OCEANIA by The Smashing Pumpkins

Billy Corgan seems to have found his space between sordid viciousness and dream-like mellow-ness. ‘Oceania’ is alternatingly haunting and raging. This may well be the most refined record to date released by The Smashing Pumpkins. Album-opener ‘Quasar’ is noisy, forceful and hard-hitting. In a similar vein, ‘Panopticon’ is a grungy, dirty mess with drums and guitars fighting for space which magically manages to remain up-beat. Again, ‘The Chimera’ is familiar, catchy and reminiscent of ‘Gish’-era The Smashing Pumpkins with wailing notes over heavy distorted punk-ness. On the other hand, ‘Wild-flower’ features strings-heavy riffage, almost-Gregorian choral backing and chiming piano chords over some lovely verses (“Wild-flower in the wilderness outside, take your chance with love and laughter and every word I write.”) that make this track memorable. 

However, the sophistication that The Smashing Pumpkins seems to have discovered sears through in their musings in the really, really remarkable pieces off this album that are ‘The Celestials’ with its acoustic chord progressions and orchestral swells poured over Corgan’s trade-mark belting, ‘Pinwheels’ with its spine-tingling embellishments and Pink Floyd-influenced melody and the uber-chic ‘Violet Rays’, which features a shimmering entrance of notes leading to an undistorted strumming passage that quickly culminates into a crunch-packed body, complementing Corgan’s wails with bags of melodic thunder. 

‘Glissandra’ is a smooth, tight, glimmering piece, but along with the plunging, synthesized ‘Pale Horse’ is one of the weak songs on this record. This record is odd, inasmuch it does not have the melodic consistency of ‘Adore’, nor the from-the-hip attack of ‘Siamese Dream’, which might let some down. What it does have is a fair amount of effort and thought devoted to production, arrangement and structuring. So, with Oceania, expect a clean-cut record, which does not work wonders but manages to keep The Smashing Pumpkins relevant.

DAYS GO BY by The Offspring

‘Days Go By’ is an interesting record in terms of analysing the core of any artiste. Think of The Offspring, and the underlying idea is rebellion, mischief and micro-critiquing societal banalities in a light-hearted vein. ‘Days Go By’ is much more contemplative and mature than their previous offerings, but is it still The Offspring? Opening track, ‘The Future Is Now’ is unmistakably so, but closer in wavelength to The Foo Fighters, while retaining the devil-may-care punk-pop overtones that Dexter Holland, Noodles and the rest usually dish out. ‘The Future Is Now’ is not only the first track on the record, but also the best. There are other songs as passable fare. The incredibly titled ‘Slim Pickens Does The Right Thing And Rides The Bomb To Hell’ is true-blue The Offspring, straight from the 'Americana' era, immensely and equally fun to dance or bang heads to. ‘Secrets From The Underground’ is a self-affirmative power-anthem, with notes identical to the underlying chords passing off as a lead phrase, and Dexter Holland’s charismatic rant hollering overhead. ‘Hurting As One’ is a fast-paced, power-punk call-and-response chant that would work well in an arena. The rest of the album varies from the forgettable title song, ‘Days Go By’ to the disastrous ‘California Cruisin’’, which is a joke of a rock song, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes the next ‘Moves Like Jagger’. The surprise find on the album is ‘Dividing By Zero’, which is practically a thrash song, with plenty of palm-muting and oozing wah-pedals. Think Trivium. The worst song on the album is undoubtedly, ‘All I Have Left Is You’, and that’s where the discussion on the core of The Offspring comes in. It’s a tolerable love song, but it is a drastic, radical step away from The Offspring we know and love, and neither sits well, nor is remarkable enough to forgive and accept. With punk/post-punk artistes, there has always been the route of The Sex Pistols and the route of Greenday. The former, much like The Offspring raised hell, never projected a thinking, feeling side, grew up and called it done. The latter maintained a steady balance between the energy and the emotion from the beginning, making their transition into forty-year olds believable and acceptable. The Offspring are a little too late to be making amends for their youthful antics, and should really reconsider the viability of a change in artistic direction.

OVEREXPOSED by Maroon 5

Even though I have, in my life, liked exactly two songs by Maroon 5. ‘Moves Like Jagger’ and ‘Harder To Breathe’, I was interested by ‘Overexposed’ to see what direction Maroon 5 would take post the obscene success of the former song. Adam Levine’s ability to write songs exclusively about women is baffling. This, from a unit whose maiden venture was titled, ‘Songs About Jane’ shows a deeper level of commitment to a cause than that of Bono to Africa. So, ‘Overexposed’ is about relationship troubles, seductresses and former lovers. It is also about replacing what little alternative rock Maroon 5 commenced their career with, with heavy electronic/disco music with liberal amounts of R&B thrown in. Apart from ‘Sad’, a piano ballad, which is the one song where you can discern that Adam Levine can actually sing, and ‘Lady-killer’, a brilliant bass-heavy, falsetto-driven tribute to Michael Jackson about a lesbian home-breaker, most songs are shockingly mediocre. ‘Pay-phone’, ‘Daylight’ and ‘Fortune Teller’ are trite and annoying, and make you wonder how the members of Maroon 5 other than Adam Levine put up with the obsolescence they seem to have been relegated to.

STRANGE COUSINS FROM THE WEST by Clutch

Despite their stunning, eclectic two-decade-old existence, only in recent times have I ‘discovered’ (and I use the term liberally) Clutch, and am yet to ‘discover’ a populace familiar with their works. That is unfortunate. Not merely because this Germantown, Maryland quartet has experimented with every modern (alongside some recent forays into more conservative (and I use the term literally) avenues, nor because they completely redefined the claustrophobic template of monotony that Sleep’s Al Cisneros insisted on putting us through (Remember the disastrous ‘Dopesmoker’?) that used to be the cognitive touchstone of Stoner Rock, and rendered it formless, free and flowing, transcending genre (funk, folk, bluegrass, blues, rock, metal and hard-core), nor because any band that Opeth claims as an influence, irrespective of how left-of-the-dial, is de facto respectable; but because the man (singer-lyricist-guitarist, Neil Fallon) who concocts a rant to the effect of, “Electric Hobo! So now you know not to clock the weeble-wobble-hot-rod-gang-revelator-big-bang!” has something to say that I want to listen to. “I always try to tell a story,” blurts Fallon, whilst acknowledging the free form lyrical approach that has come to distinguish Clutch. “I make up some kind of fiction and then act like I know what I’m talking about. I don’t really know about…UFOs or monster trucks, but I would rather tell a story instead of trying to sing about my life or how I feel.”

Consistent with their 1998-present turnaround-throwback to the blues-tinged-southern-rock-sensibilities, ‘Strange Cousins from the West’ is familiar, like whiskey stains and cigarette burns, yet, from a Clutch-centric perspective ground-breaking. The synthesis of the post-1998 southern-rock embrace with the lyrical randomness of ‘Pure Rock Fury’ has finally arrived. So, on ‘Motherless Child’, expect aged-woman-slide guitar and a slight shuffle but no lyrical throwback (Essentially, nothing of the ilk of “I don’t have a mother, oh yeah, I don’t have a mother, oh yeah, I used to have one but she’s gone away”). Nonetheless, the content is much more personal than earlier works. “Sometimes I feel like a wandering dog.” Pause. Count. Cut to bridge. This, from the man whose erstwhile idea of a plausible refrain was, “Bang, bang, bang! Vamanos! Vamanos!” is a heart-wrenching confession. Follow-up, ‘50,000 Unstoppable Watts’ gets prima facie respect for being the heaviest, soggiest, deepest-pocket groove I’ve heard in the mainstream in 2009 (‘Minotaur’ off the record, comes a close second), and the pacing-shift is a mind-blowing memento to ‘Pure Rock Fury’. Funk prevails with ‘The Amazing Kresken’ and its Parliament-esque disco-funk bass-line. Two pieces off the record, although adequate, are evidently blatant attempts at appeasing old-school Clutch-lovers and seem incongruous with the generic palate that ‘Strange Cousins from the West’ mostly sets. ‘Abraham Lincoln’ (Classic retroactive continuity vis-à-vis  ‘I Have The Body of John Wilkes Booth’) and the furious, fire-and-brimstone vocal frenzy of ‘Freakonomics’, over guitarist Tim Sult’s hopped-up rendition of what, at heart is a classic boogie-woogie rhythm.

"I would rather tell a story instead of trying to sing about my life or how I feel." 

So the riffs remain sludgy, the solos remain improvised and the lyrics are as yet, little more than intelligent salad. What is definitive about the album is the no-nonsense statement of comfort it evinces from Clutch, and the obvious shift in technical dynamics. Many of the pieces carry one lead line from Sult and Fallon each, and the structuring of each and every song seems tailor-made for on-stage improvisation. With this album, Clutch officially achieves near-jam-band status. Infinitely more importantly, precious little is better than an album that rolls on like a single unit, evoking one uniform echo throughout, leaving no doubt as to the collective awareness of Clutch that they, themselves, have finally arrived. Admittedly, in ‘Strange Cousins from the West’ the echo is that of crickets in the night and batter-fried chicken crackling, but precisely like those metaphors, it lasts through the night, and there is a hint underneath it all that you’re not the only one on your backyard porch.