Billy Corgan: TheFutureEmbrace : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

It's hard to say what's weirder: the fact that Billy Corgan has a MySpace page or the fact that he uses it to post an exhaustive (and exhausting) series of blog entries narrating his life story. The idea, he has said, is that he prefers the immediacy of the Internet, but the problem comes in the execution. Even Billy Corgan needs an editor sometimes, and the freedom that technology allows him -- to ramble, often directionless and unassisted -- also diminishes the final product. The same could be said of The Future Embrace, a collection of electronic beat- and synth-driven songs that too often lacks focus and fails to deliver the kind of emotional payoff for which Corgan is famous.

His avowed influences here include Joy Division, Gary Numan and Low-era David Bowie, but Future mostly sounds like a bunch of so-so Smashing Pumpkins songs, stripped of everything except Corgan's adenoidal vocals, and then set to a chorus of synths and electronic drumbeats. It's not all bad: In a shimmering, gothed-out cover of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody," which features the Cure's Robert Smith on understated backing vocals, Corgan gives the song an urgent sense of longing that even the original didn't have. The mechanical austerity of songs such as "Mina Loy (M.O.H.)" and "A100" ought to appeal to fans of the Pumpkins' Adore and Machina/The Machines of God. And the gorgeously minimal album closer, "Strayz," further hints at how the rest of the record would have benefited from a bit more restraint.

The main problem is that Corgan struggles with how to match his most distinctive asset -- that keening jolie laide voice of his -- with the sounds his new electronic toys make. On "TheCameraEye" and "Walking Shade," he never quite finds the right lyrical cadence or vocal melody to match the inflexible computer beats. His vocals are often too close to the front of the mix, too clean, too much like a rat in a cage, too downright Corgan-y, to sound anything but awkward when placed in such an unfamiliar context. It could just be that Corgan doesn't care if you like the new him. "Whoever I was wanting to be," he sings on "I'm Ready," "I already am."