Monday, February 18, 2008
Smashing Pumpkins - O2 Arena
There’s consternation whenever a once credible band announces a reformation. Invariably, it’s nothing more than their now desperate leader grasping at the last of their muse or a ride on the cash cow about the festival circuit; concerns made more pertinent when the reformatted band contains just half of its original line up.
Do Smashing Pumpkins, bereft of original members James Iha and D’Arcy Wretzky stand a chance of matching their former incarnation? Visually these two players were integral: flanking towering, tyrannical frontman Billy Corgan like two stately guardian angels, ratifying the band’s otherworldly image and chiming sweetly with Corgan’s lyrical bent and vision of a band heavier than heaven and equally transcendental.
Well, the new line-up barely looks the part but sonically they’re an equal match for Pumpkins of yore. Love it or loathe it, Corgan’s voice remains one of the most distinctive in rock and pushed high in the mix, it dominates throughout. One moment he’s cooing and clucking, the next he’s guttural and rasping like some stroppy mutant toddler chucking sheet metal and lightning bolts out of the pram. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlain’s explosive ‘why hit it once when you can twat it 8 times?’ drumming is as captivating as ever and when the two of them combine to bring “United States” to a shuddering psyched out climax, sadly it proves to be the sole highlight in an otherwise crushingly dreary set.
Lord knows who Corgan thinks he’s playing to but this arena isn’t full of completists and die-hards. Rather, 20,000 old hands who saw the band peak creatively around double album “Mellon Collie…..” Why then, instead of sticking to the anthems and a handful off the new album, do they opt for a set list spanning 18 years of obscure album tracks, soundtrack numbers, B sides, and three covers (including Girls Aloud) thereby alienating the vast majority of the audience?
Half an hour in, everyone realises it’s gonna be a long haul and the atmosphere plummets, never to return. Over the course of 3 hours - save for a sublime acoustic version of “1979” - sludgy riff blurs into sludgy riff and the whole thing quickly becomes tedious and depressing. Even the more familiar numbers are inexplicably retooled, “Today”’s metronomic opening riff is stripped of its chiming music-box quality and “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” is delivered at an ungainly four times the tempo of its recorded cousin.
They encore with an utterly superfluous Echo and The Bunnymen cover (Lips Like Sugar) and by this point people are flooding out of the stalls like heartbroken home fans fleeing the shrill of the final whistle. As Corgan proffers a none more patronising dedication to British music it merely confirms suspicions: Here is a man deeply out of touch with his fans and his band’s heritage and that indeed, is a crying shame.
posted by: Jim Brackpool @ 8:49 PM
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