The Smashing Pumpkins
Monuments to an Elegy

As a good hyperactive and hyper-prolific dictator, Billy Corgan has always shown a certain passion for grandeur and abundance. However, time is seldom generous. And so it is that to very refined, very meticulous, and delightfully crafted works (you know what I’m talking about), thunderous projects with killer durations have followed that would have greatly benefited from some streamlining (the two Machina together last almost three hours) and an excessive tinkering with sounds that resulted in clumsy and forgettable plastic productions (did someone say Zeitgeist?).

It’s 2014, and Billy Corgan’s incontinence has given birth to Monuments to an Elegy. A record of just thirty-two minutes of music: rediscovered sense of proportion or dramatic crisis of ideas? I am optimistic, and for one simple reason: it’s a good record. It’s pointless now if you come to tell me “yes, but Siamese Dream was something else” because yes, even Manowar knows that Siamese Dream was something else. Let’s take Monuments for what it is: a well-done work, which presents some interesting novelties and does not betray the band's past (that is when the Smashing Pumpkins were indeed a band: now they are Billycorgan, another guy on guitar, and Tommy Vee from Mötley Crüe on drums. Yes, Mötley Crüe. We have to admit there is much worse around). Monuments to an Elegy is well-played and produced, has a contained duration, no fillers, and each of the nine songs achieves a solid pass, I recommend among all Drum + Fife. The overall sound is the classic smashinpumpkian, with the addition of synths, evident in some tracks, which slightly modernize everything without distorting it. A cute way of saying they are not exactly indispensable but we appreciate the effort.

Did you like Oceania? Did you hate Zwan? Do you like that stuff that on Kerrang! they call alternative rock? Do you want a nice record and, at least this time, without too many pretensions? Monuments to an Elegy is for you.

[Someone might argue that Monuments is indeed part of the "album cycle" Teargarden by Kaleidyscope along with Oceania, several EPs, and a lot of stuff that has yet to come out, which would make it effectively a symptom of a total lack of sense of proportion on the part of the bald guy. I respond that of this hypothetical cycle only Billy Corgan cares, so it is pointless to try and grasp the overall sense of Teargarden. Just listen to the records one by one and that's it. Look at how Billy goes around dressed and evaluate if it’s worth trying to understand what’s going through his head]