Smashing Pumpkins
‘Oceania’ (Martha's Music)
And so, like the defiant knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail – limbs lopped off; disembowelled; jets of blood pissing from his head – the supremely unkillable Billy Corgan hops remorselessly on. Much of ‘Oceania’ is sillier than the concept of a Flying Circus, of course, – it’s billed as an “album within an album”, for starters, owing to its arrival in the middle of ‘Teargarden By Kaleidyscope’, an ongoing 44-song opus that lays mp3s as-and-when they’re ready, like some sort of massive internet chicken – but, for a Tarot-themed rock album made by an immortal megalomaniac, it’s actually OK. Especially the loud bits.
