Overwhelming Emotions on a musical seesaw
8/1/98 concert review
New York Times
Thanks to Eve for the review.
Smart rockers have distrusted bombast for at least two decades, since punk-rock blasted away the excesses of 1970's rock. But Billy Corgan the songwriter,singer and lead guitarist for the Smashing pumpkins is out to rehabilitate the possibility of grandeur in rock. His songs imply that overwhelming emotions-love,shame,loneliness, rage deserve outsize music: stately marches and tolling guitar chords, processional introductions and stomping hard rock jams.
Mr. corgan is unabashedly attached to the theatrical possibilities built into rock dynamics, harking back to the sound 9though not the staging) of early 1970's david Bowie. At radio City music Hall on Saturday night, the
Smashing Pumpkins seesawed between majesty and bloat. Mr. Corgan himself is a dec idly unimposing prescience, perhaps the geekiest rocker ever to become a pop idol. His voice is nasal and scratchy, the sound of a nerd who wanders from dreamy musings to tantrums. On stage with spotlights illuminating the dome of his shaven head, he looked awkward whenever he wasn't letting loose screaming guitar solos. His lyrics however, portray a turbulent introspective character who can lose himself in love or see through all his own weaknesses. Such a sensitive soul has found a devoted following among teenage girls, who stood through the entire concert and squealed "I love you billy!" In every quiet spot.
The band's set which lasted more than two hours, drew on it's most recent albums Adore and 1995's Mellon collie and the Infinite Sadness. Ballads opened into surging crescendos; rockers like Ava Adore reached for elemental impact.
Moving at a deliberate pace below pealing high guitar leads, some songs became the sonic cathedrals that art-rock once tried to build. yet while kenny Arnoff one of rock's finest drummers, is touring with the Pumpkins, even he couldn't budge the inertia of songs such as TEar with pseudo classical piano interludes by Mike Garson 9who performed on David Bowie's Aladdin Sane), revealed exactly what was tiresome about art rock the first time around.
In the finale a pulsing, pounding droning version of Joy Divisions Transmission, Mr. corgan quoted Mr. Bowies Lets Dance and added a crackled left field rant promising an alien invasion. then one by one the Pumpkins invited audience members onstage and handed them their instruments, putting the music in amateur hands. Perhaps it was their way of showing that for all their bombast, their hearts are still in punk rock.