The Sound Of One Clapped Hand

The Smashing Pumpkins “Tiberius”

When Billy Corgan announced that Monuments to an Elegy would be a nine-track album of ultra-epic guitar rock, I naturally assumed the songs would all be on the long side. You know, along the lines of stuff like “Soma,” “Hummer,” “Silverfuck,” “Porcelina,” “Thru the Eyes of Ruby,” etc. My hopes were up, for sure. The actual record is a very different thing – out of nowhere, Corgan drops the most concise album of his career. It’s over and out in just over 30 minutes, and the longest song is just a hair over 4 minutes. The songs do have an epic quality, but mostly in terms of bombast and implied scope. “Tiberius” packs a lot into 3 minutes, and it’s not hard to imagine a younger Corgan letting the song expand to at least 5 minutes. There’s a lot of discipline in this record, which is not exactly a form of artistic growth likely to get people excited, especially when you’re known for being the extremely prolific writer of over-the-top alt-rock. I like the super-saturated feeling of “Tiberius” and some of the other tracks on Monuments to an Elegy, but I find the songs sort of exhausting too – there’s an overload of treble that is taxing on the ears. I think Corgan’s voice and style generally does better when given a lot of space to breathe.

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