E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

It is five years, more or less, since Eyewear last reviewed a Smashing Pumpkins album here.  Last time, it was Zeitgeist , and I raved and gushed .  It was a sort of Second Smashing.  Now here comes Mr. Corgan , apparently armed with the same portentous ego and nasal imperatives, and a bunch of new cronies, to give us, this day, Oceania , presumably named after one of the superstates at war in Orwell 's novel.  Depending on where you stand, this new LP is either an imposition similar to being boxed about the ears by an immature giant, or a wonderful greatest day ever. I am of the latter camp, more or less.  I am a fan of Corgan.  I don't see through his soaring bluster and corny ambitons, his roaring guitar riffs and drum beats stolen from West point, via Queen 's Flash Gordon soundtrack.  No, I always bought the semi-camp leap of faith required, the adrenalin buzz, the bloodrush, the nonsensical zoom of Smashing Pumpkins, the stately plumpness of i...

Billy Corgan (pictured in pseudo-sacrilegious pose) is the frontman - one wants to say evil genius - of Smashing Pumpkins - who were, after Nirvana , the major American alternative band of the 1990s. This isn't just conjecture or opinion - though I want to stop here and coin an aphorism: fashions change, taste remains bad. SP saw their 1995 madly-ambitious magnum opus, Melancolie and the Infinite Sadness , go to number one at Billboard , following up on what I consider their greatest album (indeed, the greatest popular music album of the last 16 or so years, other than In Utero ) - the sublime Siamese Dream . SD meshed and mashed a variety of influences and styles, to gloriously evoke the head-rush of unchained rock guitar (often derided as "noodling") and adolescent vulnerability - so that the songs work together to present a landscape of teen isolation that is both defiantly itself and openly wounded by past abuses ("Disarm"); but the work is not altogethe...