Photo Credit: Paul Elledge
Unlike fellow ’90s alt-rock icons, Liz Phair, Alanis Morissette, and Courtney Love, Billy Corgan-led The Smashing Pumpkins maintained a steady output of new music throughout the 2010s – with each release seeming to generate less excitement and attention than that which preceded. Indeed, going into the band’s latest era, far more attention is being paid to the band’s past, rather than their future – with outsized coverage being given to the recent 30th anniversary of their sophomore classic Siamese Dream. Even the band themselves seem acutely aware of this – naming their upcoming tour based on a lyric from 1995’s Mellon Collie LP (“The World Is A Vampire”) rather than anything from their newest album, ATUM. In spite of this, the band seems plenty confident in their latest offering – billing it not just as a conceptual, three-part, space-odyssey rock opera, but also as a predecessor to the aforementioned Mellon Collie. Not content to live in the shadow of past triumphs, Corgan and company seem to believe that their newest project can go head-to-head with their very greatest work.
However, one only needs to listen to a handful of songs from ATUM to realize that such a belief speaks solely to the outsized ego of the band’s frontman and in no way is a testament to the quality of music offered across the triple album’s reliably uninspiring two-and-a-half-hours. In fact, so rare are compelling ideas on ATUM, that even at half its current length, the album would still drag. Much of ATUM jarringly alternates between cliché and frustratingly impenetrable poetry. In one breath, Corgan can declare, “For once you’ve left as your father’s son // You’re blessed as the dove I face,” and in another croon, “Shine as we all shine.” When Corgan declares, “I’m a hooligan” he instantly recalls “Bullet With Butterfly Wings'” cries of “I’m a renegade” but instantly invalidates such a message because of how suffocatingly self-serious the music of ATUM is.
The band’s ongoing lyrical descent would be easier to forgive, or at least ignore, if these songs sounded more compelling. Instead, the band poorly attempts to split the difference between synth-pop, glam-rock, pop-rock, and their classic ’90s alt-rock songs. Rather than demonstrating the band’s array of inspirations, this eclecticism ultimately results in music that sounds tentative and unsure of itself. “Steps In Time” beguiles in its attempts to switch between the sounds of ’90s alt-rock and the radio-friendly pop-rock of the 2000s. There is a real promise to the Linkin Park-style shredding that opens up “Empires,” which makes it all the more disappointing when the song devolves into bad ’80s-Bowie pastiche. The album’s too-muchness is most acutely captured via “Butterfly Suite,” which is part pop-punk, part synth-pop, and part Bon Iver-style atmospherics.
Though ATUM is much more miss than hit, it enjoys a handful of standouts that suggest that the band could still have another vital album in them. “Every Morning” unfolds gradually across a surprisingly enjoyable 6 minutes and settles on a relatable note of yearning (“There’s lines to flee // And ages to reach”), while “With Ado I Do” benefits from a slower, more reflective tone and pace, even if Corgan’s attempts at poetry remain largely inscrutable.
This modus operandi is where the band fare best – when Corgan and The Smashing Pumpkins aren’t pretending to hold the answers to all the universe’s biggest questions, but remain grounded by the very human emotions of uncertainty, longing, and bittersweet nostalgia. Nowhere is the contrast between ATUM’s most and least compelling qualities illustrated better than on “Space Age.” The intergalactic musings suggested by its title unsurprisingly fall flat, but Corgan’s longing for past glories and admissions of unknowing prove compelling (“Used to run, run absurd”, “Spent their legends and said youth”, “I don’t know, know true”). For all of ATUM’s ambition, its most compelling moments prove to be its most humble.
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