Part of me wants to just list this and say not one thing more. Not because there's nothing to say about it -- hardly! -- but because nobody ever wants to take liking them seriously, it seems. Well, you're wrong. Oh man, are you ever wrong.
And so Sir Billy looked out over a slough of despond and landscapes of night, heard the arena rock of his youth and the goth fantasies of his dark dreams, recruited Flood and Alan Moulder to help record and produce the whole damn thing -- and how important they were for me and still are you'll yet find out more about -- and took all of us with him. Brilliant. The way the title track gently starts things with the piano and synths is nice enough, but then "Tonight, Tonight" somehow captures that mood, that you (even the collective you) and me not so much against the world but able to be above it, to do something, right before going out on that mythical Friday night of dreams, it's your first date, you've got the car, the jocks and jerks are long gone and the possibilities are endless, and Bruce Springsteen is nowhere in sight nonetheless, instead all strings and rolling drums and gentle guitar chimes and hope springs, bursts through eternal. "Believe in me…believe!" says Monsieur Corgan, and I do.
Two hours' worth of dreams, dark and light both. He kept saying beforehand that initially it was going to be one loud and one quiet disc, but thankfully he chucked that aside in favor of just simply tackling it all in all shapes and sizes. Theoretically a concept album -- and the start and final tracks do have a way of setting something in framing, not to mention calling disc one "Dawn to Dusk" and two "Twilight to Starlight," and then there's the wonderfully garish art, like Winslow Homer suddenly pressed into service doing post-everything album covers, the past of a hundred years ago suddenly revamped and projected into rock in ways not really done in American contexts before, really.
The guitars explode, they hold back. The band storms, the band lulls. "Zero" is all aggro stomp and massive guitar phasing and lines like "Say your prayers, like you're really gonna need 'em" and "I'm in love with my sadness." "Here is No Why" has a Mick Ronson crunch while Corgan casts a perversely cold eye on his goth adolescence, at once embracing and mocking, tearing himself apart just as he puts himself up as the new god. "To Forgive" sits gently, ruminates over low-key reverb and e-bow-type things and keyboards and the like, drums along just so. "Love" rides a Gary Numan synth/guitar/crunch just so, very intentionally so. And so forth.
It continues, unfolds, evolves, ends up in curious corners. "Cupid de Locke" rides on the prettiest bed of sequencers and harp sounds and opium-laden sonic wafts, "Porcelina of the Vast Oceans" floats into view, shoots up and out over more Corgan monster solos and triple-vocals, and then drifts slowly, surely, sweetly away, screaming electricity in the background as seascapes crash below. Then James Iha does "Take Me Down" with a soft little touch, and things are suddenly that much more different in context, just enough.
And the second disc keeps it all coming, and more. "Bodies," 'love is suicide' sung like a mantra, "In the Arms of Sleep" sweetly tender and held close to the heart in the blackest of deep nights, "1979" tackling the Cure/New Order melancholic pop legacy and coming up with ghostly backing vocal snippets and inspiring verse breaks and more. "Tales of a Scorched Earth" forcing everything into final overdrive, screaming angst personified, numb weeping despair cranked to eleven, "X.Y.U." turning domestic drama into apocalypse, nursery rhymes counterpointing something never quite spelled out as it could be but made all the more horrific for that reason. I'm skipping over many others, but you're sensing where a lot of this going, no doubt.
And then it all ends on a soft landing. "We Only Come at Night" calls to mind finger-snapping goths skipping down the lane, "Beautiful" is a wonky little love song that still succeeds, "Lily (My One and Only)" has a peeping tom hauled off by the police with a song in his heart, "By Starlight" amps up the drama one more time, but by implication rather than by volume, a sweet theatricality.
Then the whole band sings "Farewell and Goodnight," tucks us all in to bed, the opening piano theme plays again, and there we are. No more needed than that.