of Montreal - False Priest

After hearing the single ‘Coquet Coquette’, an early version of ‘Hydra Fancies’, and a televised performance of ‘Sex Karma’, we knew False Priest would be a great album. And after seeing the album artwork, we knew it would be a colourful and bizarre concoction of genius. Now that we’ve listened to False Priest in its entirety, we can safely say that this Athens, Georgia-based, modern-day glam band’s 10^th full-length studio album is worth all of the hype it’s been receiving. With cameos from Janelle Monae and Solange Knowles, a baffling hodgepodge of lyrics and the soulful falsetto of Kevin Barnes, this is one album we just can’t seem to turn off.

Most of False Priest is a rather upbeat collection. And much like the band’s previous releases, this is the kind of album you can listen to hundreds of times, and continue to discover pieces you’ve missed during previous listens. It was only on our ninth or tenth listen that we caught sporadic bits like “Are zombies licking your window?” and “Unicorns eating baby meat”.

But these aren’t even the strangest moments on the album. One of the two tracks featuring Monae’s vocals, ‘Our Riotous Defects’, is certainly the most humorous. Barnes sings about a girl he met at an Al-Anon meeting who was initially intimidating, but he soon discovered she was crazy – like when on their second date she got mad at him and threw his Beta fish out the window. Truly, these are only things of Montreal could sing about and still be taken seriously. This story probably isn’t true, like most of those we find in their music, but Barnes’s ability to cook up insane, fabricated stories is one of the best aspects of the band’s music.

of Montreal have also always impressed us with their ability to seamlessly pack what sounds like several entirely different songs into one track, and we see this again in False Priest. What we also see is a continuation of their last album, Skeletal Lamping (2008), which was heavy on the sexual references. While False Priest isn’t as in-your-face with them (not that this was a bad thing last time), they’re definitely still there. ‘Sex Karma’, featuring Solange, is like a shinier, kinkier version of John Mayer’s ‘Your Body Is A Wonderland’, with lyrics like “’Close your eyes and count to three/I’ll kiss you where I shouldn’t be/’Cause you look like a playground to me”.

The most interesting, standout track for us is album closer ‘You Do Mutilate?’, which finishes with distorted vocals giving a rather powerful, thought-provoking speech: “Everybody’s searching for a cause, a reason to blow themselves up/Could be anything/When will certain people realise that afterlife is nothing to live for, nothing to die for, nothing to fight for?…If you think God is more important than your neighbour/You’re capable of terrible evil/If you think some prophet’s words are more important than your brother and your sister, you’re ill and you’re wrong”. Not since ‘The Past Is A Grotesque Animal’ (from Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, 2007) have we been this touched by an of Montreal song.

If you’re already familiar with the band’s back catalogue, then False Priest will be a delightful continuation of outlandish lyrical musings, and if you’re new to their music, then prepare yourself for 13 unique, mind-blowingly, brilliant tracks.

Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse - Dark Night Of the Soul

It’s been a tumultuous journey for the release of Dark Night of the Soul, the second and final collaborative effort from Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse. After a lengthy legal battle with EMI and a deliberate Internet leak from the artists themselves, the album is finally available, more than one year after the initial release date.

It’s challenging to pinpoint an exact sound for Dark Night of the Soul – largely due to its extensive list of contributors. Parts of the album are fused with pure rock – Iggy Pop lent his signature deep vocals for ‘Pain’, and Pixies frontman Black Francis’s ‘Angel’s Harp’ is a bluesy, gritty number.

One of the album’s highlights is ‘Little Girl’, starring Julian Casablancas of The Strokes. With another uniquely brilliant set of vocals, Casablancas makes this an insanely catchy song. This is certainly one of the best collaborations on the album.

These three tracks are sandwiched between a slew of more moving songs, many seemingly bleeding with pain. Made even more poignant by the recent suicide of Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous, it’s difficult to not draw some parallels between them.

Opener ‘Revenge’ (featuring Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips) is one of the most emotional moments of Dark Night of the Soul. “Pain, I guess it’s a matter of sensation”, sings Coyne. “In my mind/I have shot you and stabbed you through your heart/I just didn’t understand/The ricochet is the second part”. And as he repeatedly sings “The more that it backfires” over quiet drumbeats and simple, airy hums, it’s obvious this will be one treat of an album.

With other appearances from Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, James Mercer of The Shins and Broken Bells (side-project with Danger Mouse), Nina Persson of The Cardigans and Vic Chestnutt (who also committed suicide, on Christmas Day 2009), this star-packed album is strikingly beautiful and genuine the entire way through.

Dedicated to the late Linkous and Chestnutt, Dark Night of the Soul is a timeless collection that leaves a legacy they can be proud of.

The album can be streamed in full here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104129585

Lokai - Transition

Don’t listen to this album if you are of a nervous disposition. Don’t put this on your IPod if you are walking alone down the street at night. For Transition is an unnerving jolt to the senses, I don’t think you can feel safe if you close your eyes and attempt to take in this record whilst blind to the world. This album is Sadako Yamamura coming to get you. This album tells me that I haven’t got a clue, but somehow if I can survive until the end, I will do.

Florian Kmet and Stefan Németh have decided to confront the listener; this is not so much an album to appreciate, but one that becomes an interrogation. Do you want to listen to our record? They ask. Can you handle this? The electromechanical instrumentation is so deftly orchestrated that one feels tested. You are disorientated and find yourself in a Josef K situation, unexpectedly on trial, hopelessly drowning in paranoia.

From the opening of ‘roads’ I am curious, waiting for something to happen, twitching like a rabid coyote as each creak puts me on tender hooks. Lokai set you on edge, ‘salvadors’ use of minimalist percussion lurches and creeps, ‘panarea’ dwells in low-lying ambience, ‘bruit’ is a shock storm of crashing rock feedback, everything is relentless, unexpected and for at least the first few listens new. You’ve never heard these sounds before.

The only thing to question about Transition is the suitability of this record. It could be argued that this is nothing more than a play for sound tracking. Lokai make music that would be perfect for the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, scoring the post-apocalyptic landscape.

Despite the creators comparing Transition to a panoramic view, the album is uncomfortably claustrophobic. Kmet and Nemeth go the Womble way, using anything borrowed and found – second-hand discarded guitars, blunt objects and radiators that add a stark industrial sound, it is the raw sampling that creates the awe. At times you can picture an abandoned warehouse, leaking pipes, water drip dropping into tin buckets, rats scurrying through ventilation shafts and the tricks played by broken silence. Lokai conjoin sounds to silence, therefore there is a sense of exposure, the listener is stranded, unsure what is coming around the corner, what is lurking in the darkness.

Modern Skirts - All Of Us In Our Night

Launching a new business is the dream of hundreds of thousands across the globe.

As any fule kno, and as Sirallun would attest, the most important measure of any new business is to isolate a gap in the market and squeeze yourself into that niche. That way, you become that “thing” that so many people thought they couldn’t live without but couldn’t quite verbalise.

Sadly, there is no such stringency around the forming of a band. You can pretty much make any old noise and there’s airplay offered, because that’s what individual “taste” is about. Good news for Modern Skirts.

All Of Us In Our Night is their second studio album and the Athens, Georgia four-piece are awash with confidence and swagger throughout. Opener ‘Chanel’, starts up like Lee Marvin before kicking into a strummy American college rock paean to heroin “chic”  featuring the line: “Cover up your tracks with a cardigan”.

The driving drums here hold the whole thing together, but the vocals fall on  the wimpy side of rock. ‘Soft Pedals’ is tuneful and inoffensive, but the wistfulness of the meandering vocal starts to grate, all outsider posturing and musical wallpaper.

The high point musically is ‘Astronauts’, a melodic ‘I’m Only Sleeping’-style chugger, all stripped back guitars and vocal, before easing its way into a dainty-played pop suite of choral singing and listless wonderings: “I miss you, hope you stay”, the refrain goes, before the drums pick up a mere 2 minutes 9 seconds in, and a spin around a Beatles-esque musical world is the reward for the faithful.

Throughout All Of Us In Our Night, Modern Skirts are trying their hardest to woo. From the radio-friendly pop of ‘Eveready’ to the veritable lyrical nonsense of ‘Conversational’, this is best face forward, all “this is what you want” temptation.

But, even with the involvement of R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, there is something missing – some soul or heart, something real that Modern Skirts are offering above and beyond the usual. The best you can say about All Of Us In Our Night is the poppiness of tracks like ‘Motorcade’ – style over substance, but singalong enough for commercial FM.

Good news for Modern Skirts. Bad news for fans of good music.

Data Select Party

The opening of Data Select Party‘s EP/mini-album Hanging Out With Humans puts one in mind of the fantastic Dirty Projectors.

Clean, summery guitar burbles lock with a sprightly-moving round-sounded bass and off the beat drums. And I love the Dirty Projectors. Not only because the girls in it are beautiful and the frontman looks like a geography teacher, in fact, it’s mainly because they’re so fantastic and complex and dancey and beautiful and just, well, just wonderful.

The reason I’m gushing about Dirty Projectors in a review about someone else is that I’m a positive, summery guy. I like to walk down the streets scattering daisies and farting rainbows. I give sweets to children I’ve never even met before! Actually, that last one sometimes gets me into trouble, but what I’m trying to affirm is that I like being nice about things. And so the reason I was talking about Dirty Projectors wasn’t really because Data Select Party sound like them, apart from the first twenty-odd seconds of ‘The White Bear,’ no, it’s because I wanted to be nice about something.

Because it ain’t gonna be Data Select Party. I really wanted to like them. I really wanted to hear some great up-and-coming British pop. I’ve been really getting into American indie recently, because the British scene is dying on its ass (see, I’m even talking American!) and I’ve been desperately casting around for a saviour to lift us out of the landfill that is UK guitar music at the moment. To be fair, they have a decent stab at lifting ideas from one of the few interesting British bands around at the moment, but even with their Internet pop culture references (the final song here is called – and strap back your gag reflex a second – ‘The Woot The Hot The Hotness’) and shouty backing vocals, Los Campesinos! they ain’t. Los Campesinos! might talk about blogging, livejournals and ringtones, but their words are smart, eloquent and raise a smile however many times you hear them.

“We’re dressed up to dress down, and turning heads all over town” is by no means an insightful lyric; it sounds like the sort of meaningless shout-a-long swaggery refrain The Fratellis might squirt out. And sprinkling Uniqlo references is all very well, but it doesn’t achieve anything. These are phrases pulled out of conversations, but the effect isn’t one of mystery, excitement, fun or anything except banality. And the vocals stink. I worked with a guy who was a total jock but was really into Emo, and noticing my interest in music he lent me a load of dreadful records in that genre – and that is what I think of when I hear the singing on Hanging Out With Humans. As over-sung as the average X-Factor contestant and with the typical horrible transatlantic accent of people who grew up singing along to Dashboard Confessional, Saves the Day and other best-forgotten skidmarks on musical history.

The guitars are okay, and the music is generally bouncy, if forgettable, but there is absolutely no way I can recommend Data Select Party for anything more than playing loudly to irritate someone upstairs, blaring it out of a window to stop cats mating or listening to it as inspiration to go and start your own band that manage to be poppy and interesting at the same time. Please?

Brooklyn duo High Places are the product of a chance encounter that blossomed into a fruitful creative partnership. Mary Pearson’s sing-speak vocals meet Rob Barber’s mutating, otherworldly soundscapes in their music, which first came to wider attention with their 03/07-09/07 compilation. It collected the singles and individual tracks that had been their output so far, since the formation of the band in early 2006 when Pearson moved into Barber’s New York flat. Their self-titled debut album, recorded during the first few months of this year, sees them develop the themes and sounds into what feels like one pulsing, melodic whole.

The unique High Places sound is a combination of Pearson’s childlike voice and lyrics largely concerned with nature and naivety with Barber’s music, a jumbled concoction of bass, snatches of melody and ambience, and percussion lifted from samples, instruments or ordinary household objects. Within the pleasantly disorientating mess of sounds, you get hints of tropicalia, dub and IDM amongst collages of field recordings. The results are songs that sound intricately layered and crafted that also transport the listener away from the everyday. High Places seem consistently concerned with escape actually; Pearson’s lyrics swing from addressing the innocent, the insignificant, the simplistic to the transcendental and the unknown. In ‘Namer’, for example, Pearson sings about a woman and an old dog that move out of the city and walk around a wooded lot, thinking up names for all the unusual plant and animals around them.

Opener ‘The Storm’ tweaks banjo sounds to the extent that they could almost be mistaken for sitars in amongst the syncopated percussion, over which Pearson sings, ‘The storm carved out a ditch/Which we filled with seeds and earth/And a tree grew’. The theme of trees and renewal recurs through the album, such as in ‘The Tree With The Lights In It’ with its heady mix heavy bass, steel drums and wordless backing vocals provided by Pearson to her own lyrics. Each track builds steadily and mutates from simple beginnings into often quite different ends. Barber and Pearson seem to have this naïve interest in the manipulation and combination of sounds as a means of introspective transportation; Pearson sings, ‘All around are sailing boats/I stow them in my head’ on ‘A Field Guide’ and it starts to make sense. ‘From Stardust To Sentience’ follows to close out the album, all jittering beats and ambience, Pearson’s voice drenched in reverb and, fittingly, contemplating the stars.

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It was a while ago I first came across You Me At Six. Disappointed with Funeral For A Friend’s Tales Don’t Tell Themselves, I went searching for some good old British emo-pop-rock. ‘Save It For The Bedroom’ is what I uncovered – played heavily until I got the next new “toy”.

Forward to today and I am sat here with Take Off Your Colours, You Me At Six’s debut. I will be honest, I had lost them from my radar after my initial fling with the Surrey based quintets musings on love and life and my interest was piqued again when I saw in my local music superstore that their album was due for release.

The fact that it was listed on the wall behind the till in said type of shop (normally reserved to tell the unfulfilled when the next manufactured chart superstar releases their labels new cash cow) was enough to make me take a second look.

Released on Slam Dunk Records (my previous knowledge of Slam Dunk was as a club night at The Cockpit in Leeds…ah, memories…!), You Me At Six have obviously built up a reputation and a dedicated following to get such advertisements.

As I listen to the CD for the first time (on my way to work – I’m a busy man!) I find my mind wandering. It’s pleasant enough, but sounds kind like it could have been done by any number of similar bands, both British and American – all chugging guitars, big breakdowns and genre-specific vocal stylings.

Then…Hark…What is that? The alarm call guitar that is the introduction to ‘Save It For The Bedroom’, that’s what it is. Now it may be familiarity that reeled me in, but, hell, it got my attention drew me inside for a further listen.

Next up is the albums title track. Slamming straight in with the line “Those eyes you bought have gone to my head / But they wont take you to my bed” adds to the building sense of sex and short-lived relationships.

This theme is kept up over the next couple of tracks, including ‘If You Run’, which features this rather damning assessment of a former acquaintance: “Run around, just running your mouth / You’re by the hotel / Who’s doing you now? / And you’re so cold, so cold”

Things get a bit heavier on ‘Tigers And Sharks’, conjuring a sense of pain and betrayal to go with the cutting put-downs, vocalist Josh Franceschi demanding to know why everyone he knows was faking it from the word go.

The album’s unrelenting pace slows up for the obligatory acoustic number, ‘Always Attract’. Guitarist, one of Max Heyler or Chris Miller, or perhaps both (no liner notes, no concrete info), do a good job providing an understated melody allowing Franceschi to emote – this time longing for his loved one to return, enlisting the help of an unknown female (see previous comment regarding liner notes) to add backing vocals. The guitarists get to revert to their electrics for the ending, as the rest of the band join in for the crescendo of a finale. As I said, ‘Always Attract’ breaks up the generally fast paced album – but not for long.

Reverting to type for the final two tracks, ‘Nasty Habits’ bemoans another girl who, while not wanting to be “bad news”, seems to be just that.

Live favourite and traditional set closer ‘The Rumour’ ends the album in anthemic style, inviting the listener to “Hold your hands in, into the air / Hold your hands up as if you care”, but not before admitting that “We try to show some love and / It’s a skill that we lack”.

You Me At Six are writing good pop-infused rock music, the press release likening them to Fall Out Boy and Paramore. If that’s what the band are aspiring to (certainly no bad thing…and, oh, haven’t You Me At Six just been added to Fall Out Boy’s UK tour…?) they are certainly going the right way about it.

The tales of girls and boys and love and hate that make up Take Off Your Colours are distinctly teenage in content. But they are full of energy, enthusiasm and, most importantly, tunes. Good tunes make a damn good listen. Let’s just hope they stay as unlucky with the ladies…

In comparison to the 1990s, today’s pop scene is somewhat sparsely populated in terms of successful girl groups. Barring the two notable exceptions of Sugababes and Girls Aloud, it could well be said that there is a fair gap to be filled in the market. So then, here we have The Saturdays.

 

 

 

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I’m probably not the only one approaching this latest album by Mercury Rev with a certain trepidation. After releasing Deserter’s Songs in 1998, one of the most beautiful records ever made, Mercury Rev have still churned out some gorgeous songs but the overall impression left by albums like Secret Migration and All is Dream is of a band playing it safe and becoming a cleaned up, stadium rock friendly version of their former self.

Snowflake Midnight more or less carries on in the vein of the other post-Deserter’s Songs albums. The sound is full and rich, the vocals are confident and the overall feel is of a band at the top of their game. The only downside to this is the fragility and vulnerability of their earlier work, the slight cracking in Jonathan’s vocals during ‘Holes’ for example, has been totally left behind.

Even during the song ‘People are so Unpredictable’ (which lyrically would seem to be showing the showing the more fragile side to Mercury Rev), the musical bombast – all programmed drums, fast piano arpeggios and electric guitars – drowns out any vulnerability that might earlier have been on display.

Is this a bad thing? For those of us without tattoos of stars on our forearms, do we need our bands to deal in vulnerability and fragility? You could easily argue that we don’t, and that by taking a more outgoing and less introverted direction that Mercury Rev are a different proposition but not a worse one.

And yet… there was something about Deserter’s Songs in particular that set them so far apart from the crowd and from any other band making music. Jonathan still gave the impression of being a reluctant singer, remember his original role in Mercury Rev was as second guitarist, and his voice sounded quite unlike any other singer at the time. He has clearly grown in technical ability and confidence since, but at the expense of sounding more homogenised.

Lyrically Mercury Rev are still ploughing the same sort of furrow as always, references to ‘dreams’, ‘awake’, ‘girl’ and so forth abound. However a lot of the quirks and kinks of the lyrics seems to have been ironed out, leaving ‘Life is uncertain / And people are so unpredictable’ or ‘Runaway raindrop / Why so many tears?’ in their place. Certainly far more straightforward than ‘holes, dug by little moles / jealous little spies, got telephones for eyes’ but whereas the lyrics to ‘Holes’ felt like they could only belong to Mercury Rev, Snowflake Midnight’s lyrics do feel at times rather generic.

There are a great many positive things to commend and recommend this album for. It often hits musical crescendos where the pulsing programmed elements and the more organic sounds pull together and fill the room with sound; ‘Dream of a Young Girl as a Flower’ certainly does this very successfully and becomes the standout track as a result.

This is by no means a bad album - if you liked The Secret Migration you will know what to expect and you will enjoy Snowflake Midnight. But, if you liked Mercury Rev from 10 years ago, the very fact that you will know what to expect from this record will be a disappointment.

Tracklisting:

1. Snowflake In A Hot World

2. Butterfly’s Wing

3. Senses On Fire

4. People Are So Unpredictable (There’s No Bliss Like Home)

5. October Sunshine

6. Runaway Raindrop

7. Dream Of A Young Girl As A Flower

8. Faraway From Cars

9. Squirrel And I (Holding On And Then Letting Go)

The music press have been cruel to Billy Corgan and the hostility between the man and the media is a product of 1998’s commercial disaster that was Adore.

After the wild success of 1995’s six times platinum masterpiece Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness, the Smashing Pumpkins were easily the biggest band in the world. They were playing the largest arenas in America, they were selling out tours in Japan, and Europe was like a second home for one of the few American bands who enjoyed rich, critical acclaim and loyal support from countries like the UK who normally lavished praise upon their domestic bands that were incapable of selling a record outside their own territory but still existed as a major force in their small, self-righteous world.

Taking the bruising guitar riffs of Black Sabbath and combining this brutality with a sensitive pop sparkle never seen before, though, it is simple to see why Billy Corgan had made it into that magic circle of Rock music’s elite. Whether you were French or Canadian, it was easy to see how important a band like the Smashing Pumpkins were at a time when a complacent music scene had been shattered and devastated by Kurt Cobain’s unexpected suicide.

Essentially, Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness had been a gigantic step forward in the evolution of 1990s Alternative Rock culture. Their epic 28-song, double album had finally laid the ghost of Grunge to rest and immortalized the sub-genre as a cultural phenomena and revolutionary turning point in popular music. Like any great album, their 1995 effort had simply obliterated anything before or after it with its distinctive blend of psychedelic rock, electronica, thrash-metal, pop melody and sombre folk tunings; it was here where Grunge could be archived and left behind by a band who were offering the future to a sentimental audience, and credit to the record buying public, they embraced it like a national treasure.

But there was a price to pay for world domination, and just like one of those stupid moral tales from Hollywood, the world of the Smashing Pumpkins crumbled apart in the most excessive circumstances when drummer Jimmy Chamberlain was fired for his part in the tragic death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvolin. Chamberlain had been shooting up in a New York hotel and not only was he there when Melvolin overdosed on heroin; he was also arrested for possession, disgraced in the music press and subsequently fired by the furious Billy Corgan.

The world tour went on regardless, though, the band (now a three piece) went on to collect seven awards at the 1996 MTV Music Awards and everything seemed to settle down for a year.

But the pressure of a new album finally brought Billy Corgan, D’arcy Wretzky and James Iha back together in 1998 to put out another rock album to keep the decade’s most important American sub-genre alive.

However, the mass appeal of Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness had created a huge burden on Billy Corgan to keep his sales on a par with the likes of Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson, for when the time came for the band to start writing Adore something had inevitably changed.

Billy’s mother had been diagnosed with cancer and died during the making of the album, the band decided to use a drum machine rather than replace the power-house, snare bruiser Jimmy Chamberlain and, Corgan had made his now infamous quote that “Rock is dead.”

In a dying music scene where Pearl Jam had degenerated into an AOR cliché, Soundgarden had split, Alice In Chains had self-destructed in candid drug binges and Kurt Cobain was posthumously topping the Billboard chart, it was inconceivable at the time to see the Smashing Pumpkins making a semi-electronic album that had completely emancipated from its heavy roots.

For some reason the music press thought a standard rock album would have been the answer to revitalize a music scene that had already died, and when they looked to the Smashing Pumpkins camp for some gratification, unbeknown to them, they were ensnaring the band in their sentimental world where banality was more important than innovation.

Even so, not many people could have predicted that Chicago’s most famous band would turn into a unique hybrid of The Cure, Depeche Mode and The Beatles whilst the guitars gathered dust in the corner of the studio and Corgan’s collection of effects pedals remained at home.

When people first heard Adore they were asking the question “where are the rock songs?” rather than “why is this album so refreshing?” Like most human beings, we seem to be chronically pessimistic and resistant to change in our comfortable worlds of tradition, but as Woody Allen says in his film Deconstructing Harry, “tradition is the illusion of permanence”

Old Woody might have a point there, although the Pumpkins were clearly in charge of their own destiny, and even though there are no guitar solos, no snare triplets, no screams, not even much guitar on this album, the irony is, it might just be the greatest Smashing Pumpkins album of all time.

One listen to the Gothic charm of ‘Ava Adore’ – a bombastic blast of vintage Depeche Mode circa ‘Barrel of A Gun’ – or the gut wrenching anguish of Tear will ensure you that what we have here is the most powerful album of the 1990s in terms of emotion and introspection.

The stripped down beauty of songs such as ‘Behold! The Nightmare’ shine with radiance, loss, hope, devotion and, what’s more, the lyrics are probably as good as anything by a contemporary poet.

Exquisite lines such as “I’ve faced the fathoms of your deep, withstood the suitors quiet siege/ Pulled down the heavens just to please you – appease you” are shrouded in mourning for Billy’s mother. The extent of this can be very unsettling, almost to the point where you know you are intruding upon somebody else’s tacit scene of bereavement.

The chorus to ‘Behold! The Nightmare’ is surprisingly magnanimous, though, as Corgan looks for the positives in a personal tragedy. The nasal wail of his voice is devastatingly beautiful and the execution of the music is on the same monumental scale as The Cure’s ‘Disintegration’.

Very much like The Cure’s 1981 album Faith – where Robert Smith’s grandmother and Lol Tolhurst’s mother died during the making of the record –Adore is an audio document of rare beauty, a record that captures that indefinable sense of loss that can only be immortalized when we are confronted with the true reality of death.

Perhaps the most spectacular example of this is the piano-driven rock progression of ‘For Martha’, the album’s standout track and immediate tear jerker. Not surprisingly this is the one song that is personally addressed to Mrs Corgan, and in all honesty there is nothing like it in the annals of popular music.

Starting off with a slow piano passage and layered with mellotron, the drums slowly build up and pace themselves with the reminiscence of Corgan’s spell binding voice. Lines as personal as “if you have to go, don’t say goodbye/ I will follow you some day and see you on the other side” reverberate like the imagined sound of a dead person’s soul leaving the room.

A mute response is all that is possible after these nine minutes of remorse are surmounted and replaced by philosophical reflection. The incredible triumph of looking to the future is what really impresses the listener here, because the intensity of the music will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

It’s a shame this example of rare sincerity could not stop the Rock audience from turning their backs on the Pumpkins, though; because Billy’s personal crisis was buried beneath the storm of the media onslaught that had gathered round the “rock is dead” eulogy.

In the liberal western world we like to think that we offer rehabilitation, exoneration and second chances to people who have been punished for their mistakes, but the way the Pumpkins suffered after the commercial failure of this album suggests that you don’t get another chance with a fickle audience who want the same products in different doses.

The audience who bought Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness just couldn’t comprehend the idea of a band switching from Rock to electronica, which is a shame, because the Gothic synthesisers of Pug and the sombre keyboard melodies of Crestfallen pulsate with rich, sensual vibes that were begging to assault the air waves of mainstream radio.

Furthermore, the breath taking pop melody of Perfect and the haunting refrain of the Lennon-esque ‘Blank Page’ show just why the Smashing Pumpkins sold millions of records; it was clear to see back in 1993 with the classic album Siamese Dream, that the Pumpkins were more than just a heavy Rock band with a few good riffs.

In retrospect, then, Adore feels like something that was ahead of its time and originally misconstrued. The stripped down use of minimal electronics, occasional experimentation with guitars and great use of vocal reverb really give the album a timeless feel. This is basic song writing put through the grinder of an emotional pandemonium where nothing is predictable except the everlasting triumph of beauty.

The acoustic delicacy of opener ‘To Sheila’ typifies the cold beauty of the whole album. Here the guitar strings are plucked gently, the croon of Corgan is delivered with an unusual amount of fragility, and the gradual build up of bass and sampled drums climax in an epic cacophony of human clarity. There seems to be a clear human presence before any of the words have been spoken because of the atmospheric recording of audible background tension. Imagine being hidden underneath the bed of your ex-lover, trying not to be observed and you will know what I mean.

The fact that the album failed miserably also adds an ironic charm to this record, because six years later it finally seems to be getting the same treatment Woody Allen’s quintessential film Stardust Memories now receives. Essentially, the current opinion of Adore is surprisingly warm and as you get older you will realise that this is the one Pumpkins album you keep coming back to.

What the Hell do the masses know about anything, anyway? After all, the masses contributed to the rise of Nazism, led cultural revolutions for Mao Zedong and overthrew the bourgeois in Russia. Just remind me how many lives these decisions claimed…