It's the Smashing Pumpkins, Charlie Brown!
Corgan and Co Begin Work on the New Album Teargarden by Kaleidyscope
It may seem like a long time ago, partially because it was, but alternative rock radio stations didn’t used to play the latest Nickleback song on repeat twenty four hours a day. These stations used to be, not to put too fine a point on it, good. A major reason for that was The Smashing Pumpkins, and it looks like they’re back at it, albeit in a pretty odd way.
The last time the band was heard from was in 2007 when they (they in this case referring to Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin as the sole pieces of their heyday lineup still present) released the generally poorly received album Zeitgeist. In 2009 Chamberlin followed James Iha and D’arcy Wretzky in walking out on Corgan, leaving him alone to carry on the Pumpkins’ legacy.
So, after numerous shenanigans (making wrestling commercials, having fundraisers at which you bid to buy him lunch, asking fans pay a fee to watch him at work in the studio, etc.) Billy Corgan has gone from guitar god to seemingly certifiable crazy person in a few short years. But, he has the potential to redeem himself with his massive new undertaking.
Yet Another Ambitious Project for the Pumpkins' Fearless Leader
The new album will be called Teargarden by Kaleidyscope (sic) and it, like several of the Pumpkins’ previous efforts, will be a concept album. This time around the concept Corgan has in mind is “The Fool’s Journey” as told by the Tarot. The album will tell this tale through forty-four tracks that will be released free online about once every three or four weeks. At the end of the project there will be eleven four-song EPs released as a box set for traditionalists who prefer to have physical contact with their music.
The TBK project is certainly an interesting use of the Internet for music dissemination, but what is perhaps most interesting is that this isn’t Corgan’s first foray into online distribution. After Virgin declined to release Machina II, the follow up to the first Machina album, which was recorded in 2000, Corgan distributed several of the twenty-five physical copies of the album to net-savvy fans and told them to make it available for download free of charge.
So, seven years before there was In Rainbows there was Machina II. Now Corgan seeks to play the role of innovator once more, allowing fans to hear an album in sequence over the course of several years instead of as a finished product. It’s a bold move, and it’s just one more sign that the album as 30-60 minute cohesive statement is becoming an antiquated notion.
As for the concept and recording of the record, it’s pure Pumpkins. The forty-four song rumination on the tarot stands as potentially the most ambitious and oddly named project since, well, 1997’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. TBK seems to be only a slight expansion on the idea behind MCATIS, which was Corgan’s twenty-eight song, two-plus hour attempt to remake The Wall for Generation X. Knowing the Pumpkins’ tendency toward grandiose gestures TBK is merely the next logical step. When they release an album with an actual running time of several years, that’ll be news.
As far as the band at this point, it’s Corgan and nineteen year old audition winner Mike Byrne on drums for the time being. True, all the original members save one have gone, but the Smashing Pumpkins have always been Corgan’s vision. On 1993’s masterpiece Siamese Dream he recorded all of the guitar and bass parts himself to get the results he was striving for. Since this post on the band’s website promises an “atmospheric, melodic, heavy, and pretty” album, everything the Pumpkins’ best work is, the frontman’s unilateral approach may well yield the best results.
Here's to Something Resembling the Good Old Days
The Smashing Pumpkins exist as relic, a remnant of alternative rock’s infancy before the genre became so ubiquitous as to render that tag a blatant lie. Billy Corgan now stands poised to launch a truly original assault on the industry’s traditional business model.
It’s the kind of grand gesture that made the Smashing Pumpkins one of the defining groups of the 90s, and if Teargarden by Kaleidyscope is on par with Corgan’s previous work it could make a new generation yearn for the days when “Today” played so often that it seemed like the only thing on any radio station.
The face in your dreams of black
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