Album Review: The Smashin Pumpkins Oceania

An album within an album. Yes, Billy Corgan is still finding new ways to make us question his sanity. Oceania acts as a traditional album within his 44-song, three-year journey Teargarden By Kaleidyscope. Incredibly produced and impeccably presented, this record isn't so much a body of work as it is an alternative world, full of strange sonics and themes that only the 45-year-old Chicago native could possibly explain. But it's a world that Corgan is finally sharing again, the new look Pumpkins working together to turn a once sole vision into a legitimate band reality.

Away from all the card turning wish wash, however, there are some legitimate moments of swollen prog goodness here. The album starts off in unrelenting fashion, openers Quasar and Panopticon as thick as anything that you'd find on '91 debut Gish. The Celestials then recalls some of those haunting cinematic moments that encompassed the Pumpkins of the late-'90s, before the track bursts into a spiralling crescendo of distortion and thumping drums courtesy of 22-year-old mini-Chamberlain Mike Byrne. But as Oceania rolls along, it becomes more convoluted and lost in its own ambition, with the tracks coming and going with no real sense of purpose. Ironically, it's only the album's centrepiece, the nine-minute title song, that ever returns to the quality and focus that is seen at the beginning of the record.

If you can manage to avoid judging the Pumpkins solely based on Corgan's banal interview rants and focus simply on the music, this record is solid enough and a noted improvement on the Pumpkins last 'album' Zeitgeist. Still though, it's hard to avoid the notion that Corgan's ship has all but sailed.