Review Summary: Back to their destined territory of almost being a great band. Hail Mary.
Cards on the table: I'm sceptical that the Smashing Pumpkins have released a single good record since
Siamese Dream, and consider Billy Corgan a delusional cornball whose conceptual excretions have long since eschewed artistic or commercial relevance and deserve commentary only as a warning to their would-be audience. He's in the realm of Rivers Cuomo, Kanye West and Sleep Token for musicians to be taken in exclusively bad faith, whose output has hit such repeated and devastating lows that I no longer care whether it gets a redemption arc — and so it is for the Pumpkins. If
Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 heard the last gasp of a rock band pretending their vapid guitar fantasies were anything other than an excuse to fill stadiums for a nostalgic fanbase, then
Cyr and as much of the
Atum trilogy as I made it through (your guess is as good as my recollection) were packed with offensively trite content that would never have made it through a democratic production process and found itself pissed into the void of arbitrarily generated digital-age muzak.
And there's another one now? Had we not suffered enough? This virulent disdain is 100% why I signed up to field the Pumpkins' latest endeavour, and I suspect that you too went into
Aghori Mhori Mei with similar preconceptions, or, otherwise, that there is a good reason why you have not yet done so.
Well! This album's greatest and most immediate appeal is that my intuition was royally off the mark this time around: opener "Edin" wastes no time in teasing hard-edge stoner-ish motif that would have sounded great coming from just about any heavy band in the Pumpkins' vague orbit, be they Kyuss or Tool, before flooding through with a crash, a surge of overdrive and a barrelling showcase of full fucking rock band chemistry that crashes through any reservations, however justifiable, and uses the power of first impression to turn the band's profile cleanly on its shiny, shiny head — wham! We're off! This isn't the morning laundry following Corgan's latest wet dream; this is a watertight band going to town on throttling riffs, pummelling fills and larger-than-life fuzzy glory.
Just like that, it all comes back: I'd become so used to treating James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin as hired hands kept around to sustain an illusion of camaraderie that I forgot the pair make for a genuinely solid guitarist and one of rock's premier drummers. Both are as generously spotlighted as Corgan throughout the track, and the results are unimpeachable: that signature "Geek USA"-hearkening tom-rattle with which Chamberlin holds the floor four minutes in? The screaming wah-wah abuse Iha dishes out as though he recorded "Zero" mere months ago? Magical, even as a Pumpkins sceptic. The pair thunder through the following tracks: "Pentagrams" may be a little stop-start, but Chamberlain stomps so hard through its up-time that those emphatic dynamic shifts pay off in spades, while "Sighommi" is the rollicking radio-friendly banger the band have desperately needed for years (extra kudos here to backing vocalist to Katie Cole, a necessary and much-appreciated foil to Corgan who sees the track off to album-capping heights).
For these three songs – and at several points throughout the rest of the tracklist, interspersed as it is with starry-eyed, keyboard-laden warblings of kitsch – the Smashing Pumpkins are a rock powerhouse in full string, their excesses breathtaking at their best and well-mitigated even at their worst: even when Corgan's poetic twaddle lands like a bad punchline (
labyrinth milk syringe / who leaves the gates gold / scorpion, Scorpio, o vey), there's always a rousing full-band moment waiting in the wings to bail him out. For the first time in unthinkably long, I hardly felt any strain in coughing up the suspension of disbelief the man's vision so desperately needs.
Take all this excitement with as many pinches of salt as you like: this album's initial impact and discog-relative quality may be nothing short of a wonder, but it only takes a few songs for all-too-familiar snags to make themselves felt. Though the mix places him appropriately low, Corgan is still one of the worst singers in all rock music (where once he offset his nasal drawl with bile and brimstone, here many of his lines sound like they are delivered by someone with quite literally no teeth), and – less inevitably – his songwriting here tends to coast off the energy of its performances and is often indistinct in its progression or hooks (just you try to pinpoint a chorus in the midst of "999"'s lumbering mess). Though a step up from previous ventures, the production here struggles mask its own artifice: straightforward rockers erect a tenable fourth wall, but across the synthetically-augmented 50% of the album, Corgan fluffs the interplay between band-in-a-room and man-in-front-of-screen and ends up sounding like nowhere at all. One sees this at its worst on the hellish orchestral closer "Murnau" and the overbearing synth-ballad "Pentecost", both of which struggle to camouflage the grids and borderlines of Corgan's DAW against the whimsical fantasies he strains so hard to enact.
Too bad!
Aghori Mhori Mei might amount to less and less the more you squint at it, but there's no denying that first impression of a hard-rocking band of dorky romantics who still somehow love each other and the music they make after decades of artistic failure and unbalanced band politics. Put that shit on the radio, have someone riding shotgun to talk over the clunky bits, make sure the hiss of wind through your open window is the exact same level as the vocal track, and they've never sounded better. Go team.
