The cover for Billy Corgan's new album...

I really like the single, beautiful arrangement & his singing is growing on me, I like the vocal melody a lot & the piano/strings remind me a lot of some of the softer stuff on MCIS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PdZXNET88A

Was just hanging with a friend who was convinced Corgan hadn't done a thing since Zwan, that he had just retired.

Your friend wasn't that far off tbh

I told him that Tommy Lee was even briefly in the band and he thought I was kidding.

looking forward to Corgan getting shit for native american appropriation there yikes

Haha god I forgot about that.

New single is... not very good. Arrangement is ok, MCIS-y, but the lyrics and especially the delivery.. Nah. And I give this guy way more credit than most.

didn't even spell oglala right

Haha god I forgot about that.

New single is... not very good. Arrangement is ok, MCIS-y, but the lyrics and especially the delivery.. Nah. And I give this guy way more credit than most.

i like it more than anything he's done since Zwan. but it's all relative 😔... his voice is horrible now, but it's a better vocal take than almost anything from SP2, probably because Rick Rubin is super vocal oriented and made him sing it until he got it.... mostly right. I really love the music though, and the production.

His vocals are definitely improved but the song is a nothing.

what is up w that cover

i like it more than anything he's done since Zwan

eh? at the very least sp2 has a few jams

this is not a jam

this sounds like a garbage outtake from Use Your Illusion

I'd rather hear him do more acoustic/chamber music than RAWK out at this point. The softer stuff on MCIS & the Tonight, Tonight/33 singles has always been my favorite songwriting mode of his. Besides, 'The Spaniards' is on here and when I saw SP play it last year at one of the In Plainsong shows, it was a total shred fest.

Struggling to think of any SP2 rawk jams that are worth revisiting when we have Jellybelly, X.Y.U., Fuck You, Tales of a Scorched Earth, TAFH, half of Machina, etc. Oceania has riffs but always felt so empty & generic to me. Zeitgeist is garbage but United States is cool, albeit ruined by backup vocals and awful mix. Superchrist is fine. A Song for a Son is OK but not much of a song there, just an excuse to solo, which is fine by me. Still haven't revisited it much. One + All is a rewrite of MCIS era throwaway The Viper so it's automatically good. Burnt Orange-Black, a Day for Night casualty or Monuments outtake, is also great but it's a blatant Porcelina rewrite. Superchrist is fine. Doomsday Clock & 7 Shades of Black are cool but fuck all of those Zeitgeist songs are ruined by his horrible backup vocals.

None of the heavy stuff they've done in the past decade interests me. All of the SP2 songs I really like/love are in the same vein as the new single: The Celestials, Being Beige, Sunkissed, Owata, A Stitch in Time, The Rose March...

oh yeah, Superchrist is fine

I'm gonna guess the cover subjects are his girlfriend, and their son.

https://assets.rbl.ms/3349689/980x.jpg

This song is fucking slop.

I like the song. Nice vocal by BC's standards lately.

I probably won't listen to this - listening to the last Pumpkins record basically confirmed to me that I'm done with new Corgan stuff. Think I'll stick to the original SP, the Zwan LP and Oceania. I don't think I need any more Corgan stuff.

the one i listen to the most these days = zwan.
i love that album.

I'm gonna guess the cover subjects are his girlfriend, and their son.

yeeeaah, that is not really the issue

I'd rather hear him do more acoustic/chamber music than RAWK out at this point.

by "jam" i wasn't really referring to RAWK. the quieter/more dynamic moments on the last few sp albums are the high points generally ("ma belle," "stellar," "pale horse," etc.). i've said this in another sp thread but the best rockin' sp2 track is "lightning strikes" imo even though it sounds sorta like a hybrid of thefutureembrace and zeitgeist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qcZEX2iDYQ

anyway the new song is still dogshit

actually revisiting that song: i always forget how much i dislike mike byrne's drumming

mike byrne is the worst. Colors my opinion of all the songs he played on. I agree though all the Zeitgeist b-sides are better than gen record, which says something about Bill's judgment.

I really liked Sasha Geffen's write-up of the song, particularly their description of Bill's voice:

Corgan, who’s trying to rebrand himself under his full birth name William Patrick Corgan, has one of the most idiosyncratic voices in rock: high, raspy, and perforated, like it’s being filtered through a rusted metal grille at the end of a half-full sewer pipe. It made the Smashing Pumpkins stand out during the grunge years and it makes Corgan stand out now—24 years after “Cherub Rock,” no one else sings like that.

although I'm puzzled by this: "The first single off his second solo album, meanwhile, barely sees him raise his voice above a whisper." Sure, he's not shouting, this isn't Bullet, but I hear a lot of push & passion in his voice, a big part of why I like this song so much is that it sounds like Billy actually gives a shit for the first time in years.

is he really not getting any blowback for the "redface" shit on the cover? crazy. Coyne was pilloried for less.

Maybe his wife is Native American? Hopefully?

his wife is French and Asian

girlfriend, whatever

wtf BC

this is her dad: http://www.infomat.com/whoswho/gillesmendel.html

her mom's name is Jenny Mui

even if she was Native American I would hope she would know at least one of the common spellings of Oglala/Ogallala

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oglala_Lakota

new single

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1ZnYLBKs-o

sub-Guy Maddin video

Saw him play this live with SP last year on the In Plainsong tour, iirc they closed the show with it. it was a total shred fest, Jimmy pounding on the drums. I dig this version, especially the double-tracked vox on the refrain, but I hope the rest of the album is more in line with "Aeronaut." I think that might be my favorite post-2000 song that Bill has written, besides "Chrysanthemum."

xp the video is footage from his short film Pillbox. I didn't bother watching it. Not into any of his extracurricular shit

was hoping dude would save this song for a sp record

the arrangement is less uninteresting than that other song though, and i was surprised that i actually liked the imagery in the video (even as its apparently taken from a longer film), his videos have been embarrassing for ages now

the melody sounds like something adam levine would sing

He opened all the In Plainsong shows last year with a new song called "Cardinal Rule." I wonder if that's on here under a different title or if it was scrapped/relegated to a b-side. Good song.

i'm listening to this. it's

1. not very embarrassing at all!
2. occasionally inspired! ("mandarynne" reminds me of "once in a while" a lot and probably for that reason i think it's the best song here)
3. still v weird and imbalanced in mixing, mastering, arrangement, etc.
4. lyrically unforgivable

it's sort of what i expected the never-recorded chicago songs album to sound like with slightly hookier songs

Well that's pretty promising! Billy has set the bar so low for himself. Gonna wait for my LP to come in the mail to listen, but happy to hear that he actually gives a shit again. re: lyrics... lol let me guess, lots of "lovers"? I think "Aeronaut" is fantastic but my man can't write a song without some line about "lovers." Mixing issues seem endemic to any Rick Rubin project.

Apparently Bill said that if this does well, he'll release Chicago Songs. yeah ok sure guy

http://www.npr.org/2017/10/05/554282861/first-listen-william-patrick-corgan-ogilala

Apparently Bill said that if this does well, he'll release Chicago Songs. yeah ok sure guy

― flappy bird, Thursday, October 5, 2017 11:15 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah and i bet if you play this theoretical chicago songs disc backwards you unlock the metro dvd

ha! and only then will the Machina Mystery finally be solved.

fwiw he did record Chicago Songs, it does exist, but he shelved it after (brace yourself) he went on Netphoria after debuting those songs & saw people were pissed that he wasn't playing electric guitar.

whoops i didn't brace myself

Stay strong

guy should've read more blamonet

Billy absolutely went on blamo & netphoria & the o-board. i mean he uses SPFC to remember lyrics in all those Madame ZuZus performances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs9GSGR1XHA

ok then enjoy music on your own shithead!

Processional is beautiful, these lines & their melody hit me hard:

And stake your heart on mine
to places, other times
It's a long way, it's a long way
to get back home

― flappy bird, Sunday, November 26, 2017 10:56 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I completely agree! After a couple more listens, it's a late-period Corgan classic for me now.

Of course, I'm mow on a Pumpkins B-sides kick, of all things...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiFMosotuPo

only watched a few songs from that, p good so far

not optimistic about the odds of this ever coming out (at least as a double album:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BcqDsVZAk_E/

caption reads:

I just finished a few weeks recording in Nashville for the follow-up to Ogilala. So far (the new album) is more stark and tangled. Also looks like it will be a double (16 songs at least)

lol i really hope he puts it out

me too. i will say i was p sure what became Ogilala was shelved before it was announced in August (he recorded it in the summer of 2016... Linda Strawberry posted a picture of him doing vocals and said the album was called The Land of Maybe). i still have reservations about this new one though mostly because he's working with Howard Willing and presumably self-producing again, so there goes the quality control of Rick Rubin. i don't think Ogilala sounds drastically better than any of the post-2000 records, but Billy needs to have someone listen to all of his demos and pick out the gems that he's been throwing away for years now. i don't know what happened to his quality control compass. if not for Rubin "Aeronaut" not only wouldn't have been on the album it probably never would've been recorded. anyway he's still got some good momentum atm and seems like he's in a good place, hope "Cardinal Rule" is on it.

this is approaching Chrysanthemum levels of post-SP songwriting for me lately

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AAtElcmYic