Smashing Pumpkins
Adore

THE REVIEW

"Take one day, plant some trees/

may they shade you from me/

may your children play beneath".

Now someone is going to kill me, but I'm going to say it anyway. Okay, "Mellon Collie..." is the album everyone considers the undisputed manifesto of the Smashing Pumpkins, but I much prefer this "Adore", to the point that I consider it the true masterpiece of the group. Undoubtedly the product of the situation in which it was composed (Chamberlain's heroin addiction, the drummer expelled for this reason, the post-"Mellon Collie" stress, the recently deceased mother), the album represents the nocturnal side of the Pumpkins, the endless gothic night tinged with poignant prayers and pleading poems to nothingness (or to themselves). Here, you can truly sense Corgan's maturity, who, perhaps authoritatively, realizes how everything is going down the drain, and decides to take the band into his hands guided by an irrepressible sadness, and challenge everyone with eighties keyboards, electronics, and lots and lots of melancholy (the same found in the ballads of "Mellon"). This is, therefore, the other side of success, the manifesto of the (psychological) cancer that grips the singer's heart. The true epitaph of the group.

We start with the sweet "To Sheila", an ochre fresco of a late nineteenth-century melancholic landscape, a city at sunset abandoned to its shadows and its solitude. A powerful beginning, not boisterous but insidious, that finds its way directly to the heart without passing through the ears, and chills follow immediately.

Next is the rough and dark anger of "Ava Adore", a piercing and raw love shouted with utmost bitterness, occasionally tinged with bittersweet streaks. This was the single chosen as representative of the album, and indeed the choice proves to be spot on, given the immense charge of cynicism and melancholy that already oozes from this track.

The notes chase each other; the alien "Daphne Descends", effected and icy, the dramatic "Tear", a piece that drove me crazy at the time, theatrical, poignant, and nihilistic at the highest levels. A pompous and elegant piece, minimal when needed and explosive in throwing gratuitous suffering in your face, also thanks to songwriting that is poetry: "I saw you there, you were on your way/you held the rain, and for the first time/heaven seemed insane, cause heaven is to blame/for taking you away". Corgan's gothic, chapeau.

As if that weren't enough, here comes another stab, "Crestfallen", a text that should be quoted in its entirety, so refined and decadently beautiful it is. For many, it might seem like self-pity, for me, it's a warm blanket for the moments when I feel sad and alone, lost among many.

The heartbreaking "For Martha" is a son's farewell to his mother, a promise to meet again one day, somewhere. A dolorous and bloody lullaby, the song is another major piece of "Adore", but it is perhaps with the concluding "Blank Page" that the peak is reached.

A blank page, the image of a never-expressed anger that sought relief in chasing a dream of love that has escaped forever. What is left of that? A bitter memory, unanswered phone calls from friends, a sunny morning on a hill with a tree and children playing around it, perhaps your own children, whom you will never see again.

Let yourself go in this dark sea, drown if you must, cry and vent, pity yourself if you want. Afterwards, however, you will feel better, aware that you saw yourself in the mirror while you cried, makeup smeared, eyes reddened, face streaked with warm streams, and a heart filled with a sadness that has finally found an outlet.