The Smashing Pumpkins: Machina/The Machine of God

Machina sounds like 73 minutes of someone trying to reinflate a zeppelin. Corgan and co-producer Flood give most of their tracks a sort of sonic tinitus: no guitar is left unfuzzed, no keyboard noise fails to reverberate. It's a clear attempt to recapture the all-enveloping noise of songs like "Cherub Rock" and "Bodies," or to ape "1979," in the case of quieter fare like "Try, Try, Try." Unfortunately, it often forces the songs into too familiar patterns.

The most grating example of Corgan's mining into his back catalog comes in Machina's first track, "The Everlasting Gaze." The guitars riff muddily, then suddenly drop out so Corgan can whine a singsong spoken-word chant twice as long as the one from Mellon Collie's "Zero," and three times as obnoxious: "We all want to hold in the everlasting gaze/Enchanted in the rapture of his sentimental sway/But underneath the wheels lie the skulls of every cog/The fickle fascination of an everlasting god."

Lyrically, then, Machina continues to draw from the two wells of clipped phrases and overextended metaphors that have always been Corgan's stock-in-trade. They also draw on his signature themes, "The world is crap and so am I," as seen above, and "I'm so melancholy and moony and I love you." In addition, a third theme emerges in songs like "Heavy Metal Machine": the rock star suffering inner torture about his fame. Corgan sings, "If I were dead/Would my records sell?/Could you even tell?" There's an obvious reply to Mr. Corgan's question, and he probably would've anticipated it if he hadn't been so busy absorbing himself.

None of which is to say that Machina is god-awful. Moments on this disc approach the pompous enjoyability of earlier Pumpkins, from the stadium-ready hot-air burst of "The Sacred and Profane," to the "1979"-esque cruises of "Wound" and the aforementioned "Try." The problem is that each time Corgan has burrowed into himself to find some new product, that product's gotten a little staler and a little more monomaniacal. Here, that fact is painfully obvious: there's the whiny self-justification of the opening track, the return of cherubs and suns with faces to the neo-medieval liner notes, and second-generation guitar grind that doesn't cohere into a catchy whole like it used to.

This particular chapter of "Billy and His Head," then, features our protagonist trying to pretend he's the same bloated force he was before, which is a shame. Rock needs its annoying, pompous blimp-people, but this time the Pumpkins have filled themselves with second-rate helium. (EMD/Virgin)

—Matt Wiegle

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