AVATAR: "CYR" THE SMASHING PUMPKINS

"CYR"
THE SMASHING PUMPKINS

Jimmy Chamberlin: Drums and Percussion

William Patrick Corgan: Vocals, Guitar, Bass Guitar, Keyboards
James Iha: Guitar
Jeff Schroeder: Guitar
with
Katie Cole & Sierra Swan: Vocals
 

All music and lyrics by William Patrick Corgan

Produced by William Patrick Corgan

Released November 27, 2020

So many times with music, it is not always necessarily about what the music means but how the music feels. 

For me, The Smashing Pumpkins have existed as precisely that type of a band where song by song, album by album all contain their own specific statements but they are not ever ones that are firmly identifiable to the listener. For as forceful as their body of work exists, there is also a hefty impressionistic quality and artistic outlook that lends their legacy to intense interpretation and an equally intense emotional connection. Perhaps that is indeed why opinions concerning the band, their history and continuing musical odyssey has received such impassioned responses and opinions over these thirty plus years of the band's existence. 

With The Smashing Pumpkins, there is always so much to ponder, debate and argue about, from the songs and albums to even which members are in the band, which has then extended itself into serious discussions about what a band actually is, isn't, can or cannot be. Because of this reality, there is nothing disposable about this band and that includes no matter how much their detractors wish for them to disappear, a quality which in and of itself confirms The Smashing Pumpkins' relevance and vitality.  

Since the band's original dissolution in 2000, and resurrection in 2007, The Smashing Pumpkins, over the past decade plus, released yet another sprawling collection of genre defying music, which featured a revolving cast of musicians with only co-founder/singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Billy Corgan settled at the core, while original drummer Jimmy Chamberlin rejoined, exited and ultimately, re-entered. 

Enormously surprising the fan community, especially myself as I had long figured such an event was completely out of the realm of possibility, co-founder/guitarist/singer/songwriter James Iha officially returned to the fold in 2018, thus bringing three of the original quartet back together. Now armed with guitarist Jeff Schroeder, who joined in 2007, and has more than fully earned his Pumpkins soldier stripes, the band has felt to be more unstoppable with content, musical agility and potential more than ever and by the accounts that I have read, it feels as if the collective wishes to make the most of this period as possible.   

Following up the Rick Rubin produced reunion effort, "Shiny And Oh So Bright, Vol. 1/ No Past, No Future, No Sun" (released November 16, 2018) and the gloriously triumphant corresponding tour, The Smashing Pumpkins have, at last, made their full return to the artistry of the album as sweeping grand statement with their 11th release, the double album "Cyr." Unlike the preceding album which truly felt to serve as an initial greeting from the band to the fans signaling their return, "Cyr" is an expansive journey and fully representative of the full arc of The Smashing Pumpkins discography and what it has meant to listeners thus far. 

It is an album that is cinematic in scope, profound in its conceptual depth, and completely succulent, lush and enveloping in sheer sound. It is indeed the very type of album in which you emotionally enter in one place only to emotionally arrive in a different place by album's end. Again, and especially with Billy Corgan's peerless lyricism, which firmly exists as a poetic dream state joyride through language itself, which this time is merged with the band's deepest dive into electronic and synthetic textures to date, we may not precisely know what the complete work means, but we can always determine how it feels.

After three succinctly ominous notes, "Cyr" blasts open with the propulsive "The Colour Of Love," a surge of charging drums augmented by atmospheric guitars, New Wave synth accents, the siren swirl of Katie Cole and Sierra Swan's harmony vocals, all of which surrounds the forlorn narrator as voiced by Billy Corgan, who sings of unrequited passion that feels like gray colored love, "of ash and mud and time slipped away."  

With "Confessions Of A Dopamine Addict," the mood turns meditative as we seemingly explore the birth and pursuit of love within the music's icy, synthetic landscape.

"Love is easy
Whichever way you start
Take a diamond

Slice it through your heart
And watch what color bleeds...

...I'm down for bewitching trains
And cursed tower
Masts blacked windswept
Horizons ever sour
If it takes more to find you

Than setting out a faded sun

Can you feel the same?
Do the stars inked on my face
State what's changed?
With a distance I can't make
From a distance I can't make"

Here, it feels as if Corgan is singing from a place of stasis, a cocoon state, a period of recalibration and preparation to continue the search regardless of duration and location. Additionally, the song feels as if he is making a list or inventing a persona designed to attract. "I'm down for bewitching trains/And cursed tower/Masts blacked windswept/Horizons ever sour/If it takes more to find you/Than setting out a fading sun." 

If the desired object is real or imagined, that is not quite known. But the yearning? That is undeniably real.

If the previous track felt to be an internal pause, we reach metamorphosis with the album's title track, "Cyr," as we find ourselves on the dance floor. It is a song of nightclub swagger as The Smashing Pumpkins deliver a pounding four-on-the-floor groove serving as the theme song for our narrator, now possessed with a parading posture of flash, glitter and command, more than appropriate for a name and/or word that is derived from a Greek origin meaning "Lord" or "Master."

"Say, I done told you!" our narrator exclaims. "Say, dire warning...Stare down your masters!" he challenges as well. And throughout, there remains the question of identity. For me, I was made even more curious during the song's midsection where the music quiets a bit, allowing Corgan to voice a proclamation, much like in past songs as "Zero" from "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" (released October 24, 1995) and "The Everlasting Gaze" from "MACHINA/the machines of god" (released February 29, 2000), two past Pumpkins rock operas which starred the central character of Zero who later becomes Glass.

"Did the times, wind
Did the crowd, kind
Aping youth, wise
Ever lost, ides
'Midst the chaff as meek       

And those weak, as sand
Turning GLASS upside down
For the hours should they pass"

OK...again, all of this is guesswork and conjecture on my part but in reading/listening closely to recent interviews as well as Instagram question and answer session with fans by Billy Corgan himself, he has openly expressed that there is a connection between Zero/Glass and the "Cyr" album but he has not delved any further than that. Additionally, the band is currently within the throes of creating a proper sequel album to follow up both "Mellon Collie" and "MACHINA," which will hopefully arrive in late 2021. That being said, I am wondering if "turning glass upside down" is a means to to provide a different shading or perspective or alternate persona to the Zero/Glass character if not a full storyline yet, which does go to a certain length into how this album in full felt for me. But I am getting ahead of myself...

Gently swooning spells of love songs arrive with both "Dulcet In E," during which our narrator proclaims himself to being a magical "necromancer," yet fragile enough in the following song "Wrath" to express that "when I break into sapphires/I've cost you more than myself." The double sides of falling in love, with hopes of attraction and fears of rejection where the personas we create to woo can be easily shattered, revealing our even more broken true selves. This situation seems to have our narrator at a crossroads of either delving into love or moving onwards, keeping one's guard up yet still reaching outwards.

"I should wander" sings our narrator in the enchanting "Ramona," as the landscape feels to shift to something more dusty and medieval with lyrics of incantations, hexes and souls torched to dust while musically, we are given a blend of electronics sprinkled with acoustic guitars. For the brooding "Anno Satana," the persona and world shifts again to something more like a futuristic Western with our narrator in the role of a solitary gunslinger rolling stone armed with the come on calling card, "Oh, did you know I'm a wanted man?" who insists "I've never needed anyone," a statement that exists as more emotional shield than as actual truth.

The sense of persona melts away completely with the tender, pastoral fields of "Birch Grove," which is announced by the quiet musical footsteps, so to speak, of the "Strawberry Fields Forever" styled mellotron, a loping beat and a wistful musical backdrop. This song, which Billy Corgan has expressed was written as a message for his children, feels like the self that arrives when the world grows completely silent, the noise of life faded and a moment when one is able to find oneself able to hear one's own heart beating. 

"Sundays come and Sundays flee
Sundays wed
Won't you stand with me?
Not someone 
Not someone else..."

Not Zero. Not Glass. Not the rock star. Not in any persona other than...Dad.

"My seedlings grow and grow
And home is whatever ground they hold
Shading life inside the falling rain
All alone, in love with age and someone
Someone else
But I've grown stronger
As someone, as someone
As someone else..." 

For Billy Corgan, just as all of us, and who his children will one day grow up into being, we are never the same people we once were. Not through elusive personas but through the act of growing, living, aging and the realization of one's mortality, all of which does indeed contain aspects of an infinite sadness. "I forsee a time without me," Corgan sings as himself in this aching, jewel of a song.   

Sometimes, reality aches too terribly and in doing so, it is a return to fantasy, even one as dark and as doom filled as the one presented in "Wyttch," a song tailor made for the Halloween season and instantly conjures images of specters on broomsticks spiraling in the night skies incanting the very spells ("Come call, Autumnus/Start the wheels of Helios/Strike up the lantern/Singe forth darkest piece") that unleash the demonic guitars, eerie keyboards and evil bass tones that take us on a descent into Hell.  

Or perhaps, the Necromancer has met his match.

The sparkling "Starrcraft" suggests the transcendence after being fully bewitched, or in more earthly terms, possibly another mental plane reached after some narcotic influence. Sounding a bit like one end of a middle of the night conversation while stoned, our narrator returns to state his claim. 

"Say you hate me
Say you'd mark my grave
Swear religion has no spectral race
Chase me under
Right back where I sang
To brace new visions and decay in chains...

All hail the blackest nights
The blackest night I'd find
All hail the blackest night
Blinding me with sight"

When speaking of the act of love between lovers, it is often described as how the heart feels lifted but yet, we all fall in love. The growling temptation of "Purple Blood" sets the stage for our narrator and his emotional descent as he easily gives away of himself, proclaiming as if drugged, "I am in love with your god!" therefore relinquishing whatever sense of command he held at the album's beginning, fully succumbing to something that sounds to be more carnal and more sinister than he may realize.  
 

The spectacular "Save Your Tears" engulfs our narrator, and us, completely in the "Swoon in spirals phased...in somber haze...of chorused grays," and what is the colour of love again? This sonic flight is then countered by the prowling "Telegenix," where love is not all sunshine and rainbows but in actuality, it may be a sentiment that feels to boomerang itself to a declaration heard within the song "Bodies" from "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" when our narrator questions, "If they say it's not suicide, then what is?"  

If part of love is the fear of losing that love, then is that where we find ourselves within the primal seeking, searching of "Black Forest, Black Hills," a song of wind, crows, stone, and a "longing to just belong."  

Pulsating synthesizer notes set the pace for the emotionally racing "Adrennalynne," where our narrator finds himself at a potential crossroads more tenuous than at the album's opening. 

"I'm taut inside the movement, movement
A jake of which there's no door, no door
A fear of which there's no floor, no floor
These lives aren't real for anyone
These riffs don't mean shit but what I want
Come ask for why
'Cause hearts like bombs can't belong
Surrender, please and please no more
Come ask for why
Come ask for why"

Such is the journey of life, especially as we all attempt to find salvation but otherwise encounter, in some way or form, that "Groundhog Day" feeling, the realization that we are experiencing the same trials and tribulations again and again and in doing so, what is the purpose, what is this cycle and how can we extend beyond it? "Make no mistake," Corgan sings, "That's life."

The final section of "Cyr" opens with the pensive mood piece of "Haunted," a inner soliloquy where our narrator seems to questions his place in the world, his validity of his outlook and the meaning of his existence. 

"If this be life, our evening's prayer
Or death's denouement
A thorned idyll that's offered no one
And I've stood for no one
Then father, I'm nowhere
I'm no closer to your throne"

With the warm synthetic waves of keyboards leading the way, "The Hidden Sun" feels to find or narrator amidst a newfound realization due to the consequences of his journey. From venturing into something inauthentic ("Come eminence") in order to discover something authentic, "Fagin's prophets on Aesop's ride...I'm stuck with blunt force and Morpheus."  

A thief, a storyteller and the god of dreams populate the song and therefore, the fantasy in which our narrator has placed himself and may now realize its fallacy. There are elements of truth in fantasy, but you will most likely never find THE TRUTH in fantasy...and so, it is time to leave fantasy behind to find the transcendence that does not arrive in easy answers. 

In the Tears For Fears-esque "Schaudenfreud," we find our narrator leaving the false grandiosity of the album's start behind, now more humble than haughty. "I'm harvest more than guide...I'm shadow more than guide," he sings and on the existential catwalk of "Tyger, Tyger," he repeatedly pleas, "I've got to know!"

"Cyr" concludes with the curtain call that is "Minerva." If not exactly a "happy ending" so to speak, it is one of the jauntiest finales I can remember from an album by The Smashing Pumpkins, who seem to step out from behind the curtain, inviting us to "dance around again" and to address us all with the following benediction:

"October loves you
Strawberries love you
Who wouldn't love you?...

...Saints
(We are)
Saints
We are fools
But sometimes, fools, they rule" 

Now then, all of which I described is a tremendous amount to pour over and remember, just take everything that I have recounted to you with a grain of salt as I am not a Pumpkins scholar, by any means. I am just a longtime fan offering an interpretation based on copious guess work, many trips to the dictionary and most importantly, the feelings brought to me by the band's past albums. Some may call all of this pretentious and honestly, if songs that feature allusions to Greek mythology, language that sounds like Shakespearean sonnets and host dauphins, anodynes and pandrogynes aren't your thing, then that is, of course, your prerogative. But, for me, this is fun and I happen to deeply appreciate the effort to even conceive of something in this fashion, let alone execute it, again extending what the landscape of rock and roll can actually be.

While I do not have the name in front of me right now, a recent interviewer of Billy Corgan likened "Cyr" to being something akin to The Who's "Quadrophenia" (released October 26, 1973) and to that, I can now see the comparison even though both albums do not remotely sound like each other whatsoever. To me, Billy Corgan is cut from an extremely similar cloth to The Who's Pete Townshend as they are not only songwriters of a specifically elevated class but they are also extraordinary conceptualists and so the connection between both bands and albums do not feel to be terribly far fetched. 

With "Quadrophenia," Pete Townshend told the story Jimmy as filtered through the four distinct personalities and personas of his then bandmates, Roger Daltrey, the late John Entwistle, the late Keith Moon as finally, himself, even as far as devising song themes for each member and therefore each piece of Jimmy's personality. And so, we have Townshend's perceptions of his collaborators serving as personality traits of a fictional character. So, it would not be unlikely to think that if his bandmates had written the same album, we would end up with three distinctly different additional rock operas as one perceptions of other and themselves would be markedly different.

The Smashing Pumpkins' "Cyr" feels to find itself in similar territory (and frankly, so do most of their songs as song titles are typically not featured in the actual lyrics therefore inviting interpretations).   

Conceptually, while the album is technically positioned as the second in the "Shiny And Oh So Bright" series (a third volume is to follow), when I hear the album, it feels to be even more of a piece with the art metal of "Zeitgeist" (released July 10, 2007) and the more ornate, psychedelic prog rock of "Oceania" (released June 19, 2012), which itself was a portion of the larger scaled "Teargarden By Kaleidyscope" (2009-2014) song cycle which itself centered around the Tarot and the character of The Fool, a representative of untapped knowledge opportunity and potential and is usually beginning a new journey...and at the end of "Minerva," who are we all again? 

Is "Cyr" a representation of the next phase from the societal warnings of "Zeitgeist" and the spiritual awakening/conflict/crisis of "Oceania"? Is "Cyr" representing a retreat from the material and spiritual world into the synthetic, virtual landscape, where reality is inverted and invented? Where making the process of living even more precarious as we splinter ourselves between several worlds via a collection of carefully cultivated personalities, identities and avatars for the pursuit of real connections without fully revealing our complete beings? Where interpersonal connections are made virtually, sometimes at the expense of making real world connections? Where fantasy becomes so commonplace that empirical reality is now something that is impossibly being debated over? 

These questions are represented and reflected in the sonic presentation of the music itself. Yes, hearing the heavily electronic aesthetic of "Cyr" as compared with the traditional guitars and drums onslaught of The Smashing Pumpkins was a surprise to my ears yet, it is not as foreign as some have made it out to be (and are still decrying, "Where are the guitars?" "Why isn't Jimmy playing those drums?" "Where's James and Jeff?").  

The synthetic textures have been part of The Smashing Pumpkins' musical language for the breadth of their existence as they performed as a trio with a drum machine before Jimmy Chamberlin officially joined the band. "Cyr" does showcase the band via keyboards and synthesized textures at their most overt but also remember, we heard this aspect, the seeds of which were planted all the way back to their now iconic song "1979," and continued through the more electronic textures of songs like "Eye," "The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning" and throughout their albums ever since, most notably Billy Corgan's debut solo album "TheFutureEmbrace" (released June 21, 2005).

With this "new" approach to the music, The Smashing Pumpkins have again confounded expectations, and therefore, our perceptions of them, what we think they are and are not, a puzzle they have created pieces for from the very beginning. Are The Smashing Pumpkins the art psychedelic kids of "Gish" (released May 28, 1991), the gleaming teenage dream of "Siamese Dream" (released July 27, 1993), the dark alt-rock anti-superheroes of "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness," the broken, mournful band of "Adore" (released June 2, 1998), the Wagnerian funhouse mirror deities of "MACHINA" or any other permutations depending upon who is in or out of the band at any given time? Or all of them or even none of them?

Even the ever insistent desires from some for the band to somehow create "Siamese Dream 2" are all based within the perceptions of who they think those people who made the original album actually were. Further, and most crucially, this desire functions without the realization that this beloved album cold never be remade as the people who made that original album and the circumstances in which that album was made, no longer exists. Only the perceptions remain and as real as they are, the perceptions some are not THE TRUTH of the band, again creating confusion when empirical reality refuses to congeal with fantasy.  

From first listen with "Cyr," the trademark guitar army is fully eschewed in favor of keyboards and electronica, which does make the listener wonder how The Smashing Pumpkins, a band with three guitarists now functions. Or more specifically, brings up questions as to the actual presence of James Iha and Jeff Schroeder as their respective sounds are not obvious. 

To that, I found myself often thinking of Rush, when they heavily adopted keyboards and synthesizers into their sound or even King Crimson, during the era when Adrian Belew joined forces with the Crimson King, Robert Fripp and what sounded to be synthesizers were all the while guitars actually being played yet filtered through all manner of synthetic technology to manipulate how we heard them.

As for Jimmy Chamberlin, who I still contest is the finest rock drummer of his generation, within "Cyr," his trademark jazz influenced wonderland of splash and style has also been completely dialed down to the essence of essentially creating beats, again showcasing that for all of his dynamism, he understands that the song  comes first and for these songs, and this concept, perhaps the drums needed to sound more robotic, more unreal.

And there goes our perception of the band and the reality of the band and the instruments to which each member is connected. Through studio manipulation, multi-track layering and technology, "Cyr" gives us a musical landscape where guitars sound like keyboards and vice versa, blending into an entirely new sonic territory. The drums are performed and created to their most skeletal quality, making for beats that inventive radio programmers and even hip-hop DJs/producers could use for airplay and their own recordings if they wished. The musical realities are being blurred considerably, which then fuels the album's concept and lyrical content. 

To that end, the glorious vocal harmonies of Katie Cole and Sierra Swan add a profoundly alluring texture to the music making The Smashing Pumpkins function with a heretofore untapped sexual sophistication, seductiveness and danger. For are their vocals, which again, to me, serve as a siren's callings, a simultaneous invitation and warning to our album's narrator? 

One will never know with absolute certainty, aside from the band themselves and that indeed is what makes The Smashing Pumpkins' "Cyr" a truly elevated work for a long running band completely disinterested in remaining in the same conceptual space and place when there is still so much yet to discover. It is as demanding of your attention as their most beloved and celebrated work of their past and it is equally as worthy, as the rewards, should you allow yourself to receive them, are as overflowing as the ocean of melodies, themes, rhythms and ideas they delver and inspire.