TheFutureEmbrace

undefined

.co.uk ------ The past is a foreign country but the new dawn alluded to by the title of Billy Corgan ( http://www..co.uk/exec/obidos/artist-search/Billy%20Corgan/${0} ) 's debut solo album TheFutureEmbrace is actually an overcast day in an Eighties post-punk Britain of raincoats, chimneys, riots and run-down heavy industry. That might not seem like much of a surprise - Smashing Pumpkins ( http://www..co.uk/exec/obidos/artist-search/Smashing%20Pumpkins/${0} ) were neither cheery, Anglophobic or much given to enjoying luxurious sunny afternoon teas in thatched Devonian hostelries - but while TheFutureEmbrace is very much the inverse of Zwan ( http://www..co.uk/exec/obidos/artist-search/Zwan/${0} )'s lighter but all-too-brief psych-pop caress, Corgan, to his credit, has avoided any back-peddling to the salad days of Smashing Pumpkins' biblical bombast. This is much more subtle, brittle and chilly, the inner rage of yore making way for sceptical deliberation and John Foxx synthetics. Corgan's admiral influences are obvious - the grey wash and wintry equanimity of Bowie's Neukoln phase, the phallanx of distantly shimmering flanged guitars recall The Banshees, the archaic and relentlessly mechanic drum machine summons forth the austerity of early Human League. The Cure's Gothher Robert Smith stoops forward for an unlikely duet on a cover of Barry Gibb's "To Love Somebody" (Joy Division's "The Eternal" meets David Sylvian's Japan) while Corgan's own "Sorrows (in blue)" suggests he's actually more of a fan of the Bee Gees than his public may care to conceed. Others may sense the spectral presence of Killing Joke (both in "DIA" and in the tense, metropolitan meltdown of "Mina Loy") but while 1981 in England was no laughing matter TheFutureEmbrace at least allows one to reminisce from an extremely safe distance. --Kevin Maidment