You will not tell Billy Corgan what to do. The Smashing Pumpkins leader's two-decade career has been wildly erratic, full of potholes and detours, but this ironclad rule has remained. "I was into Black Sabbath and it just wasn't cool, but I didn't give a shit: My band was going to sound like Black Sabbath because I fucking wanted it to and I didn't give a shit what some idiot fuck thought," he spat at Julianne Shepherd 2005, apropos of nothing, around the release of his solo album The Future Embrace. The quote, with its fascinating blend of indomitable will and boiling spite, is pure Corgan. For better or for worse, this energy is his fuel: He will reach transcendence, goddammit, with or without you.
The last few years have borne sad witness to this worldview's inevitable end point. When Jimmy Chamberlin, the band's lone remaining original member, departed in 2009, saying only, "I can no longer commit all of my energy into something that I don't fully possess," Corgan became the last one standing. His announcement that he would be keeping the Pumpkins name and recruiting new members was hardly surprising. The Pumpkins had always been Corgan's dream, after all, the other members mere action figures recruited for its realization. Even the ridiculous band name, which the other members wore with the ease of an ugly sweater hand-picked by their mom, was a remnant of Corgan's boyhood vision. "The name of the band is a stupid name, a dumb bad joke and a bad idea, OK?" original bassist D'arcy Wretzky snapped to the Washington Post back in 1993. "Billy named the band before there even was a band. He was like, 'I'm gonna have a band and it's gonna be called this.'"
Now, Corgan has surrounded himself with a new crew, one presumably more excited to be sporting the team jersey. Mike Byrne (drums), Nicole Fiorentino (bass), and Jeff Schroeder (guitar) were assembled via "It could be you!" open auditions: Nineteen-year-old Byrne, for example, was a freshman at the Berklee School of Music when Corgan recruited him. This crew is charged with the unenviable task of making the first record since 2007's Zeitgeist to bear the Smashing Pumpkins name. Given the conditions, they do the best job possible.
In terms of sheer sound, Oceania hits its mark: It succeeds, at least, in seeming Pumpkins-y. The towering slab of guitars, the sense of hurtling forward motion, the alt-rock-meets-Les Mis sweep, are present, and help make Oceania Corgan's most worthwhile work in years. Opener "Quasar" features plenty of pile-driving riffing, and you can hear the new members working overtime to justify their spots: Byrne's drums have some of the fluid propulsion of Chamberlin's, and Schroeder's leads are ear-catching but unshowy. When Corgan's thin, keening voice enters over the mass of sound, you believe, for a moment or two.
But the songs themselves lack the soaring melodies Corgan used to grace them with, and his voice is a little rougher, coarser. The arrangements suffer from a whiff of generic, corporate-rock slickness. Would that this record actually had some of the thick-caked doom of the Sabbath records Corgan built his tower out of. The entire album, meanwhile, suffers from rote, obvious lyrics, which lean heavy on the "I'm always on your side"/ "Everything I want is free"/ "There's a sun that shines in me" School-of-Rock madlibs approach.
It's also difficult not to notice he's repeating himself: The introductory riff to "Quasar" is nearly identical to that of "Cherub Rock". The power ballad "The Celestials" recalls "Disarm", while the open-hearted, dramatic plea at the center of "Violet Rays" ("I'll leave with anyone this night/ And I'll kiss anyone tonight") is an almost-direct quote from Mellon Collie's "In the Arms of Sleep". "Pale Horse" echoes the chord progression of "Thru the Eyes of Ruby". This is the classic Pumpkins sound, but an echo of itself; its spirit is somehow enervated.
What you do hear on Oceania is a reawakening of Corgan's ambitions. The album feels bigger and covers more ground than anything he's done in a decade: There are neon electronic interludes, folk-rock breakdowns, songs that morph from wintry ballads to grim rock stomps. "Pinwheels" starts with a flitting-hummingbird synth line, layers of droning cello, and George Harrison-style guitar before collapsing into a lovely folk-rock breakdown with softened, cascading female background vocals. Uptempo rocker "The Chimera" has an infectious chorus, and the title track churns darkly through multiple sections without losing momentum.
Oceania is reportedly only the middle section of a larger, looming 44-song epic bearing the Terry-Brooks-fantasy-series title Teargarden by Kaleidyscope. It's exhausting to imagine this record sitting inside something three times its length. But Corgan thinks only in epics-- double albums, boxed sets that come in suitcase packaging-- and this generosity is the upside of his world-conquering ambition. Corgan made Oceania available with no advance copies or radio singles, an attempt to preserve the pre-digital "everyone all at once" album experience he fondly remembers. This gesture, like many of Corgan's, combines astronomical rock-star hubris with a kind of weird largesse: He very badly wants to give his audience something enormous, undeniable, and life-changing.
But this impulse has a dark side. Like Corgan recording countless vocal takes of "Zero" and grading them with a series of check marks. Or recording all of Siamese Dream's bass parts because he could complete them in fewer takes. Corgan used to be able to absolve his personal failings in rock'n'roll, but rock'n'roll can only do so much. His new band might not question him very much, and they may play better or more professionally, than his old crew. But Oceania suffers a kind of rock-star-dictator airlessness. "I'm all by myself/ As I've always felt," Corgan sang, on Siamese Dream's "Soma", surrounded by his bandmates and newly ascendant. "I'm alone, so alone, but better than I ever was," he sings, sadly, on Oceania's title track, surrounded by a hired-via-contest crew of strangers. You can always be more alone.
