- Record Label: Rocket Science
- Release Date: May 25, 2010
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None of these songs have the concise punch of a single, but that's surely intentional: they're not designed as hooky statements of intent, they're dreamy teasers for what promises to be Corgan's most varied set of music since the days of Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness, whose title is quite deliberately echoed in the very name of Teargarden by Kaleidyscope.
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Without Chamberlin's freight train roaring behind him, the hurtling "Astral Planes" never quite achieves liftoff. And one can only imagine how Chamberlin might've combusted the six-minute "Son of a Sailor," which sounds like a promising sketch for a "Stairway to Heaven"-style epic. Corgan's at his best when he takes a lighter tack and develops two of his more engaging melodies on the remaining tracks.
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That fixation on headphone-trip arcana doesn't mean the new songs lack hooks: "A Stitch in Time," for example, opens with a folky acoustic figure that openly echoes "Disarm," one of Smashing Pumpkins' biggest hits. But "Songs for a Sailor" seems indifferent to what's happening on the radio right now. It's a blast of arty alt-rock escapism, short and not so sweet.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 18 out of 37
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Mixed: 12 out of 37
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Negative: 7 out of 37
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Sep 16, 2010
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May 14, 2012
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Apr 13, 2012