With its truly gargantuan length of two hours and 18 minutes, ATUM - The Smashing Pumpkins’ 12th studio album, and the official sequel to both Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (1995) and the band’s two Machina records (The Machines Of God and The Friends & Enemies Of Modern Music, both 2000) - is not the kind of record you’d put on to soundtrack a casual drive to the shops, workout or study session. It’s an absolute behemoth of a record: a black hole of conceptual depth that spans the full gamut of the Pumpkins’ sprawling musicality, from the crunch of their ‘90s classics to the shimmery (and divisive) synth-pop of 2020’s CYR.
True to fashion for the obstreperous frontman, Billy Corgan wants you not to see ATUM as a collection of songs - even one that forms a singular, cohesive narrative when spun from cover to cover (to cover to cover - this is a triple-disc set on CD) - but as three entirely unbroken scenes, each only split into its 11 parts out of necessity. As its subtitle declares, ATUM is a rock opera in three acts, and it’s those that come together to form this narrative. Chatting with Australian Guitar, Corgan makes two rather paradoxical comparisons: it’s at once a $200 million Hollywood blockbuster, and an auteuristic period piece á la Federico Fellini. Regardless of the cultural dissonance, both make sense in that ATUM is a dense and preciously slavedover epic worthy of its gravitas… and people are either going to love it or hate it.
Corgan not only acknowledges that not every track on ATUM is a hit, nor does he even embrace that fact: it’s by design that some parts of this record feel small and inconsequential, in the same way that a billion-dollar blockbuster (for a recent example, think Avatar: The Way Of Water) might use some more lowkey, character-centred beats to make those climactic action sequences feel more impactful. Think about it: if you watch those action-packed Avatar scenes on their own, isolated from the context of the rest of the movie, they’d sure look cool, and might even rouse that desired sense of excitement within - but that excitement dissipates just as soon as it’s roused because it’s hollow; it’s not connected to the yearning or emotional hinges that those character beats established.
In this metaphor, a song like ‘The Good In Goodbye’ represents a CG-flooded action sequence, and ‘Embracer’ is that more considered character beat.
Corgan stops short of calling the Pumpkins’ magnum opus, if only because in his mind, it’s too soon to know. If the record has some lasting impact long beyond his years, then sure, he’ll at an umbilical level to view it objectively, and concedes that it’s entirely possible he might one day reflect on the record to find that he utterly hates it… It wouldn’t be the first time. So how Corgan view now, on the cusp of its release after some three years of gestation? Just as daunting as we do.
