William Patrick Corgan - Ogilala

Drowned In Sound 70

Ogilala is by no means a bad record; Corgan is an expert in melody and his knack for a genuinely satisfying chord progression is up there with the greats. He’s always been able to conjure strange, sad images in lyrics that stay turning over in the mind long after the disc whirs to a stop. Those skills are still with him; the chorus to ‘The Processionals’ soars, and his gorgeous, plaintive plea on ‘The Spaniards’ to “take me as I am” is shiver-inducingly good. At its best Ogilala is autumnal and intimate, as on the folkish ‘Half-Life of an Autodidact’, or the lonely, piano-led ‘Mandarynne’ which could have sat comfortably on Smashing Pumpkins’ classic Adore.

There are problems though. Occasionally, like on ‘Aeronaut’, Corgan wobbles on the line between 'beautiful' and 'boring'. A lack of sonic variety can make the songs unforgivably interchangeable, and after a dozen listens you’d still struggle to remember which was ‘Amarinthe’, and which was ‘Antietam’. Ripping the album to listen on my commute I somehow ended up getting one track twice. I didn’t notice for a week. .

The biggest surprise is Rubin’s production, with its strangely crunchy piano sound and an almost abrasive tone to the acoustic guitars. Where one song can be appealingly intimate the next feels uncomfortably raw, like a piece of furniture made with unsanded, splintering wood. The tonal choices turn a record that could have been delicate and pretty into something sonically quite abrasive. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: it makes an album that risked being predictable - the singer/songwriter solo record - into a far more challenging and interesting piece. For an artist who's always sat at the centre of a push-me-pull-you battle between his instinct to play the artsy weirdo and a desire to sell out stadiums and knock-out classic pop anthems, the dichotomy is oddly fitting. It would be admirable if those tonal decisions didn’t occasionally do good songs an injustice.

Corgan is always fascinating; as unlikable as he is talented, often the first to sabotage his own success, and the last to admit his mistakes. Whether Ogilala will count as one of them remains to be seen. Like its author it too is both fascinating, brilliant and unlikeable by turns. An interesting curio in an always-compelling career.

Pitchfork 57

In his latest reinvention, the Smashing Pumpkins frontman hires Rick Rubin to deliver a prestige comeback album in the producer’s usual stripped-down and soul-baring mode—but Corgan is no Johnny Cash.