By my last count, I have 256 Smashing Pumpkins songs on my MP3 player. According to Last.fm, I’ve listened to the band 1,283 times (which is definitely a low count). The Smashing Pumpkins are my favorite band of all time.
I was very excited when I walked into the Orpheum Theater on Friday. This would be my second time seeing the band, of which guitarist/vocalist Billy Corgan is the only remaining original member. After sitting through two boring-to-terrible openers, (the mediocre Light FM and the exquisitely painful Fancy Space People) I was ready for the band to start playing.
They opened with “Quasar”, a song from their forthcoming album Oceania, and from there delved into a 21 song set that was, surprisingly, comprised mainly of deep cuts from their 90’s output. This strategy is a double-edged sword. While a huge Pumpkins fan like me is going to be incredibly happy hearing songs like “Thru the Eyes of Ruby” and “Starla” live, the more casual fan is going to alternate between angry and confused. In fact, the only two hits the band played were “Cherub Rock” and “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”, the former at the end of the set, and the latter as the final song of the encore.
They shied away completely from 2007’s comeback album Zeitgeist; the only post-reunion material they played came from their current project Teargarden by Kaleidyscope (which, confusingly, Oceania is a part of as a sort of album-within-an-album). It was my first time hearing many of these songs live, and while they certainly sounded better than most of Zeitgeist, they didn’t sound too engaging. Weirdly, the band chose to end the main set with the 8-minute Adore cut “For Martha”, featuring new drummer Mike Byrne on keys, which left the majority of the crowd confused.
There was something very strange about this concert. Although the band played with a ton of energy and was clearly having fun, I was never able to truly lose myself in the show. Maybe this had something to do with the venue, or maybe it had something to do with the fact that this is the second time I’ve seen them now. Still, as I walked out of the venue, I felt a queer sense of emptiness.
At this point I am convinced that the current incarnation of the Pumpkins will never be able to recapture what made the original group so great. For the most part, that’s fine with me. I’ll still go see the band when the come through, I’ll still listen to their new material. But I’m not sure if I will ever be able to do it with the same gusto I had a year ago, when I saw them for the first time. The concert was good, not great. And, at this point, that’s all I think the Smashing Pumpkins can be.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
LightFM was a unknown to me, but they had my attention from the first minute….they are a long way from mediocre, I was drawn in. Sorry you were disillusioned. Maybe its not Smashing Pumpkins, or the music, maybe its you. Maybe you aren’t listening with the same ears.