‘Habagat’ weather, ‘hebigat’ sounds

MANILA, Philippines – The southwestern monsoon that hit Luzon this past week was a timely echo of the music of first-time PHL visitors The Smashing Pumpkins — the latest foreign act to be flown in by Music Management Inc. Live after Morrissey last May. 

Just as the nameless habagat brought in much rain that was by turns thunderous and soft, light and torrential, many of this US band’s songs are moody suites that alternate between whispery quiet and monster loud, between dreamy calm and heavy rage, often within the same tune.

Coincidentally enough, just as The Smashing Pumpkins’ repertoire has a substantial yet limited audience in a world where disposable pop rules, the resulting monstrous flooding this early August limited the attendance to the band’s first ever Pinoy concert to a few thousand brave souls, even after the Smart Araneta Coliseum gig got moved by a day to August 8.

(I myself had the landmark experience that night of riding an excavated refrigerator turned raft to make it past waist-deep waters that submerged a tract of Aurora Boulevard in Quezon City.)

And this freak weather disturbance ended up, among other things, adding value to “The Smashing Pumpkins Live in Manila” — making the concert all the more unforgettable for both the band and local fans who had been raring to hear SP songs straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth since the 1990s.

Lead singer-songwriter Billy Corgan, the band’s founder and sole remaining original Smashing Pumpkin, recognized all this, and so he and his trio of fellow instrumentalists served up not just one loud and proud show per se but also pulled off a surprise treat down the line.

An ocean of sound

Corgan has long been uncompromising than most, and 21 years since his and the original Smashing lineup’s recording debut in 1991, his stance remains largely unchanged.

Case in point: Rather than straightaway indulging their Philippine audience of mostly 30- to 40-somethings hungry for the band’s “hits,” Corgan and company spent the first hour of their Manila gig rendering all 13 tracks off the latest SP album, Oceania. 

Much of the spectators that Wednesday night were presumably strangers to Oceania, which was released just last June (domestically via PolyEast Records) and lacks radio airplay.

Yet the gig audience was generally enthusiastic as the Pumpkins dished out the album’s tracks in sequence, the viewer-listeners reacting with cheers and cheery hand gestures whenever Corgan (whose voice remains unhampered by his many years onstage and on record), guitarist-keyboardist Jeff Schroeder, bassist-vocalist-keyboardist Nicole Fiorentino and drummer-vocalist-keyboardist Mike Byrne unleashed an accent of muscular noise here or raised a rock-star arm there.  

The uniqueness of that initial tracklist — a kiss-off to the generic concert format of serving up album cuts — was enhanced by some far-out visual accompaniment.

While the glorious roar of “Quasar” and “Panopticon” and the calm yet lively tones of “Violet Rays” and “Pale Horse” drenched our eardrums, a giant orb-cum-stage backdrop projected a continuous stream of peculiar video art, created for the band by artist Sean Evans. 

The songs and imagery alike (the latter replete with scratch marks a la old films) furthered what seems to be the Smashing Pumpkins’ perpetual agenda: of trying to make sense of this imperfect world through art, of holding a mirror to the perplexing, even maddening beauty of life. 

There is this deliberate vagueness to the Pumpkins’ songs that has endeared Corgan and the band to their followers — that these musicians are just as confused and overwhelmed with things as their own fans might be, and channel all that uncertainty through an amalgam of classic and postmodern rock.

On that note, the band’s name is quite apt: their music is messy yet enticing, gooey yet compelling.

No tricks, all treats

Once the final Oceania track, “Wildflower,” was finally rendered, the orb video showcase also concluded, paving the way for a second half teeming with “oldies” but not necessarily just the Smashing Pumpkins’ own. 

The band thus launched into the oldest track on their onstage setlist: a take on the 1969 David Bowie classic “Space Oddity.” 

As Corgan mentioned at the August 6 press conference at the Edsa Shangri-La Plaza, rendering covers is their way of doing “great songs by great artists, like covering Picasso or Monet.”

Yet as the Pumpkins blasted away for a thunderous take on the spacey tune, a few might have noticed a different, subliminal point: many might not have dug “Oddity” when it first came out in 1969 and maybe someday, more people would fully dig Oceania than folks do now.

It was pandemonium from there as the Pumpkins finally satiated the collective urge for familiar fare, the band rendering a slew of fan favorites such as “Disarm,” “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” “Luna” and “Today.”

Within this segment came what is perhaps the night’s highest point: the band’s delivery of “Tonight, Tonight,” arguably the most celebrated Smashing Pumpkins ditty.

Those particular 4 minutes or so saw the concertgoers at their most fervent, with everyone either singing heartily along and/or video-recording the moment, such that the orb’s screening of A Trip to the Moon, Georges Méliès’ timeless silent film from 1902 and visual inspiration for the “Tonight, Tonight” music video, was barely noticed.

Corgan was right in remarking at last Monday’s presscon of “this magical, fairy dust feeling” when playing that endearing 1995 smash — a resplendent sonic counterpart to the cathartic sensation of flight and descent.

An elongated encore

With 22 tracks rendered and the band practically bushed, especially Billy who alternated between smirks of pleasure and pants of exhaustion, the quartet made the now standard concert scheme of exiting the stage, disappearing for a few minutes then reemerging to play some more. 

And play some more the band did, unveiling a pre-set encore of “Zero,” “Ava Adore” and, the first ever taste of the Pumpkins for many, “Cherub Rock” — the mostly up-on-their-feet crowd likewise transforming the Big Dome into one big karaoke joint. 

Per the band’s recent, pre-PHL gigs, the show should have ended there.

But as Corgan himself declared to everyone’s surprise, “On a normal night, that would be it. But this is not a normal night,” alluding to the extraordinary circumstances of those past 3 days.

“We’re going to play a few songs we haven’t been playing in a while,” Corgan continued, “for those of you who made the effort to get here tonight. The Lord has blessed me with a great life. I have the greatest fans in the world,” kickstarting a deafening mass of cheering from the still-game audience.

And so the Pumpkins played on, starting with the resonant “1979” then, two tunes later, concluding with the other active track in the band’s roster of covers, the 1974 Kiss scorcher “Black Diamond.”

Just as Kiss drummer Peter Criss had sang lead while pummeling the drum set on that tune, Pumpkins’ sticks-and-skins man Mike Byrne, possessed with such youthful stamina, did double duty with his voice and hands, to the delight of the awed crowd. 

Awed — that sums up the reaction of one and all that fateful, still rainy Wednesday night.

The attendees, some of who got to catch guitar picks that the band gave away in spades, were certainly left dazzled not just in the fulfillment of a decades-long dream but also for the monstrous rock bonanza this concert was. 

But the band looked no less awed, too.

As the band stayed on for a couple of minutes before making their final exit that night, their eyes surveyed the crowd all the way to the general admission and upper box areas, clapping and marveling at the sight of the relatively large throng who were resilient enough to have made it that night.

Corgan promised via Twitter hours before the gig that “For all the fans who cannot come tonight due to the weather, we will come back again soon. We have been treated so well, and we thank you.”

Here’s hoping that, by then, the metropolis’roadswould be a lot less oceanic. – Rappler.com

Watch the Smashing Pumpkins perform ‘Tonight, Tonight’ in Manila here: