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整理人: (2000-04-08 12:30:18), 站内信件
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Smashing Pumpkins
Machina: The Machines of God
Virgin, 2000
★★★☆
Billy Corgan isn't sure whether he's a lost soul or a potential messia
h. His songs on the Smashing Pumpkins' fifth album, Machina: The Machi
nes of God, are all about redemption, commercial and personal, and the
y deliberately scramble any distinctions among romance, rock stardom a
nd religion. With chutzpah or reverence, the band has even redrawn its
logo, with the S and P next to an honest-to-Jesus cross. "Send the bo
red/Your restless/The feedback-scarred/Devotionless/You're all a part
of me now," he intones in "Sacred and Profane," as if being one with G
od might make him the biggest star of all.
At first hearing, Machina comes across as a rebound album. Adore, the
Pumpkins' 1998 record, was the kind of dud that every major band seems
to need: A big, wrongheaded project, repudiated by all but diehard fa
ns, the dud -- like U2's Rattle and Hum or Pearl Jam's No Code -- prov
es that a band is following artistic impulses. In the end, it provides
liposuction for a band's bloated self-esteem.
In the mid-Nineties, when the Smashing Pumpkins became Lollapalooza-fe
stival headliners and arena rockers, Corgan emerged as a bundle of fas
cinating contradictions: high-minded and cynical, humble and grandiose
, earthbound and spaced-out. With a nasal, twerpy voice and a gawky pr
esence, he was a frontman that only alternative rock could love, a ner
dy guy whose alt-ego happened to be a ferocious guitarist.
But on Adore, Corgan sank sturdy melodies with lifeless rhythms, inscr
utable lyrics and keyboard abuse. And instead of venting an inconsolab
le fury that adolescents could appreciate -- "Despite all my rage, I'm
still just a rat in a cage," Corgan had yowled in 1995 -- he was now
preaching about love and prayer, which weren't as much fun.
The band's drummer, Jimmy Chamberlin, was fired for drug problems; he
came back rehabilitated, but bassist D'Arcy quit, to be replaced event
ually by Melissa Auf der Maur from Hole. Corgan, meanwhile, clearly se
t out to make Machina the anti-Adore. He rehired Flood, who had co-pro
duced Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and he set out to keep t
hings simple. The saw-toothed guitar riff and big beat that open Machi
na's first song, "Everlasting Gaze," are unironic signals that the Sma
shing Pumpkins plan to rock, and rock hard, before listeners notice th
e existential questions. "You know I'm not dead," he wails, as if he a
nd his band are resurrected.
The songs go back to the basics of would-be hit singles: riffs, hooks,
bridges, choruses, often with voice and guitar tossing the same short
phrase back and forth. Corgan hasn't radically changed his songwritin
g; he still goes for anthems, riff rockers and dirges. But there are n
o more fantasy epics or muses named Daphne, and there's hardly a keybo
ard to be heard. Guitars rule: distorted electrics and hard-strummed a
coustics, sitarlike drones and orchestral reverberations, tolling Pink
Floyd tones, and jabbing, wriggling leads, with plenty of echoes of t
he Cure and U2.
Chamberlin's drums stand shoulder to shoulder with the guitars. The ba
nd's chemistry demands human muscle, not machine precision, and with C
hamberlin back in place, the music surges forward again. Only one song
, the neopsychedelic "Glass and the Ghost Children," is allowed to dri
ft, echoing the dissolution of a woman lost to heroin; the rest of the
album allows no digressions.
Corgan has streamlined his messages, too. The nearly seventy minutes o
f Machina boil down to a handful of recurring ideas: Love is good, dru
gs are bad, God is everywhere and -- seriously -- thanks for listening
. They all merge in "This Time," with guitars shimmering behind the wa
rning, "For every chemical/You trade a piece of your soul"; a rising c
horus proclaims, "Crashing down, crashing down again/Only love, yeah,
only love will win" as the singer mourns a failing romance that could
also be a crumbling band.
The songs on Machina are one big search for love -- from a woman, an a
udience or a deity. Over the stately glam-rock riff and stomp of "Heav
y Metal Machine," Corgan imagines himself as a rock martyr, Ziggy Pump
kin: "If I were dead/Would my records sell?" And in "Wound," a jubilan
t U2-style march, what sounds like a love song turns to dreams of apoc
alypse and glimpses of divinity: "You're a part of me/Eternal one."
Clear hooks, a hefty beat, words of love and even a song, "I of the Mo
urning," about feeling lonely and listening to the radio -- these are
the earmarks of a band trying to reconquer the airwaves. Yet between t
he power chords, the Smashing Pumpkins insist that the songs are more
than that. They are tales of tribulation -- by drug abuse, by solitude
, by apocalypse, by loss of audience -- to be overcome by unconditiona
l love, or at least the search for it. Corgan can't quite decide wheth
er he wants to join God or be one. But if he can't guarantee salvation
, he can still crank up the fuzz tone. (RS 836)
JON PARELES
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你说这班车可以把我送到天国去,怎么我觉得我在一步步接近地狱。
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