Ryan Dannar's Album Reviews
I can't tell you how much I disliked this album upon its release. Revisiting it recently, I find that my opinion has softened a bit.
As a 90s kid, I'd been a deep fan of Gish, Siamese Dream, Pisces Iscariot, and Mellon Collie. At the same time, I'd been aware of the allegations regarding Corgan's extreme ego, and I really disliked the way he was shaping his public persona into some kind of petulant bat-child. The Nosferatu look did him no favors, and his continual ranting in interviews about how "nobody respects the Pumpkins" was very off-putting.
Prior to the release of Machina, Corgan announced, via his blog on the band's website, that he'd heard the voice of God, and that God had charged him and his band with saving the world through their music, or some such nonsense. He announced that he was renaming himself to Glass, the Pumpkins would now be known as The Machines of God, and their next album would be the first in a series of divinely-inspired works. Epic eye-roll.
Although it wasn't clear at the time, Corgan later revealed this bonkers blog-post to be part of the concept of this album -- an album upon which Corgan adopts a cartoonish persona based on the public perceptions of him, and the band similarly plays cartoon caricatures of themselves. This sounded to me then, and still does sound to me, like a thin excuse for Corgan to write his own ego a blank-check.
All of this baggage was impossible for me to dismiss when this album came out, and because of that I found it hard to hear anything good in the album at all. Frankly, it's still hard to hear the goodness in this album through all of its problems -- but now I would tell you that THERE IS GOODNESS HERE, and it's worth the finding.
The baggage is enormous. Beyond the context in which the album was released, you also have to contend with the production (by Flood), which makes everything sound as fake, as harsh and as digitally-cold as possible. Corgan's voice, in particular, sounds more unpleasant than ever. Flood has produced a number of great albums by great artists (including the Pumpkins' own "Mellon Collie"), but here he's just made an enormous number of bad decisions. I speculate that these decisions were made in the service of attaining a "futuristic" sound, but they sound spectacularly bad as applied to the Pumpkins.
If, however, you can hear past the overwhelming narcissism and the cold robotic production, you may find, as I now do, that the songs themselves are actually pretty good. Corgan did turn in some winners here. "Everlasting Gaze," "Stand Inside of Your Love," and "Glass and the Ghost Children" all stand side-by-side with the better songs in the Pumpkins' discography. Overall, the album is too long and doesn't have enough variation between songs or any sense of actual dynamics -- but none of the songs here are truly duds. Dip in at any point and you'll find a well-written tune, if you have the ears to hear past the myriad problems.
As a 90s kid, I'd been a deep fan of Gish, Siamese Dream, Pisces Iscariot, and Mellon Collie. At the same time, I'd been aware of the allegations regarding Corgan's extreme ego, and I really disliked the way he was shaping his public persona into some kind of petulant bat-child. The Nosferatu look did him no favors, and his continual ranting in interviews about how "nobody respects the Pumpkins" was very off-putting.
Prior to the release of Machina, Corgan announced, via his blog on the band's website, that he'd heard the voice of God, and that God had charged him and his band with saving the world through their music, or some such nonsense. He announced that he was renaming himself to Glass, the Pumpkins would now be known as The Machines of God, and their next album would be the first in a series of divinely-inspired works. Epic eye-roll.
Although it wasn't clear at the time, Corgan later revealed this bonkers blog-post to be part of the concept of this album -- an album upon which Corgan adopts a cartoonish persona based on the public perceptions of him, and the band similarly plays cartoon caricatures of themselves. This sounded to me then, and still does sound to me, like a thin excuse for Corgan to write his own ego a blank-check.
All of this baggage was impossible for me to dismiss when this album came out, and because of that I found it hard to hear anything good in the album at all. Frankly, it's still hard to hear the goodness in this album through all of its problems -- but now I would tell you that THERE IS GOODNESS HERE, and it's worth the finding.
The baggage is enormous. Beyond the context in which the album was released, you also have to contend with the production (by Flood), which makes everything sound as fake, as harsh and as digitally-cold as possible. Corgan's voice, in particular, sounds more unpleasant than ever. Flood has produced a number of great albums by great artists (including the Pumpkins' own "Mellon Collie"), but here he's just made an enormous number of bad decisions. I speculate that these decisions were made in the service of attaining a "futuristic" sound, but they sound spectacularly bad as applied to the Pumpkins.
If, however, you can hear past the overwhelming narcissism and the cold robotic production, you may find, as I now do, that the songs themselves are actually pretty good. Corgan did turn in some winners here. "Everlasting Gaze," "Stand Inside of Your Love," and "Glass and the Ghost Children" all stand side-by-side with the better songs in the Pumpkins' discography. Overall, the album is too long and doesn't have enough variation between songs or any sense of actual dynamics -- but none of the songs here are truly duds. Dip in at any point and you'll find a well-written tune, if you have the ears to hear past the myriad problems.
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