Smashing Pumpkins: Fresh Fruit or Rotten Veg?

New single is horrendous, but that’s par for the course with 21st century Pumpkins. Chamberlain’s drumming is so rote and boring on it

Yeah, probably the single biggest crime Corgan continues to commit is having Jimmy fucking Chamberlain in his band and refusing to let him off the leash. It's awful.

For all his hullabaloo with artwork, song titles, huge albums, gaudy videos...the songs since Oceania have been sooo uninteresting. At the very least the guy used to be bursting with ideas.

the other new song ("butterfly suite") is much better, uncoincidentally it sounds a lot like cyr (see evidence above of me liking cyr)

Didn't realize there was a second one out there, I'd only heard "Beguiled".

I didn't hate Cyr, but I'm also not interested in another take on that sound.

i dislike "beguiled" and "solara" for the same reason, they are both anchored by very boring riffs

besides which corgan already wrote a late-period pop-metal song that both of those tracks wish they were, it's called "glow" and if it isn't particularly good at least it actually gets stuck in my head

The songs themselves will be drip-fed to fans on a weekly basis, however, with frontman Billy Corgan launching a podcast, Thirty-Three (named for the total number of songs on ‘ATUM’) to explore the story behind each track.

oof, come on

Didn't realize there was a second one out there, I'd only heard "Beguiled".

― a superficial sheeb of intelligence (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Tuesday, September 20, 2022 7:58 AM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it leaked, i guess? i thought it would hit streaming with "beguiled" but it didn't https://www.reddit.com/r/SmashingPumpkins/comments/xibg95/butterfly_suite_2022/

Thanks!

i maintain that shiny & oh so bright vol. 1 was actually decent (even though "solara" sucked) & pretty easily the most worthwhile thing corgan's done since zwan

& lol he is releasing one song a week but not even in tracklist order? "beguiled" is in the middle of act 2, this is completely baffling.

i was an oceania denier for years but it's easily the strongest post-pumpkins mk 1 record

Maybe he can actually finish this project, unlike Teargarden.

it's already done so little risk of that

haha, yes, that was my point

it is billy though so i wouldn't completely put it past him

I wasn't there, but apparently they were pretty solid last night:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Faqxbmj6sIg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMlb3UEA4MI

lol

Disappointed in ilm tbh, feels like there was a time when Corgan eating chips and dip during a show would have at least led to a day or two of riffing. Hoped to get a least one "despite all my rage, I am still eating dip on a stage" joek in.

It's 2022, Billy C being a weird dick is no longer news

idk I think footage of him eating dip on stage mid-concert is objectively funny no matter the year

Maybe if James had done it...

That's a pretty good bit tbh. And Jimmy Chamberlain is crushing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SLr5UK1WIg

5:05 for a great Corgan vocal take.

What are the marks on his arm (1:16 in)? Has he been ill?

It’s a birthmark

They're birthmarks, he had concealed them for years and then became comfortable with them around the time of his first solo record iirc

sorry just1n3

Birthmarks, he's always had those. It wasn't until TheFutureEmbrace, his solo record from 2005, that he made a conscious effort to stop covering them up.

lol oops xpost, what they said

I have always thought of them as a long-sleeved shirt kinda band.

just gonna keep it to myself after this post but i'm kinda enjoying the first third of atum, much as i kinda enjoyed cyr

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFChKps-0AA

ok i did not end up keeping it to myself

seeing them tonight, if corgan shows up (they cancelled the portland show two nights ago)

ran outta dip?

he lost his voice apparently

this after janes addiction had to pull out of several shows because perry hurt himself onstage doing contortions or whatever the fuck

Some interesting stuff on the new album but mostly meh.

It's better than I expected? Still lots of meh, but a step up from Cyr imho. That intro title track is misleading, it's like an atmospheric black metal intro or something, I was all stoked for it to lead into like "Tales of a Scorched Earth" v2 or something but, nope, back to the same synth pop sound he's been chasing. I do love the metal loving guitar solo in "The Good in Goodbye" though, along with a few other parts where the guitar makes a notable impression. It's overproduced to death, but the drums do hit pretty hard.

Again, borderline criminal that Corgan has a rare talent like Chamberlain in his band and refuses to let him loose and keeps him tied to so many boring ass beats.

they were great last night, new songs were good too. interestingly, no keyboards on stage; there were some programmed things here and there being triggered from somewhere, but this was an extremely guitar heavy set. I hadn't realized there was another guitarist in addition to Iha and Corgan now too.

Jeff?

Yeah, he's still with them afaik.

yes. also, sadly, no chips and dip, though we were treated to the worst version of Once in a Lifetime I've ever heard

Jane's Addiction were awesome, I didn't miss Navarro at all, plus Josh Klinghoffer showed up for a few songs.

I feel bad for Jeff - he's been in the band for 15 years now and still gets forgotten.

well in fairness, I pay no attention to smashing pumpkins in general so don't assume my ignorance is a sign of anything

the stage set up was interesting in that they didn't have any amp cabs up there, just heads, so I guess they routed everything back through the monitors (and in-ears, I assume). I've read somewhere else this is becoming common for some bands but I'd never seen it before.

hmm

https://www.discogs.com/release/25361299-The-Smashing-Pumpkins-The-Rubano-Tapes-Vol-2