Billy Corgan’s “TheFutureEmbrace” is a pretty but unmemorable wander down what Corgan calls “the path of love.”
After a quick flip through Corgan’s poetry book, “Blinking with Fists,” it’s clear that he’s already run off into crap-spirituality oblivion, like the emaciated love child of Jesus and Krishna. He’s under no obligation to come back. Corgan has enough strength as a musician and songwriter that he can experiment and still make an honest record.
The fault isn’t in the change of sound, but in the mildness of the songs. “All Things Change” fades in with a soft quiver from a synthesizer, and the album stays at about the same intensity for 45 minutes. There are few good hooks, and the vocal melodies are so monotonous that even Corgan’s voice can’t make this a stirring listen.
On this album there are no sounds you can’t hear on a Joy Division, New Order, Cure or My Bloody Valentine record — and enough bad lyrics to make Ian Curtis choke. “You are love/you are soul/you are real to me,” Corgan sings on “A100.” His synths and guitars are recorded for optimal warmth and pleasantness — to the point that they have no remarkable texture and the album has no balls. The bands that influenced this album would have been worthless if they had sounded this smooth. You can’t dance to it, can’t thrash around to it, can’t screw to it. You could cuddle with a coma patient to it.
Corgan sounds confident and enraptured despite the blandness of the songs. He seems to think it’s enough to merely embellish the words “love” and “soul” with cheap wordplay and gibberish haiku: “come what may/it’s here I must wait/to keep the dogs at bay/ok? ok/sorrow/sorrow.”
His lyrics were better when he was more hateful. With the Smashing Pumpkins, he twisted anger and mopiness into bizarre imagery: “to runaround kids in get-go cars/with Vaseline afterbirths and neon coughs/galaxies full of nobodies/giving us the farewell runarounds,” he sang on “Fuck You (An Ode to No One)” on “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.”
Whether that’s good writing or not, it brought life to that music, and nothing makes up for its absence here. If Corgan wrote with the same flair about his unconditional love, “TheFutureEmbrace” would have been a damn good album.
— Scott Gordon
