Everything can be said about Billy Corgan (and in fact there would be things to say), but his incredible work ethic and inexhaustible creativity must be recognized. While he put the finishing touches on 20 songs by Cyrthe Smashing Pumpkins record released in 2020, was already dealing with Atum: A Rock Opera in Three Actstriptych composed of 33 songs that the musician has described as the sequel to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and of Machina/The Machines of God. He may seem like a tortured guy, but evidently his inner demons don’t manifest themselves in the form of writer’s block.
An album comprising 33 songs and running nearly 140 minutes would be difficult for even the most hardcore Pumpkins fan to swallow and so Corgan wisely decided to feature songs from Atum one at a time, in his weekly podcast, and to divide the official album release into three parts. The first act was released in November 2022, the second in January 2023 and the third came out last week. While it’s significantly longer than the previous two chapters, the last one is the easiest to assimilate on first listen. More varied in tone, tempo and atmosphere, the third act has a breath that is lacking in its very dense predecessors. But it is also the one of the three in which synths are most present and this means that Pumpkins fans linked to the guitar assaults of Gish you hate Siamese Dream they may find it disappointing or even irritating.
And yet if you put up with Corgan’s electronic whims, Atum: Act Three it has several great moments. With his synthesizer strings and those yacht rock chords, Sojourner appears to be directly descended from The Dream WeaverGary Wright’s keyboard work from the mid-1970s. Pacers it’s more 80s, with glacial synth textures that, towards the end, give way to a Giorgio Moroder-esque dance groove. In the nine minutes of the epic Intergalactic it transitions twice from a haunting electro pulse to a violent rock assault led by Jimmy Chamberlin’s drums, sounding as powerful as ever both here and on more straightforward rock numbers like In Lieu of Failure, Armageddon And Spellbinding. The best tracks are The Canary Trainer And Cenotaph. The former is a goth-tinged mid tempo that looks like a cross between the Cure and Church, the latter an intimate acoustic ballad decorated with moody synth flourishes.
It takes a while to unravel the meaning of the songs and put them into the context of the plot of Atumwhich is essentially a sci-fi metaphor for Corgan’s experiences after reactivating the Smashing Pumpkins in 2007. A lyric like “In odes dodging your hills / Our spirits were a stinging laugh” (Intergalactic) would be difficult to understand even if it weren’t made even more obscure by Corgan’s strange pronunciation and the fact that his voice is often mixed to blend with the music, as if it were an instrument like any other. But it’s all the result of the basic idea: it is obvious that Atum is conceived to be a record that requires our maximum attention and the third act represents a hallucinated and fascinating finale of the project.
From Rolling Stone US.
