Smashing Pumpkins - MACHINA / the machines of God

****

(Virgin)

Review: Russell Baillie

The last Smashing Pumpkins album was seen as a bit of a disaster. Adore blipped electronically and twanged acoustically instead of rocking with the American giants' trademark beauty and belligerence.

It sounded as if the band whose increasingly grandiose albums had put them truly in a league of their own had finally cut their unwieldy, majestic world down to size - and not many thought much of the renovations.

Meanwhile, the ongoing rock soap-opera that is the life of head Pumpkin Billy Corgan - and whoever can stand working with him - has carried on for another thrilling season. Fired a few years back for his drug problem, drummer Jimmy Chamblerlain got his old job back. Bassist Darcy Wretzky walked and Melissa Auf Der Mar was poached from Courtney Love's Hole to replace her. The band got a new manager in Sharon Osbourne, wife of metaller Ozzy. However, she soon quit, saying Corgan was an impossible client. They're suing her. Meanwhile, the newly-liberated Wretzky got herself arrested in Chicago for possession of crack cocaine ...

And as for the new album ...well, it's really quite good, actually, if a comfortably familiar mix of Pumpkinrock and Pumpkinpop that sounds like it could have been the more commercially sensible follow-up to the previous double, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

Yes, this can feel all little Anthems 'R Us.

As the title of this CD-filling, 15-track, 73 minutes indicates, the songs come full of Corgan's wistful, baroque, gothic, apocalyptic lyrical nonsense.

But when they are combined with the mix of scorched-earth guitars and wiry melodies, it's easy to be convinced again that something greater than the sum of its parts is happening here.

The first half swings between riffery and sighing pop, with a psychedelic opus or two saved for the closing stages - like Glass and the Ghost Children, the near-10 minutes of which swing through a surf guitar meltdown, a spot of plaintive piano beneath what sounds like a tape of a typically long-winded Corgan interview, then a space rock finale that lyrically has a thing about spiders (from Mars, perhaps).

But fortunately this satisfies with anthems that are either grandly guitar-grinding (Standing Inside Your Love, the stupidly sludgy Heavy Metal Machine) or sounding like pop tunes of an often Cure-ish bent (I Of the Mourning, This Time, Rain Drops and Sun Showers, the stiffly New Wave The Imploding Voice).

All this and art-rock thrills (the shards of guitar helping give that end-is-nigh mood to Blue Skies Bring Tears) to finish up on.

They sound better for Chamberlain's return, too. The explosive opener Everlasting Gaze, among others, sounds as if he's making up for having had the last album off.

And if you did too, then this Pumpkins album should patch things up nicely.