The Best New Goth-Rock Album of 1992

June 23rd, 2005

Billy Corgan’s new solo album, The Future Embrace is, truly, the best new goth-rock album of 1992.

But….”Wait a sec,” you say. “It’s 2005, not 1992. What the hell are you talking about? Last time I checked, Billy Corgan doesn’t have a working time machine, so….”

The Future Embrace is a wonderful collection of simple, but beautiful, songs revolving around drum-machine beats, heavily-reverbed guitars, moaning bass, and melancholy lyrics delivered in Corgan’s distinctive whine. This isn’t just another underproduced Zwan album or “Smashing Pumpkins” record aiming to recapture the grunge-chord-meets-orchestration power of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”. This album has a heart…and a production ideal straight out of 1992.

The guitars are very reminiscent of those on The Cure’s Wish: melodic, slathered in reverb and delay, and understated–there’s very little distortion at all on this album. The drums sound like they were sampled from an old Big Electric Cat album, or perhaps Rosetta Stone (minus the fuzzbox and the overdrive). The bass is heavy and smooth. And the lyrics are…well, wistful. All in all, very suggestive of The Cure in the days before Robert Smith grew fat and snarly. The Future Embrace could very well have been released by EMI or Cleopatra Records in 1992…long before they grew fat and snarly, as well.

And speaking of Robert Smith: he does background vocals on “To Love Somebody,” a superbly gothed-out ethereal cover of the Bee-Gees…but I’ll be damned if I can identify his voice beneath Corgan’s. Doesn’t matter, though, because the song is just a beautiful cover infinitely superior to the original, which I always found too saccharine for my tastes.

This is definitely Corgan’s best post-Pumpkins work to date. Check it out!

By Derek C. F. Pegritz on June 23rd, 2005 | Scategory: Music |