Smashing Pumpkins

This might not be the Smashing Pumpkins you remember from seven years ago—or, as seems more likely, from around 1995, when leader Billy Corgan symbolized the meld of artistic and commercial ambitions of alternative-rock as it went mainstream. Back then, the Pumpkins were really his baby, and Zeitgeist discards any pretense of a “band:” the credits state, “JIMMY CHAMBERLIN: DRUMS/BILLY CORGAN: ALL THE REST.”

Chamberlin, once as famous for his addictions as for his drumming, remains Corgan’s reliably virtuosic ace of controlled frenzy. And Corgan remains one of rock & roll’s most grandiloquent noisemakers, layering tracks of guitars atop each other and trying to sing through it all in a voice that makes him sound as though he’s releasing an inner child driven to desperation by the captivity.

Zeitgeist finds the child trapped in America—perhaps the biggest, most elusive subject possible for any native. Corgan pursues it in ways both oblique (the fiercely buzzing “Doomsday Clock” ) and direct (the black-metallic “United States” ), although his lyrics (“apocalyptic screams/mean nothing to the dead” ) are as cryptic as ever.

When Corgan gets more personal, the lyrics and music get less remote: “That’s the Way (My Love Is)” drifts into tenderness and “Pomp and Circumstances” revives the earnest, synthesized lushness of 1980s ballads. Yet Zeitgeist fails to capture America, or indeed anything resembling its own title. Instead, it offers a mélange of distant memories of what used to be the Smashing Pumpkins. VS