Smashing Pumpkins

Zeitgeist (Martha’s Music/Reprise)

By Elizabeth Rhodes
Published: July 28th, 2007 | 1:34pm

Billy Corgan needs some inspiration. After a seven-year hiatus from the Smashing Pumpkins, the gifted songwriter is relying on cookie-cutter song structures and half-hearted political lyrics to save his influential band from extinction. Although fans who disliked Corgan’s synthesizer fetish will appreciate the return of the guitars and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, Zeitgeist has little of the iconoclastic fire that fueled the greatest Pumpkins albums.

Produced by Terry Date (Pantera, Deftones) and Roy Thomas Baker (Queen, the Cars), Zeitgeist is a tougher, more straightforward squash fruit than we’re used to hearing. Beginning with the apocalyptic “Doomsday Clock” and the unrequited love rant, “7 Shades of Black,” the album maintains a fever pitch with throbbing drums and searing guitar solos. The quirky highs and lows that made the melodies on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness captivating are exchanged for increasingly streamlined, muscular songwriting.

Zeitgeist also journeys into uncharted lyrical waters for the Pumpkins. The sprawling, prog rock centerpiece, “United States,” and the ode to the Cure, “For God and Country,” are just two of the album’s tracks with a socially conscious message. “I don’t know what I believe / But if I feel safe / What do I need? Revolution!” sings the anti-hero who once claimed to love his own sadness.

Everyone scratched their heads in 2005 when Corgan announced in two Chicago newspapers that he wanted his “band” back. What band? The Smashing Pumpkins have always been the story of Corgan and his guitars, bound in infinite sadness. By successfully blending heavy metal, goth rock, psychedelia, and dream pop, the Pumpkins emerged as one of the best alternative acts of the ’90s. Guitarist James Iha and bassist D’arcy Wretzky declined to return to their brilliant, yet infamously dictatorial, 40-year-old bandleader. It’s therefore no surprise that Zeitgeist sounds most similar to 1993’s Siamese Dream, on which Corgan played every instrument except for percussion.

But although critics and bloggers have tagged Zeitgeist as the Pumpkins’ hardest-rocking album ever, there’s nothing as furious as “Cherub Rock,” “Zero,” or even “The Everlasting Gaze.” Choruses of Billies emphasize each hook, but there’s nothing as catchy as “Today” or “1979.”

When Zeitgeist dropped July 10, few fans were optimistic enough to hope that the return of the Smashing Pumpkins would be triumphant. Unfortunately, we were right.