The Smashing Pumpkins - "MACHINA/The Machines of God"

Rating: 6

You may know it as the notorious album that precipitated the Smashing Pumpkins' breakup. But is MACHINA/The Machines of God as terrible as its title would indicate? Perhaps I have my head so far up Billy Corgan's bald ass that I can't tell what good music is anymore, but I say no. But mediocre, most definitely!

For although Corgan's songwriting declined as we entered our third millennium, it hadn't completely gone to shit either. However, this album is filled with bad artistic decisions. Let's take a quick run-through of the decision-making of Mr. Corgan:

Wrote a set of spiritual, soaring mid-tempo ballads? Make sure that every song is produced with a deafening, buzzing wall of sound that makes Phil Spector want to kill again.

Need a lead single? Re-write "Zero" from Mellon Collie, give it a meaningless title ("The Everlasting Gaze") and make sure to include an a cappella section where you sing the line "But underneath the wheels lie the skulls of every cog" with a hard G so that everyone wonders if they just heard you scream 'skulls of every cock'.*

Find yourself with 25-30 minutes of top-notch material and no more? Make the album 73 minutes long and then release a companion album called MACHINA II with 90 minutes of OUTTAKES from the recording sessions.

Shit, I've almost convinced myself that I shouldn't give this album three stars which is what I'm going to do at the end of this review. But despite the flaws, I do think there is 25-30 minutes of top-notch material here, which is enough for a borderline positive rating. The stretch from "Stand Inside Your Love" through "This Time" is good enough that I can almost forgive the stretch of bad songs from the needlessly 10-minute "Glass and the Ghost Children" (solid at 3 minutes, bad at 10), through the tedious "Blue Skings Bring Tears." I wouldn't say there's a great album buried here, but there is a good album at 10 or 11 songs, especially with sparser production. And what pushes me over into positive territory is that "Stand Inside Your Love" is a truly great single, the one vestige of classic Pumpkins.

So if you're a Pumpkins fan, you should still listen to this album. If you aren't, don't. And no, there is no fucking way I am ever going to listen to MACHINA II.

Rating: *** out of *****

* There is one other example of this that I can think of in the annals of rock: Manfred Mann's "Blinded by the Light" where the singer clearly sings "Wrapped up like a douche" when the line is "Wrapped up like a deuce." I'm not sure I can say why, but both songs make my skin crawl.