Adore sounds as good to me now as it did over ten years ago as an over serious, acne ridden teenager. I remember listening to the album in its entirety, alone, in my room, in the dark. On a now long obsolete tape player, whose slight incessant whine seemed to augment the mystery of the music.
As a fifteen year old just beginning to see that the world wasn't such a great place, it's hardly surprising that I found a friend in the vivid melodrama of Corgan's most divisive album, Adore, an ode to love in all its various guises. An unequivocally dark and desolate work, Adore dwells on the bleaker aspects of love and human connections. As its macabre, monochrome cover suggests, Adore is a thing of restless, gothic beauty. Solipsistic, self involved, and gloriously indulgent. That Adore was a perfect match for the self important teenage me is obvious, but what's surprising, is that it's still such a good fit.
When I say overlooked I don't mean to say Adore is obscure or maligned, just that whenever people talk about Smashing Pumpkins they always talk about either Siamese Dream, or the their 1995 opus, Mellon Collie...(MCIS) never Adore, which I feel is superior to both, and contains indisputably less filler than MCIS. Written following Corgan's divorce and the death of his mother (see the gorgeous 'For Martha'; an ode to her), and also after the massive success of 18 million selling (in the US alone) MCIS, Adore had to be a break with the past. Where could they go after this success? The answer was to a darker, more emotionally resonant place.
Moving away from the pomp rock of their past, Adore leans heavily on piano based ballads and icy electronic flourishes. Opting (mostly) for a drum machine instead of the power house of Jimmy Chamberlin, Adore was a bold move that probably alienated a lot of fans. It had little for the hard rockers who probably dug tracks like 'Zero' and 'Bodies', or the poppier followers who would have loved 'Tonight, Tonight', 'Disarm' and '1979'. That's not to say there isn't much to stick your teeth into on first listen, 'Ava Adore' and 'Perfect' are two great singles. But it's the album tracks that really shine, 'To Shiela' is perhaps their most beautiful ballad, and 'Behold! The Night Mare' illustrates what a great match Corgan's misery was for his new electronic inclinations. Sounding as if recorded underwater, the lyrics, as do many on the album, see Corgan working out his grief: 'I can't go on / digging roses from your grave / to linger on / beyond the beyond'.
The album is split into a sun and shade dichotomy. 'Tear' is one of the latter."Where has your heart, Where has your heart gone to?", asks Corgan over a black nimbus cloud of organ-like synths. The song builds from nothing to a cacophonous din in seconds and then back again, symbolising, perhaps, the "flash of neon" that captured the object of his grief. It is an epic song that anyone who has ever suffered a loss in their life could definitely relate to.
This painful catharsis is tempered with moments such as 'Once Upon A Time', which is the Pumpkins at their sweetest and most melodic, displaying the flip side to the rancorous rage of (above mentioned) 'Tear'. Corgan seems accepting and almost resigned: "To the last goodbye / Who cares why," he sings over gently strummed acoustic guitar and tambourine. The album is full of these peaks and troughs of emotion, and I feel if any Smashing Pumpkins album should be called Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, it should've been this one. It's a work so achingly sad yet rewarding that I still love it a decade on.
It's also a great document of a band in transition, reinventing themselves into purveyors of superior alt electro-pop, as seen in songs like Daphne Descends, which resemble the stronger moments of the unfairly maligned Machina.
In a career littered with high points (not least Corgan's mighty return with Zwan in 2007), Adore deserves credit as perhaps the Pumpkins' most beautiful album. A work that is both baroque and austere in its sound, it has a song for every emotion. It may have appealed to me as a teenager, but Adore is a mature work in every sense. It speaks more quietly than their other works, but what it does say lingers longer.
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