Smashing Pumpkins

It’s as though the world swings around a different-colored sun than it did when the Pumpkins closed out their first incarnation with 2000’s Machina. Zeitgeist is equally worth loving and hating—right away distinguishing itself from the stale ambivalence deserved by most of modern rock’s horrid, manufactured self-consciousness. Corgan lashes out with the same sledgehammer of confidence and inalienable sincerity he’s perfected since Gish. An over-rehabbed, paunchy and fried-like-a-chicken Jimmy Chamberlin pounds the skins like he’s in a band with dinosaurs while Corgan autopilots the rock ’n’ roll into overproduction until it sometimes comes off sounding more half-assed than worked-on. Still, it’s good to have a band step on stage that doesn’t stare at their shoes and make pained faces like they really don’t want to be there.