Smashing Pumpkins: "Song for a Son” / “Widow Wake My Mind"

Billy Corgan first projected that the Smashing Pumpkins’ free online album, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope [sic, sigh] would be doled out at a track per week beginning in October. “Widow Wake My Mind,” released Monday, follows “Song for a Son” after about a month. At the present rate, I’ll be writing about the collection’s (weird, electronic, and anti-climactic—I’m calling it now) 44th and final song sometime before my thirty-fourth birthday, and my children will fix me a puzzled expression from their hover snow booties. Nevertheless, the lag time would suggest there’s a bit more quality control then we’re used to seeing from Corgan, which was his stated intention: “The new standard for an SP song would that it be excellent and fantastic and most importantly essential or it’s not coming out.”

The world’s reaction: “but forty-four? I think just one would be fine at this point.”

To be completely fair, “Song for a Son” is a much better idea than most anything on the middling Zeitgeist (2007) album. The problem is that the idea is Led Zeppelin’s: this is an explicit rewrite of “Stairway to Heaven,” from its faux-baroque intro (descending bass, ascending lead tone, a major IV in the fifth measure) to its herculean guitar solos. Not that the Pumpkins of old were ever shy about their love of Queen and Foghat, but Corgan used to be able to weld them into something he could call his own. Despite some impassioned lead playing in the obligatory loud section, this is a mere homage. If one could ignore his adenoids bleating out some astonishingly lame lyrics (“This is a song for a kid / This is a song for a tailor / Who stitched up my old heart”), it’s a pleasant song to listen to once.

That’s more than I can say for “Widow Wake My Mind,” which sounds like an outtake from Zwan’s Mary Star of the Sea (2003). The song sounds (as they say in literary reviews) more plotted than written: there’s a melodic, off-meter intro, a big chorus, a key-modulation in the quieter bridge, all of these featuring well-worn tropes and harmonic tricks. Obviously, someone with Corgan’s acumen knows how to write a song; the problem is the foundation of the architecture. There’s just nothing here, and it isn’t helped by a much too prominent vocal and lackluster drum work.

Billy Corgan has been flying his psychedelic flag high recently, starting a record label that has Nuggets heroes Strawberry Alarm Clock and the Seeds on its roster. This probably explains a lot of the hippie-dippy hokum that has seasoned his lyric sheet, or the idea behind Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, which corresponds to the Tarot deck. No amount of elevated, inchoate consciousness can offset the ravages of time, though, and the first fruits of this project suggest that Corgan has cut out something for himself something as unworkable as Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s play in Synechdoche, New York. Then again, Infectious Diseases in Cattle would be a better name.

:: Download both at smashingpumpkins.com