It's been over a decade since both Billy Corgan and James Iha could call themselves members of the Smashing Pumpkins, and now they've finally got something else in common: It's 2012 and they're both sorta acting like it's still 1998. Yet this tenuous link becomes an exception that proves the rule. While Corgan is still airing out grudges and resentments against any and all bands that ticked him off and fans who had the gall to stop buying his records after Adore, Iha is calmly going about the business of releasing what sounds like a logical follow-up to Let It Come Down, his solo record which celebrated its 14th birthday this year*.* This clearly has the potential to work out better for Iha. Bands who sound and sell like Smashing Pumpkins don't exist anymore, and the leveling of the playing field has allowed artists to become stars even while making the sort of modest music Iha favored on Let It Come Down: peaceful, easy California folk-rock, dewy AM-radio pop. From the sounds of Look to the Sky, Iha does want to be a star. Unfortunately it's on 1998's terms, and he's prepared with bafflingly outdated alt-rock songs that could comfortably sidle between choice cuts from Marcy Playground and Semisonic and get their asses handed to them.
It didn't have to end up like this. Iha's built up a lot of goodwill over the years simply by not being Billy Corgan, and if you're amenable to the sort of KROQ-friendly alt he abetted in A Perfect Circle and attempted as part of Tinted Windows, there are moments that can press your Buzz Bin joy buzzer. Check the whooshing raygun effects from "Speed of Love", the meek and unexpected female harmonies on "Make Believe", and you'll be able to overlook his rhyming, "You rush in with stars in your hair/ You cast your spell and float through the air," in the first damn line. Plus, you hear those chiming, flanged arpeggios on "To Who Knows Where" and it starts triggering memories of songs like "Believe" and "The Boy", very strong Iha B-sides that admittedly wouldn't have fit anywhere on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness like the comparatively limp "Farewell & Goodnight" or "Take Me Down" did. Besides, there is precedent for this kind of thing being done quite well and quite recently. After all, wasn't the Pains of Being Pure at Heart's Flood-produced Belong a document of alternate history where Iha took the controls of the Pumpkins ca. Mellon Collie for about 40 minutes? It's almost frightening how close some of Look to the Sky resembles Belong, though Iha mostly favors the mid-tempo, big-chorus stuff (i.e., "The Body", "Even in Dreams") and the album's one very unfortunate genre experiment ("Appetite") is the sort of baritone burlesque piano maundering Scott Weiland attempted at his most far-gone on "Lady, Your Roof Brings Me Down". Weiland's was much better.
You can engage in this sort of cautiously optimistic evaluation process for about 10 minutes, after which the music of Look to the Sky just does not matter. I'd feel more comfortable telling you Iha has nothing to say here. The problem is that he does, and it's mostly just sad to see the cruel strictures of rhyme scheme cause someone to sing things he would almost certainly never think or speak. It might sound strange to bring up Iha's lyrics as unacceptable considering that, with all due respect, the bar's not really all that high in this field. Some might just go ahead and say that "I'm traveling at the speed of love/ And sooner and later I'll be crashing" is not a lyric that should emerge from the mouth of a grown-ass man. I'll give Iha the benefit of the doubt and say "twee" doesn't really have an age limit, though the frequency of song titles like "Summer Days", "New Years Day", "Make Believe", and oh yes, "Speed of Love" tests patience merely by appearing on one's iPod.
My bigger issue is that those aren't the kind of lyrics that should be coming from a guy who clearly knows how to put a song together and might've been sitting on these ones for the better part of a decade and a half. When Pains' Kip Berman sings an iffy lyric like "Tell me again what the body's for/ 'Cause I can't feel it any more" on "The Body", the sentiment and emotional content is understandable even if you might want to phrase it differently. I can't even really give Iha's lyrics the dignity of cliché because clichés are truth for the most part. Most of this stuff has a strange aggression in its refusal to even bother making any sense. Here's the intro triplet on "Waves": "Waves wash over me/ Drag me out to sea/ A tide pours slow-ow-ly," but wait... how are the waves washing over him if he's not already out to sea? Iha has no time for your follow-up questions, pressing in a maudlin deeper register: "Tonight I feel so alone/ Tonight I've wandered far from home." Got that? And, for God's sake, does he really rhyme the title of "Till Next Tuesday" with "close the door till it's news-day?" Even with that bashful voice of his, the words become impossible to ignore and these aren't songs so much as a kind of mental tennis game where Iha serves and you put yourself in position to volley with a guess at the most obvious and often correct rhyme. "Gemini" becomes a highlight by default as it's about the only song here that doesn't adhere to a strict AA/BB pattern.
The content is disheartening enough, but it's the context of Look to the Sky that makes it pitiable. Maybe slap some preset beats on it and trade out some of the guitars for synths of Gushers-like sickly sweetness, attribute it to a post-Owl City new jack rather than a well-known guitarist from a 90s alt-rock titan, and you might have something that all of a sudden shows up in Billboard's Top 20 without your having any idea where the fuck they came from. But in the aforementioned leveled playing field, Iha gets exposed-- Look to the Sky expresses so little that could be considered real or truthful that it couldn't have been created out of some sort of emotional necessity and is aiming for radio formats that no longer exist. Or, to paraphrase the most withering putdown of 1998, 99% of its fans don't exist.
