Departures: "Adore" by The Smashing Pumpkins

Art reflects life. The more I look at those unusual, experimental albums in the catalogs of famous bands, the more I see how that adage is true. When recording artists experience major changes in their personal and professional lives, it's almost guaranteed that their music will change with them. If a band tries to maintain a sound that came from a different frame of mind or even from a different collection of people, the result is usually pretty flat.

Take, for example, One Hot Minute by The Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was the album they recorded after the first departure of guitarist John Frusciante and save for a couple interesting tracks it just doesn't work as a cohesive record. The Chili Peppers didn't try to do something different with One Hot Minute when a departure was really the only thing short of Frusciante's presence that could have saved the album. Unlike the other bands I've featured in this column, the Chili Peppers were still at the height of their popularity at the time of One Hot Minute, so their fear of alienating their fanbase probably contributed to the album's sound.

On the other end of the spectrum, The Smashing Pumpkins were also platinum-selling rockers when a series of shake-ups threatened to ruin the band. Instead of falling apart or leaning on old sounds, the Pumpkins opted for a reinvention. The result was 1998's Adore, in my opinion the pinnacle of electronica in the 90's and the band's most fully-realized album. Given the Pumpkin's previous sales, Adore's 850,000 US copies were kind of a disappointment, though the foreign market embraced it to the tune of 2 million plus.

The problems that ultimately contributed to Adore's unique sound started with the heroin overdose of drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. Chamberlin survived his addiction, but the band's touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin didn't. The incident saw Chamberlin fired from the Pumpkins and when they went into the studio to record their next album, Billy Corgan scrapped the initial tapes with replacement drummer Matt Walker. A West Coast relocation and a drum machine purchase later, Corgan essentially cloistered himself with producer Flood and put together a beautiful, gothic-tinged album.

To a lesser extent, Billy Corgan was to The Smashing Pumpkins what Robert Smith was to The Cure. He wrote the overwhelming majority of the band's songs and had a notoriously tyrannical presence in the studio. Adore is the sound of Billy Corgan mourning the death of his mother, going through a ridiculously long, protracted divorce, and generally alienating himself to his bandmates. It's beautiful in its agony and a prime example of how electronic music gives an artist the ability to make a very complex sound without any real input from others.

Some of the ideas explored in Adore made their way into Machina: Machines of God, but the latter is a sort of retrospective in sound anyway. The Smashing Pumpkins made some excellent music in 1990's, but I think it's their deep foray into electronic atmospherics that's the most enduring.