Oceania
| The Smashing Pumpkins
Oceania
Oceania is the eighth studio album by American alternative rock band the Smashing Pumpkins, released on June 19, 2012, through EMI, Reprise Records and Martha's Music. Produced by Billy Corgan and Bjorn Thorsrud, the album forms part of the band's 34-track project album, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope. By September 2012, Oceania had sold over 102,000 copies in the US.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Slant
The album effectively conjures much of the band’s lost charisma while shedding the forced, clumsy, and otherwise ill-conceived qualities of Zeitgeist and Teagarden. It is, if nothing else, a modest righting of the ship, with the added benefit of Corgan finally rediscovering some of the musical animus that’s eluded him for the past decade.
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The Guardian
Billy Corgan and his Smashing Pumpkins interrupt their 44-song concept release about the tarot for Oceania, an "album-within-an-album". Continuing to make this principled stand against pretentiousness, Corgan staggers around a number of meandering rock songs in search of hokey mysticism. Rating:
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Sputnik Music
Corgan and his group should be praised. Instead of relying upon the old classics, touring the same old stuff, he and SP have forged ahead to create a record that could well be the catalyst of a stellar second era for one of rock’s more interesting groups.
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Pitchfork
Corgan made Oceania available with no advance copies or radio singles, an attempt to preserve the pre-digital "everyone all at once" album experience he fondly remembers. This gesture, like many of Corgan's, combines astronomical rock-star hubris with a kind of weird largesse: He very badly wants to give his audience something enormous, undeniable, and life-changing.
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Smells Like Infinite Sadness
‘Oceania’ still can’t touch their first three albums, and perhaps even ‘Adore’. It is however a step towards the right direction, and an improvement on recent material. Fans will be polarized I predict, equal parts pleased and frustrated.
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Music OMH
But on the whole it’s an album that finally, after a dozen years, shows that there can be a place for the Pumpkins in the 21st century. Their last tour, in support of Zeitgeist, fell victim to the folly of insisting on playing turgid new material at great length. At various times uplifting, rocking, refreshing, and sweet, Oceania makes a return to the live arena a suddenly desirable prospect.
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BBC
This album’s title-track and compositions such as My Love Is Winter will be seen as the work of a man still equipped with a sense of direction, a writer determined not to fit the hole into which his detractors wish to hammer him. Straddling the line between art and commerce, between arena rock and cult devotion, for the first time in quite a while Billy Corgan and The Smashing Pumpkins sound energised and alive.
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All Music
Oceania is an exuberant, gloriously melodic, fluid return to form for Billy Corgan. While Zeitgeist certainly contained many of the elements that make for a classic Smashing Pumpkins release -- including slabs of distorted guitars, passionate vocals, and poetic lyrics, not to mention drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, who was the sole remaining original member besides Corgan and who subsequently left the band -- there was something cold and perhaps a bit too calculated about the production.
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Hollywood Reporter
The release of Oceania means one thing: The famously critical Corgan must submit to another round of judgment from the music critics. But with the record receiving largely positive reviews, the self-declared “king of gloom” may have something to smile about.
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Louder Than War
Oceania is a like a sanitized journey through the rock history from Jefferson Airship through Reo Speedwagon, Yes and White Snake before beaching itself on the credibility of the early Smashing Pumpkins.
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Noripcord
Oceania ultimately wants to be a lot of things, and it makes no pretense in its ambitions with the intent of creating something that’s sorely lacking in today’s fast-moving world: an event. And there is a point where the sheer magnitude of the entire package speaks louder than the individual quality of the songs, ultimately making more of an impression that it actually merits. For that, it stands as a rousing success. But while Corgan feels reinvigorated, utterly convinced that’s he’s finally nailed it this time, the final product doesn’t hold up as an entirely ingenious one. What it does, however, is give some validity to a band that is long overdue the banner of respect it actually deserves. When glorified past acts pat themselves in the back for their short-lived, yet celebrated artistic legacy, or settle on a quick cash-in, making the effort to make another ascent into heroic status almost sounds foolish. Corgan is up for the challenge, and he wouldn’t want it any other way.
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Seattle Pi
What it all comes down to is that Oceania is the most consistently good Smashing Pumpkins album since Machina... and the best since Adore. With the exception of final so-so track "Wildflower" (which ends the album on a little bit of a whimper like "Pomp and Circumstances" did on 2007's Zeitgeist, which was a few tracks away from being a truly great comeback record), the album is full of winners. It may take some time getting used to the new Pumpkins sound, but then again, that's what fans had to do regarding the band's first four albums (from Gish to Adore), all of which were different from their predecessors and all of which are now, more or less regarded as classics. Add this to that list.
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Paste
Oceania very much sees Corgan and company settling into album, not single, territory. And that’s probably where long-term fans have wanted to see them for a long time.
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Loudwire
The Smashing Pumpkins are back with a new album, 'Oceania,' the first full-length effort featuring their current lineup. While it's certainly no 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,' the disc showcases a more focused vision than was present with 2007's 'Zeitgeist.' Mostly absent are the moments of 'Guitar Hero' bravado Corgan so abundantly supplied on their last album and in their place are more structured, fully realized tunes that deliver mixed results.
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NME
‘Oceania’ arrives with a marvellous amount of hubris. It’s an ‘album within an album’, a phase of Corgan’s conceptual mammoth ‘Teargarden By Kaleidyscope’, a 44-song album based on the four phases of ‘The Fool’s Journey’ version of the tarot (those ancient playing cards that may or may not be able to predict your future). This multi-year conceit was conceived as a way of abandoning the traditional album format.
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Pop Dose
Oceania, Billy Corgan finally returns his beloved Smashing Pumpkins to the heights of greatness and excess that he walked away from in the year 2000.
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Mapped By What Surrounded Them
While Oceania won't fit neatly in their canon of classic albums, it is by far Corgan's most cohesive Smashing Pumpkins' record in years, and for that alone it is worth listening. Oceania definitely reveals that Corgan still has the ability to put out some great songs, and is not just coasting on the memory of better days.
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Glide
Oceania includes elements of acid rock, heavy metal, folky acoustic rock, punk, New Wave, progressive, and some other stuff that can only be classified as “Pumpkins.”
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Austin Chronicle
Oceania is a well-thought-out album with respectable execution. Varied yet familiar, it hits marks on three key Pumpkin elements: sandpaper guitar, dynamic drumming, and compelling emotion with a grandeur that shows Billy Corgan still wants to be a hero.
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Stereogum
Like much of the best Smashing Pumpkins work, the album never settles on one sound, although it’s blatantly dreamier and less rat-in-a-cage raging than any other Pumpkins’ LP released this millennium. The album’s entire second quarter — “Violet Rays,” “My Love Is Winter,” One Diamond, One Heart,” and “Pinwheels” — is composed of ballads, but their tones and instrumentation vary (from acoustic guitars to Adore-esque synths). The title track is a proggy marathon that tries to squeeze about half of Melon Collie into its nine minutes. And the album closes on three ferocious guitar-heavy anthems that veer in and out of the “Zero” dimension without getting stuck there.
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Chicago Tribune
Corgan's keyboard colors are especially vital to setting the album's tone, as are his incorporation of vocal harmonies, featuring bassist Fiorentino. The chamber-rock of the exquisite "Pinwheels," the nine-minute title song and the hypnotic "Pale Horse" create a three-song world within the album, a part of the journey that revisits the introspective terrain of the hugely underrated 1998 Pumpkins album "Adore." For once the comparisons to '90s Pumpkins don't ring hollow.
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After Dark
Oceania is a classic Smashing Pumpkins album or just another of Billy Corgan`s bog-standard projects, but for now we should just be happy that we have an album to excite over from one of rocks most important acts.
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The Upcoming
Oceania’s songs are built upon bolshy percussion and snake-like bass and are packed with the odd sonic squiggle. From start to finish the album is ragged and riff-heavy and occasionally hypnotic and menacing.
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The Quietus
Corgan sings of the futile call to battle amid a rat-a-tat drum tattoo and a nagging little synth riff presumably representing the pipes of long-dead soldiers.
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Metro
Oceania is an album of satisfyingly varied textures and moods. The Pumpkins’ melodic genius is to the fore on the gorgeously self-dramatising Violet Rays and the stately, Cure-ish Pale Horse, while big guitars loop and groove around Corgan’s trademark angsty whine on The Chimera and Glissandra.
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MTV
Corgan isn't interested in making top 10 lists, earning raves or placing singles on modern rock radio. Instead, he just felt the need to make an artistic statement: This is who he is, 25 years into his career, without any regrets. Whether you listen or not is largely up to you; either way, he's content to be misunderstood. In fact, "content" may be an understatement.
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Now Toronto
Corgan’s voice was in shockingly good form, and the sheer onslaught of hits and recognizable album cuts was mind-blowing.
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Live 4 Ever
The Smashing Pumpkins’ seventh studio album will again be dealt with by EMI after the company reached a deal with the band’s principal member Billy Corgan to work along side his own label Martha’s Music.
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Independent
Oceania is best listened to in bits.
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Seth Saith
Devoted Pumpkinheads will probably be adequately reminded of the band they love to sufficiently enjoy Oceania, but there truly isn't a song from it that I would pick to say, "Listen to this, it sounds amazing."
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The Star
Oceania is the only Smashing Pumpkins album this incarnation of the band — Corgan, Byrne, second guitarist Jeff Schroeder and by now de rigeur (and fourth) chick bassist Nicole Fiorentino — has recorded together. Give Corgan et al. points for honesty, for standing behind a decent record that deserves to be heard more than it has been and, above all, for not succumbing to au courant tour trends and disingenuously trotting out a classic album like Siamese Dream in its entirety in a bid to fill arenas once again.
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Express
Oceania’s songs are epic and widescreen but, crucially, taut and focused while, for all its alpha-male swagger, pastoral themed lyrics of love and longing give the record plenty of heart.
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Mandatory
Technically the Smashing Pumpkin’s latest release Oceania is their ninth album but really, the way they release records, it’s hard to tell what the number comes to. There are certain things you have to face with Oceania. The first is that the James Iha, D’arcy Wretzky and Jimmy Chamberlain Pumpkins are long over. The second is that this incarnation of the Smashing Pumpkins seems to bring the best out of Billy Corgan.
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Exclaim
Oceania is more the addition of a new tower to the alternative palace Corgan helped build than the foundations for something strange and new. One can hardly fault the man for polishing his innovations though. If the pressure of the Pumpkins banner is what it takes for Corgan to continue crafting peerless rock, we should be thankful it's flying high again.
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COS
On Oceania, however, Corgan exerts a different kind of authority, one that’s level-headed enough to go somewhere, and with people behind him. The songs actually feel like songs and not tracks digitally titled “Smashing Pumpkins anthem.”
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Artist Direct
Oceania is the year's best rock record and a milestone for the genre. Hopefully, it incites and inspires a new generation. The Pumpkins are no strangers to that concept.
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Live For Live Music
Having not listened to much of the new album prior to the show, I have to admit that this is a collection of really good songs. Corgan’s writing hasn’t declined much at all, as he can still tap into that classic Pumpkins sound that he began to create back in 1988 with James Iha. As always, both lyrics and music is emotionally charged, which isn’t surprising given Corgan’s penchant for the dramatic.
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Uinterview
On Oceania, the Pumpkins are revising rather than reinventing. Corgan’s distinct vocals ground the songs, while the densely layered instruments push the band to a previously unheard musical state. The band still manages to produce a noise that is simultaneously dreamlike and tangible. The push and pull between fantasy and reality allows the music to concoct enough emotion to speak for itself.
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Louder Sound
Oceania proves to be a persuasive effort for a notoriously uneven band on their second or third comeback, full of reminders of past glories without straying into self- parody.
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Antimusic
The Smashing Pumpkins are not the same band they once were, but there is forward momentum and yet they are still capable of capturing the awe of their first decade. The Smashing Pumpkins circa 2012 are a musically absorbing entity on record and on stage taking us deep into our subconscious as we reflect upon our dreams, nightmares and desires as we do our best to believe in one another.
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Stereoboard
This record isn't one for people who like one particular Pumpkins record. This is for people who have found something to cheer about with all of them, from the massive rock smash hit 'Mellon Collie' through to the electronica tinged 'Adore', with some of the more ambitious aspects from the 'Machina' projects thrown in, without forgetting how it all began with 'Gish', Smashing Pumpkins have yet again released a record that intrigues, flows, shows off and, most importantly, rocks.
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Blog Critics
Oceania is an essential Smashing Pumpkins offering, especially if you loved the Oceania album itself and whether or not you caught the group on tour last year. If nothing else, it will be revelatory to you the viewer in that it shows that the Smashing Pumpkins are playing as well as they ever have. You’ll see that Nicole Fiorentino is more than an attractive female bass player in skintight clothes, that the young Mike Byrne, with his Neil Peart-ish flourishes, is an incredible drummer just like his predecessor, and that Corgan’s six-string partner Jeff Schroeder is the best guitarist he’s ever been in a band with full-time. You’ll also see that his versatility in guitar sounds and exciting lead solos makes him the surprise star of this show and release.
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Drowned In Sound
Oceania feels like a fairly genuine indicator of where Corgan’s muse is really at right now, and probably marks the best record he was likely to have made with whoever else constitutes the Smashing Pumpkins these days. Therein lies the problem, though: for all the improvements since the last record, it’s still not that good. Despite Oceania’s merits, the thing I really can’t hear is any of the overweening ambition that powered the first incarnation of the Pumpkins. That band drove itself into commercial oblivion by releasing a string of increasingly mad, difficult albums that unflinchingly gave the boot to the bulk of their grunge-era fanbase. This is just a nice album of pretty songs.
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OCR
On the one hand, Corgan’s reputation as an iconoclast has seemed to wane over the years. While contemporaries like Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong flex culturally relevant muscles on the MTV Video Music Awards and make headlines when they head to rehab, Corgan has become a bit of a footnote, still ranting about “the good old days” while churning out a slew of new music that’s had a hard time connecting with any but the most hardcore Pumpkins fans.
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Montreal Gazette
If Oceania was a qualified success live, the shortcomings didn’t have to do with the material, but with the band planting roots near the midway mark, leaving it to the awesome spherical screen and some expensive-looking projections to carry the visual element. Excess is a Pumpkins hallmark; excess formality is not. As much a centrepiece live as on album, the alternately dreamy and propulsive title track raised the momentum and the effort expended.
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Kexp
2012's Oceania was a bit of a "back to form" type record, with the sound and scope heralding back to the Siamese Dream styles as much as 20 years of songwriting evolution would allow.
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Overblown
The irony is that Corgan’s best pop song since ‘1979’ (or at least Adore’s ‘Perfect’), ‘Inkless’, was buried in the second half of Oceania, never to have even a sniff at radio play. ‘Run2me’ is even worse. Corgan has obviously been listening intently to Coldplay’s commercial successes with synth based pop music. Billy’s effort is just bad. Boring, bland, redundant. Chris Martin’s uncle singing 80s ballads at a wedding.
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Pop Matters
Oceania seems like nothing new from the overwrought percussion heavy loudness that was Zeitgeist. In fact, a passive once over may leave you feeling underwhelmed. But to do so would be dismissing this record far too quickly. Admittedly, they are no longer the Pumpkins once loved in the '90s, but that doesn’t preclude a potentially wonderful rebirth fuelled by their historic relevance. In addition to the striking absence of Chamberlin, Iha, and Wretzky, is the complete 180 Corgan has had in relation to spirituality, religion, and love.
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Av Club
It may be too late for Corgan to reclaim the alt-rock throne he’s long pretended to have no interest in, but with Oceania he’s finally delivered the Smashing Pumpkins album that everybody wanted the first time he decided to revive the name.
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Punk News
Stylistically, the record falls somewhere between Siamese Dream's epic guitar dirges and Adore's goth-pop leanings, only with way more electronic textures. Those happen to be my two favorite Pumpkins albums, so I'm certainly not complaining. Oceania is supposed to be part of a larger batch of songs entitled Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, which the band was releasing for free on the Internet one song at a time, but much like the lineup change, I'm not terribly interested in that. What matters is that, separated from hype and hate, Oceania works on its own.
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Last Fm
Oceania is the ninth album by the American alternative rock band The Smashing Pumpkins, that was released on June 19, 2012 on EMI and Martha's Music. Produced by Billy Corgan and Bjorn Thorsrud, the album is considered to be part of the band's ongoing 44-song concept album, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope.
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Off The Tracks
The futility of this album is best understood when you consider there is already a Smashing Pumpkins album newly available this year that could have some impact: the reissue of Pisces Iscariot, a b-sides collection originally released in 1994.
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Rolling Stone
About half of the songs from Oceania were regularly performed on the Pumpkins’ most recent world tour.
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Entertainment Time
This is the album that needed to surface back in 2007. With Zeitgeist, Corgan lost himself amidst a complicated jigsaw puzzle that was always destined to lay unfinished on the dining room table, namely because he kept looking for the missing pieces in other boxes. It didn’t help that the only support he received was himself and producer Roy Thomas Baker, whose sensationalized, glossy production made everything feel as real as a Hasbro action figure. On Oceania, however, Corgan exerts a different kind of authority, one that’s level-headed enough to go somewhere, and with people behind him. The songs actually feel like songs and not tracks digitally titled “Smashing Pumpkins anthem.”
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American Songwriter
Oceania sounds louder, better, and altogether more revelatory than any Pumpkins album in years. The psychedelic rock overtones that filled Gish and Siamese Dream are back, and Oceania rides a mighty wave of guitarmonies and heavy riffage for 50 minutes, matching every instrumental freakout with an equally compelling melody.
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Song Facts
Corgan told Artist Direct that "there's a lot of unconscious stuff on Oceania." He continued: "What's weird is there are some lyrics on here lifted from other songs of mine. I'll hear a line and say, 'Did I rip that off from another song?' I wasn't even conscious of if I was appropriating my own material. It's kind of strange. In 'G.L.O.W.', which we did a few years ago, the first line of the song is 'I'm so alone.' The chorus of 'Oceania' is 'I'm so alone, I'm so alone.' In the past, if I saw a repetition, I would've just canceled it on form. It never even crossed my mind until the record was done.
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Perez Hilton
The Smashing Pumpkins’ upcoming album Oceania is strangely beautiful.
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Audio Ink Radio
The Smashing Pumpkins” created ‘Oceania’ as an album experience, and it is intended for the process of the release to follow a path of inclusion, so that best efforts are made for all the fans hear it at the same time as press or radio. We were excited to find partners in EMI Label Services that were equally passionate about the plan for the album release as well as being huge fans of the Pumpkins.”
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Rolling Stone India
The Smashing Pumpkins will release Oceania, their seventh studio album, on June 19th. Though the record stands on its own, it was created as part of the band’s ongoing 44-song work-in-progress Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, which has been released song-by-song since the end of 2009. The album is the Pumpkins’ first major work with new drummer Mike Byrne, guitarist Jeff Schroeder and bassist Nicole Fiorentino, who all joined the group in the time since the Pumpkins’ previous album, Zeitgeist, came out in 2007.
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Uncut
The album is the band’s first recorded effort with their new line-up, which now features Mike Byrne on drums, Nicole Fiorentino on bass and Jeff Schroeder on guitar, with Corgan keen to stress that they have recorded the album as a band, rather than as himself and session musicians.
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The National
Backed by his latest, all-new trio of hired hands, Corgan bills Oceania as part of a marathon 44-track song cycle with the achingly pretentious title Teargarden by Kaleidyscope.
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PJ
Nearly half the songs are an instrumental intro, driven by a synth and guitar riff. Nearly three minutes in, Corgan begins strumming an acoustic guitar and singing a love song.
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JamBase
Oceania was recorded at singer/guitarist Billy Corgan‘s private studio in Chicago with his bandmates: guitarist Jeff Schroeder, drummer Mike Byrne and bassist/vocalist Nicole Fiorentino. The powerful 13-song collection was produced by Corgan and Bjorn Thorsrud and mixed by David Bottrill. Marking the Smashing Pumpkins’ 7th studio record, it is “an album within an album,” part of their 44-song work-in-progress Teargarden By Kaleidyscope.
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Modern Drummer
Oceania is being called an album within an album, the forty-four-song Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, which itself was designed as a collection of individually released tracks that were also due to be grouped together into EPs. Even Corgan seems a bit confused by his own attempt to reimagine the way bands release music in this decade of radically changing listening habits, but in the end what we have with Oceania is a good-old-fashioned hour-long album that works as such, and it’s our first chance to see how the twenty-two-year-old drummer fares across the long haul. Quiet well, it turns out.
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Full Album
Oceania is an exuberant, gloriously melodic, fluid return to form for Billy Corgan. ….. Conceptual conceits aside, these are some of the most memorable and rousing songs Corgan has delivered since 1993’s Siamese Dream, the album that Oceania most closely mirrors in tone and aesthetic.
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Reuters
Their new album, “Oceania,” which entered the Billboard 200 charts this week at No. 4, is part of that project and the always-outspoken Corgan talked to Reuters about the new music.
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Altpress
The 13 track record, the band's seventh album overall, is part of their larger 44-track work-in-progress release Teargarden By Kaleidyscope.
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