To start things off, "Adore" is different.
The Smashing Pumpkins' newest album opens with "To Sheila," a wistful pastoral road song that is markedly different from the rest of the record's industrial techno-rock. It sounds more like an epilogue than a prologue.
But more than that, the whole album itself is different.
Different because The Smashing Pumpkins are the only darlings of the alternative scene that can still claim some pop relevance. Different because the band is now playing without a drummer. And different because the album is mostly a collection of love songs, but it does not contain a single power ballad.
"Adore" really kicks off with the second track and first single, "Ada Adore." It's an angry, merciless love song that mixes lines like "It's you that I adore / you will always be my whore" with the demanding pseudo-chorus "we must never be apart."
"Ada Adore" also gels the album's sound -- a European-sounding collection of synthesizers, drum machines and sparse atmospheric guitars. The next two tracks, "Perfect" and "Daphne Descends" explore the soundscape further and evoke what a collaboration between The Cure and post-Achtung U2 might sound like. "Pug" drops most of the U2 sound to become a mere Cure clone.
Many of "Adore's" songs feature simple and repetitive arrangements that highlight Billy Corgan's crooner side. While Corgan's voice may lack the range of Ella Fitzgerald or the character of Billie Holliday, his versatility shows from the straightforward "Once Upon a Time" to the strung-out wailing of "Annie Dog."
His deadpan performance on "Shame" suggests the audio equivalent of a Hal Hartley film: "Love is good and love is kind / love is drunk and love is blind / love is good and love is mine." And it works.
Billy Corgan, the driving force behind The Smashing Pumpkins, deserves credit for effortlessly adapting electronic industrial drums to replace drummer Jimmy Chamberlain, who was ceremoniously booted from the band after the overdose of keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin.
But at the same time, however, the band's first full album without a permanent drummer also suffers from the departure. The uniform plodding percussion of machines gets repetitive after a short while and the different songs start to blur together and sound the same.
The album's second-to-last track, "For Martha," is a bit self-indulgent with a running time over eight minutes, but guest drummer Matt Cameron gives the song a welcome amount of personality that brings it to life. At that point, by contrast, the earlier songs seem stilted. "Behold! the Nightmare" has plenty of character as well, with Phish-y barbershop harmonies and screeching guitars.
"For Martha," "Behold!" and the last full song, "Blank Page," finally evoke the spirit and winning sound of Radiohead's "OK Computer." But the rhythmical uniformity of the album's first two-thirds prevent it from reaching the same level as a whole.
Corgan, guitarist James Iha and bassist D'arcy threw away most of the hard-rock trappings to create a new sound on "Adore." But while they succeeded in revamping their style, they also lost a few important elements. Few of the songs contain choruses, which would have broken up the redundancy that mars some of them. And for a band whose lineup is 66 percent guitar players, the lack of featured guitar parts also leads to the blandness of songs like "The Tale of Dusty and Pistol Pete" and "Appels + Oranjes."
As a whole, the album is fairly successful. It's like the hour-long episode of a sitcom that would have made a hilarious half-hour, but does not have quite enough laughs and story to justify the extra half-hour in the middle. And even though the middle portion is somewhat lacking, "Adore" ends on a high note, leaving the listener to anxiously await the next episode.
