In an ambitious launch it consists of 33 new songs, The Smashing Pumpkins set out to amaze us once again with ATUM. It seems that the inspiration and energy to compose and produce have seized Billy Corgan, James Iha, Jimmy Chamberlin and Jeff Schroeder, since just three years after the Cyrthey bring what can be considered a triple disc.
The new album by The Smashing Pumpkins is produced by Corgan himself, an absolute and obsessive student of every detail of his albums. We can notice that for this album, the work on the sound of synth progressions and guitar distortions are notable efforts by the band and the keen ear of its main engine.
A band immersed in their own vision
For starters, in Corgan’s words, this album by The Smashing Pumpkins is the sequel to Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness (1995) y Machina / The Machines Of God (2000). The overall narrative can be described as lThe reflective exercises of a character who is stranded in space.
Perhaps the song that most clearly exemplifies this space journey is “Intergalactic”, a song of almost nine minutes where The Smashing Pumpkins They tell us about the spirit, love, life, death and many other topics of the human experience.
Yes, Billy Corgan bought into his own idea and boy did he take it as far as he could. We love that at this point in his career, The Smashing Pumpkins have no restrictions on putting out a 2 hour 18 minute album and doing whatever they want with their project.
The three acts are distinguishable from each other, and today we receive the one that begins with “Sojourner”, with an extremely moving melodic piano and orchestra section, while we feel like Corgan’s voice floats as he continues his space adventure. This narrative of a temporary resident, literally the translation of the term, who inhabiting the space for a while feels somehow natural and not fake, and that’s what the band achieves.
A great compilation of the sounds of more than three decades
The Smashing Pumpkis is a band with a 32-year career, with 12 studio albums counting this one, so it’s not easy to keep in mind the sound palette of this project. Even with this complexity, Corgan and company are in charge of giving us a walk through many of the sounds that have made them so successful.
We listen to synthesized ballads, acoustic songs, and even a pretty good post grunge on ATUM de The Smashing Pumpkins. In general, there is more guitar presence on this LP than on its predecessor, but there is enough balance between the synthesizer sections and even orchestral parts.
Songs like “The Good in Goodbye” or “Empires”, we get excited about the riffs and galloping drums that immediately take us back to those The Smashing Pumpkins of the ninetieswith a conceptual post grunge space theme.
Even so, the swerves in the trip that Billy leads are quite marked with songs like “Hooray!” or hooligans synthetic and even danceable, something unexpected but incorporated as a more that the truth achieve very well within The Smashing Pumpkins.
This transition towards synthesizers and dance also give dynamics to The Smashing Pumpkins’ album., which couldn’t just get bogged down in the monotony of reflective, spacey rock. These are necessary breaks to continue with the more serious issues.
A space rock opera that’s not so easy to follow
With eleven albums behind it, it’s a bit hard to shake our idea of The Smashing Pumpkins, and in this space rock opera called ATUMthey present us with various characters and situations that unexpectedly take us by surprise.
Hearing names of those characters and some scenarios at first hearing disorients usbut after several listens, we managed to accept the long story that Corgan brings us, in a space odyssey that renews the energy and image of the band.
To listen and perhaps better understand this album by The Smashing Pumpkinsit must be placed together with other musical marvels such as The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) by David Bowie, and more recently Fear Of A Blank Planet (2007) de Porcupine Tree.
Definitely, making a rock opera is not easy, and for this installment, while The Smashing Pumpkins achieve a career milestone, the story sometimes feels disconnectedand it seems that several songs were not necessarily conceived within the idea of the album.
Still, heas synthetic textures in roles such as “Hooligan” and “The Canary Trainer” they do manage to put us into orbit, from perhaps some forgotten spacecraft. The main character is in exile, and this gives rise to several dense reflections, which is why this album by The Smashing Pumpkins is recommended for active listening with everything and lyrics in hand.
