Smashing Pumpkins

For their first album of new material since 2000, the Smashing Pumpkins produce a meaty slab of bombast-saturated alt-rock -- Zeitgeist is many things, but subtle isn't one of them. Single "Tarantula" sets the harried pace, and there's plenty to bang your head to here, but the grace and variety the band made its name with is missing: Gone are the heart-wrenching ballads and aching melodies, replaced by aggressive songs that bear more resemblance to Velvet Revolver than the Pumpkins of yore. Makes you wonder whether the missing D'Arcy and James Iha were the heart of this band all along.

Zero: That is the exact number of doubts singer-guitarist-songwriter Billy Corgan has about
this controversial resurrection of his old band. "I never felt so right and good. . . . You'll
never need another sound," he crows in that bleating voice against the titanic fuzz of
"Bring the Light." It is classic Corgan bravado, but the cumulative effect of his
distortion-orchestra guitar and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin's pinpoint thunder is... More >