07 Sep 2007
Smashing Pumpkins: Zeitgeist
After the almost embarrassing brevity of Zwan and a solo album that for some reason never made much of an impact, it’s easy to focus on the circumstances surrounding the revival of the Smashing Pumpkins instead of the songs; even calling it a ‘reunion’ is stretching it a bit when the latest effort contains only half of the original line-up. For all the gossip and sniping at the motivations surrounding Billy Corgan’s decision to reform his old band, the important thing is what should be the outfit’s raison d’etre: the music itself.
Murakami’s follow-up to Kafka on the Shore is a surprisingly short novel but carries on the themes of loneliness, isolation and chance meetings of his previous works, not to mention his characteristically quirky and surreal style. As the title suggests, the story takes place between sunset and sunrise, focusing on an assorted selection of characters who are going about their business while the rest of the world is asleep and unaware. A girl named Mari sits in a Denny’s fast food restaurant when she meets a student named Takahashi, who is practising with his band in a nearby basement; meanwhile Mari’s sister Eri is alone at home in a state of unnaturally deep sleep as her sibling is called into a nearby love hotel to help in an incident involving one of its guests.
Right from the first time I saw the 
Be Human, the GitS SAC soundtrack album that revolves around the idea of, well, ‘being human’. The tachikomas of the SAC were prone to discussing what it means to be human in a world of computers and AI - a recurring theme of the series that forms the concept of this record. Basically, it’s a concept album that’s dedicated to the endearing little ‘think tanks’ - if it hadn’t been penned by Ms Kanno I probably would have given it a go on that reason alone.The cover art, that of a tachikoma taking to the microphone, is reflected in the rest of the inlay booklet that places them in a variety of real life situations (i.e. not art taken from the series) in an photographic style reminiscent of the sleeve art for Pink floyd and The Verve’s early stuff. It means you don’t know what to expect from the album from a musical point of view, beyond the fact that it’s a bit strange.
Flushed with success after a tour that included sell-out shows in the USA as well as their native Japan, Osaka’s Dir en Grey released The Marrow of a Bone, their sixth full-length studio effort. Although some of the song titles and lyrics are in English, they still insist on performing many of the songs in their own native language - not that it’s very obvious given the in extremis screaming that is Kyo’s vocal trademark. The nu-metal influence is a little more obvious this time around but nevertheless they deliver a record that is characteristically original and difficult to pigeonhole.
The Ring phenomenon, spawned from a novel by Koji Suzuki, has a number of sequels, prequels and spin-offs to its name; the 2002 remake is a particularly well-known and surprisingly high quality production but the 1998 effort by Hideo Nakata wins over the competition. The concept of a cursed videotape that brings about the death of its viewers seven days afterwards, and the efforts of a newspaper journalist to discover its terrifying secret, are fairly familiar to filmgoers by now but this fact does not detract from the film’s masterful grasp of creating an atmosphere of overwhelming tension and foreboding.
After Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness Billy Corgan and James Iha announced that the band was taking a change in direction musically. Although this difference in sound was no doubt intended from the outset the overall feel of their follow-up, Adore, can also be attributed as much to the absence of Jimmy Chamberlin; at the time was fired from the band due to his problems with drug use. As a result, it is a very different album that lacks, among other things, the crisp and cutting drum beats of their earlier days. Instead, Adore is almost entirely a collection of slow, introspective ballads and synth-driven numbers that are a far cry from their previous alt-rock/borderline-metal offerings.
