Ok, I’ll admit: this is one of those butthurt, rather bellicose posts. But we all know how it is when you hear someone say they don’t like a band that you hold dear. It’s time to sound the cannons.
Now, I will admit, assuredly, that Billy Corgan can be rather difficult to deal with, in real life. He’s been known to diss other bands in the press, like Collective Soul, whom I also happen to like, and he was conspicuously a major hard-on to Bradford Cox of Deerhunter, per report, who I think just took one bottle of water from this giant mountain of bottles, or something along those lines. In general, artists that are the most powerful almost always surprise me — it’s like there’s just bound to be a series of strains in their mind the average person has never conceived of, hence the cataclysmic product they’re capable of offering to the world, and, in tandem, all the apparent emotional complications, as well.
Anyway, this stuff speaks for itself, without question. Much like “Mayonaise”; from their prior album, “We Only Come out at Night” is an album track not released as a single, but catchy, gorgeous and classic enough to have ballooned into mega-hit-single status. This is, of course, provided that the listening public isn’t too rigid and tight to enjoy the unorthodox percussion approach on this track, which entails, at least, a couple of bongos and a strange, almost gurgling sound, which might not even be a real musical instrument.
The percussion interface is spare, though, on purpose, to showcase the incredible songwriting and production techniques, among which are an incredible array of phrasing unorthodoxies, and some gorgeous, textural piano stabs which commence in the first verse, so pleasant and hypnotic that the average listener probably doesn’t notice them, unless he or she is on a specific quest for imbibing all of the instrumentation, which I just was. Then you’ve got the lyrical theme, which, again, might rely on some nominal amount of perspective on the part of the audience, exclusive of those for whom “shallow ambition” has completely occluded “appreciation of music” in the brain. Like “Blackbird” by The Beatles, “We Only Come out at Night” portrays a nighttime scene, one apparently having to do with animals, perhaps bats, and seems to have stemmed from some similar sort of vision to McCartney’s classic — a haunting manifestation of truth in darkness, like Anthony Keidis’ reference to a “slow cheetah” [1], the beauty of the contentedness with one’s own limited resources, the possibly risible on the part of a more superficial mind. It’s also the semantic variety in Corgan’s lyrics implied by this strange foray that makes the Pumpkins, for me, into something permanent, lasting and significant in alternative rock, but again, it’s all a matter of opinion. ’Cause, I mean, ya know, other bands have written droll, gorgeous tunes about nocturnal animals. Sure, whatever.
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[1] This phrase comes from the title of a tune on the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2006 album Stadium Arcadium.
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