out of, and even Mellon Collie‘s nostalgic pop. And the gorgeous textures save even the silly songs. I’ve never been a “goth” kid but Adore make a solid argument for it — if you can listen to all six and a half minutes of “Shame” without once wishing to trudge through an ash-colored landscape with nothing but your sadness and your old iPod, you must still have a heart (unlike goth kids). Misdirected latria aside, Adore is a very good record.