Review 9 of 36

Jtothe writes:

4of 5 Stars

So unlike most Pumpkins fans, when I first heard that The Pumpkins were doing a new album, I kinda cringed. Sure, just like everyone else I secretly hoped that it would be a return to their glory days of "Siamese Dream" and "Mellon Collie..." However, I knew deep down that this was extremely unlikely. After all, Billy Corgan is getting pretty old, and I haven't been a big fan of his work since 1996's "Adore." That said, I went into this album with very low expectations, and in many ways I was right to do so. However, this album is not a complete loss. It is better than 2000's boring "Machina...", Corgan's confused solo album: "The Future Embrace", and the disappointing "ZWAN." For one thing, the production is the best i've heard on a Pumpkins record since 1995's "Mellon Collie...", and it's really no surprise since it was produced by Mr. Baker (i.e. Queen, Pantera, Deftones,etc). The music is actually really amazing, Jimmy Chamberlin's drumming is as powerful as ever and that is not an understatement. The album has a heavier sound and is more rocking than anything they've done since 1995. The low point is the same undeniable low-point of everything Corgan has touched since "Adore", HIS VOCALS! Am I the only one who longs for the days when Billy used to actually stop whining and sing, in that soft, and more delicate tone (see: Siamese Dream)? But lets face it, he is not the same person he was in 1993, therefore he is not the same musician either. Alot of other reviews talk about how this album is great, but it's not the old Pumpkins of their glory days. Well...no shit! I mean, it's just Billy and Jimmy. The problem with this record is not the absence of D'arcy and James, it is the fact that Corgan is not an artist struggling to make a name for himself anymore, as he was prior to Siamese Dream. In my humble opinion, it is that hunger, that helped Corgan to acheive the level of legendary status during the alternative movement of the 90's. Make no mistake about it, from 1994-1996 The Smashing Pumpkins were the most powerful and relevant band in rock and roll. Still, although my feelings about "Zeitgeist" are a tad bit mixed, it is still better than everything else on modern rock radio these days, except for maybe The White Stripes. I have not lost faith or interest in The Pumpkins, I just no longer worship them as I did when I was younger. Back then they seemed almost superhuman, untouchable, and even, dare I say...unpredictable. Those days are long ago, so I guess i'll have to learn to like this new incarnation, or not. Overall, if I had to rate this album on a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a 7. Some might say that's far too high, while others may say it's much too low. Either way, it's certainly not a bad album. Put it on shuffle amongst your 10 trillion other songs, and you might even find yourself bobbing your head to it. Oh, and to the fellow that says "Zeitgeist" won't stand the test of time...are you a time traveler? I mean, judging by Rolling Stones "TOP 500 Albums" list, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to squeeze in on there. Just look at some of the mediocre stuff from like no.200 down. Four stars is a decent rating for a decent album.

Sep 1, 2007 00:43:46

Review 10 of 36

Ltobar writes:

5of 5 Stars

i like it. quitrepeating the past already wouldja. if youre a true pumpkins fan you;ll like it. i'll admit being a pumpkinhead that i was a little eh at first skipped maybe 2 -3 trakcs but it grew on me 2 days later. theres a message you superficial popheads aren't listenig to. i guess money hoes drugs and oh my life is in shambles emo heads isn't what they're singing makes it not good enough. ya'll draw billy up as an ego-maniac, and everything else. as a musician and someone who loves his music & who ultimately is the glue that keeps it together, he has every right to control it. he lets the band add their imput and opinion. PEOPLE GET A LIFE! your not making the music and making $$$ nor being blogged about! maybe if this were about diddy or some other pop lush you;d be saying how great. great becuz they copied it again from someone else. regardless if anyone likes SP music or not. Billy is always gonna write and perform cause thats what he was meant to do. he's a natural. quit booing him already. It's a band they are a band, it's not just billy or else he woulda continued his solo. VIVA LE PUMPKINS!

Aug 25, 2007 08:10:00

Review 11 of 36

eyenot writes:

2of 5 Stars

The SP Weltenschaungg, by Gabriel Arthur Petrie
copyright © Aug 18th, 2007

The "Pumpkins" return to us a distilled sense of value and existance suspended on the shoulders of a bygone age and army of post-rockers. But if a band transforms into an aeroplane, they're not a carriage any more, right? And in a transformative process, there is an exterior hiding something else underneath, emerging.

When Corgan promised rock's first back-to-back double albums of fresh material, it seemed that the halls of rock history were going to have to be widened for the mack-truck size band that was about to be forever installed there. But perhaps it did come to us, the double album, albeit not how we expected. Perhaps it's the Smashed Pumpkin, already.

And if we need any explanation as to what happened, it's all there on five discs of b-sides and unreleased tracks called "The Aeroplane Flies High". See, somebody went way up in the airplane, brought the pumpkins, second double album, and Corgan's psyche, and said "let's go parachuting" but lied about the parachutes.

Critics complain about Corgan's inclusion of his taped therapy sessions in his music on the official "album" releases, but their bitching started way too late for it to have any Pavlovian effect on cage-rat Corgan: he already slipped alyrical stream of conciousness into "Aeroplane", to no complaint.

Every review I've read of "Zeitgeist", not one mentioned what should be classically remembered as the last known The Real Smashing Pumpkins release, "Aeroplane". Meanwhile critics seems to agree that the self destructing group that released "Adore" and "Machina" was not the functioning, official Smashing Pumpkins.

Corgan's obsession with his own genuinity has been a mainstay since the band's first break into mainstream music. Certain statements come to mind: "we're not fake"; "this is fucking real". But so do others: "we'll never do anything this big again" (Mellon Collie); "we don't have that wierd glue that other bands do".

If you study Corgan's changing style of dress and manner of lyricism from the beginning of his career, palpable is a sense of losing genuinity, replaced by a routine that nothing "fake" is happening. For some reason the various, transparent, I suppose healthy fragments of his personality more delicately apparent in Gish and Siamese, gained their own perfectionist treatments after Mellon Collie probably due to inevitable entrenchement in the double-album masterpiece looking for what should follow.

Now Corgan trying so hard to Gothicise that he's redefined America for Zeitgeist as The Black-and-White Stripes. Here we see the problem: Corgan wearing his Beetlejuice outfit, accompanied by Leiutenant Ripley plastic-wrap. Look, we all feel the losses of technical greatness sometimes, but they aren't always located in the same person. Is guilt still an issue?

Korn's another band that was alright before appealing from mainstream to Goth, and hence miss their irreplacable guitarist. Corgan always, up to a certain time, had the insight to note that he is nowhere near the guitar maestro he saw -- and needed around -- in James Iha. And no doubt much of Pumpkins' earlier subtlety and grace had something to do with a softer, female presence, which Corgan would probably at one time have admitted just as he's replacing one pretty female bassist with another (picky, picky).

Unless we find a changed Corgan, one that's returned to self-reliance before questioning the authenticity of his and everyone's mentality, but that's also completed or grasped whatever he's set out to do that drove him and everyone so up the wall, we won't see a Corgan that could court Iha or D'Arcy back to the fold. We'll see a washed-up Pumpkin chasing the impossible, market-hyped dream of swaying the notoriously underground Goths into a mainstream-success-remaking dollar factory.

Aug 18, 2007 13:41:34

Review 12 of 36

AZ1 writes:

4of 5 Stars

I'm surprised by the mixed reviews. Yes, I too couldn't stomach the apparent money-making angle of this "resurrection" but this is no true Smashing Pumpkins anymore than Axl's Chinese Democracy will be the return of Guns N'Roses. That being said, this is (behind Icky Thump and Memory Almost Full) one of the best albums of 2007. Billy Corgan, inarguably one of the best songwriters of the 1990s, has finally shown he can release a Pumpkins-like album post-Mellon Collie. Adore was to the Pumpkins what Up was to R.E.M. Machina? their Warning: when everyone was hoping for an American Idiot. This is Zwan with aging Bullet-driven Butterfly Wings. Billy has something to say and, thankfully again, a uniquely guitar-fueled voice with which to say it.

Aug 11, 2007 19:56:41

Review 13 of 36

KevinRules writes:

1of 5 Stars

Kinda wish this was Machina...okay, no I don't. Still, I couldn't imagine the album being as bad as this. Homogenized, bland hard rock unfit for human consumption.

Aug 2, 2007 12:24:23

Review 14 of 36

BDKMat writes:

2of 5 Stars

Rolling Stone gives this album four stars now. I am willing to bet any amount of money you care to name that when and if the Smashing Pumpkins release their next album, the Rolling Stone review of that will refer to Zeitgeist as "disappointing" or "unappetizing" or some other way of saying that it sucked. Because it really does suck. It's a collection of songs that all sound the same, broken by "United States," the too long and too boring song that is mandatory on all Smashing Pumpkins albums. I think Billy Corgan needs to start considering a transition to the novelty act that plays his fifteen-year-old hits to fans who are only there for the nostalgia, because the post-1996 stuff is going nowhere.

Aug 1, 2007 01:15:51

Review 15 of 36

smileyface writes:

2of 5 Stars

awww Rolling Stone magazine. Why don't you hire me to be a rock journalist? You obviously have no standards anymore whatsoever. Seeings how the only good thing this publication had left in David Fricke, has stopped trying, (honestly he couldn't have listened to it and given it 4 stars) you could hire just about anyone. I mean Zeitgeist, which is mediocre in the most giving standards, gets a higher review than any other smashing pumpkins record got by RS? A better review than the extremely solid and well-written Icky Thump by the White Stripes? This album is old hash at best. A flood of guitars to cover up a lack of ideas. Billy Corgan had zero doubts? How do you know that? I love the old smashing pumpkins, but Billy Corgan is full of shit. The Smashing Pumpkins is a band in name only. This so-called reunion where nobody comes back to the band except those who were already there? Wasn't Chamberlain already playing with Corgan in his solo stuff? So what has changed? Nothing. Although, it says SMASHING PUMPKINS on the cover. Billy Corgan wants to be the king of rock again, whether he brings anything special to it or not. Didn't he pretty much record Siamese Dream all by himself? It's always been his baby, but it's been dead for 12 years now. His time is done. It's the truth, and Zeigeist is overwrought, and plain old boring. The worst song on "Icky Thump" is far better written and more interesting, than the best song on "Zeistgeist". I know it's impossible to always have every review correlate with the next, but I swear this magazine has no consistency anymore. Check out all-music guide for some consistency. At least when I disagree with them they give a valid and understandable argument. I never know why I'm supposed to like or dislike any album based on the shit poor reviews this magazine is giving these days.

Jul 31, 2007 13:01:36

Review 16 of 36

PierceInPieces writes:

3of 5 Stars

If the Smashing Pumpkins of today were just some Alt band coming out of left field, this album would be brilliant. Fresh. Except, they're the Smashing fucking Pumpkins.

They gave us the brilliance of "Today", the grand feel of "Tonight, Tonight" and the laid back riff of "1979". Metaphorical lyrically, yet songs like "Today" still dripped with a good feel and hope. They were signs of a happier, laid back, pre-911 90's.

So when I discovered the Smashing Pumpkins were reuniting, I was ecstatic. If they were anything like their 90's counterparts, they could pull us from the depths of an "emo" ridden darkness in rock sub-genres...

But instead, what we get is "Zeitgeist", supposedly standing for "the spirit of an age". Yeah, okay, a hard-driving metalish album with metaphors against a United States led by universally hated leaders could be the spirit of the age-except Green Day took the idea in 2004. And SP didn't expand on it, except adding lines about love every other song.

Instead, they took the introverted metaphors of their 90's tunes and instead of focusing on the brighter parts of it all, they gave us this. A political statement too late. Unfortunately for Corgan, the generation of mainstream music-goers aren't going to buy into it. Nobody outside of 25+ guys that grew up on it, or a select few of the younger generation that will download it, are going to buy this album. Neither "Tarantula" or "That's The Way (My Love Is)" is going to stand against the likes of a more a ascetically pleasing riff of "Teenagers" by My Chemical Romance or the latest Fall Out Boy song that every 14 year old is just dying to download.

Either way, this album could be great if all things were dropped aside and you cold view it as some album by anybody. But Corgan decided to take back the Smashing Pumpkins, and took a burden of a time of better music. This album is decent by those standards.

Jul 31, 2007 12:38:24