vinylfanatics.com

**The Smashing Pumpkins - Machina II/The Friends And Enemies Of Modern Music**
★★★☆☆

The Smashing Pumpkins have always been a band of grand gestures and even grander contradictions. After reaching the absolute zenith of alternative rock with 1995's "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" – a sprawling double album that perfectly captured the band's ability to marry crushing heaviness with ethereal beauty – Billy Corgan seemed determined to deconstruct everything that made his band great. If "Mellon Collie" was their "White Album," then "Machina II/The Friends And Enemies Of Modern Music" represents their most fascinating failure, a deliberately fragmented epilogue to what was supposed to be the band's final chapter.

Released in 2000 as a free download and limited vinyl pressing of just 25 copies, "Machina II" served as the companion piece to that year's proper studio album "Machina/The Machines of God." While the first "Machina" attempted to wrap the Pumpkins' story in a conceptual bow about a rock star's rise and fall, this sequel feels like rifling through the deleted scenes – raw, unpolished, and occasionally brilliant in its incompleteness. It's the sound of a band simultaneously at their most experimental and most exhausted.

The album emerged from the wreckage of the classic Pumpkins lineup, with founding members D'arcy Wretzky and James Iha having already departed. Corgan, along with drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and a rotating cast of session musicians, crafted these 25 tracks during the same sessions that produced the first "Machina," but the material here feels like it exists in a parallel universe – one where the Pumpkins embraced lo-fi bedroom recording and stream-of-consciousness songwriting over their typical studio perfectionism.

Musically, "Machina II" is a genre-hopping fever dream that refuses to settle into any comfortable groove. The opening salvo of "Slow Dawn" and "Vanity" establishes an intimate, almost demo-like quality that pervades much of the record. Corgan's voice, often multi-tracked into ghostly harmonies, floats over deceptively simple arrangements that occasionally explode into moments of vintage Pumpkins fury. The electronic elements that dominated the first "Machina" are largely absent here, replaced by a more organic, if deliberately rough-hewn, approach.

The album's highlights reveal themselves gradually, like Polaroids developing in slow motion. "Cash Car Star" bursts with an infectious energy that recalls the band's mid-90s peak, while "Lucky 13" showcases Corgan's gift for crafting melodies that feel both nostalgic and forward-looking. "Real Love" strips everything down to its emotional core, featuring some of Corgan's most vulnerable vocal work over minimal instrumentation. Perhaps most intriguingly, "Glass" builds from whispered confessions into a wall of feedback that feels like a direct transmission from the band's early days.

The album's unconventional release strategy – essentially giving it away for free while the band was still contracted to a major label – was both a middle finger to the music industry and a gift to the faithful. It was punk rock in the most literal sense, even as the music itself wandered far from any recognizable punk template. Corgan seemed to understand that this material, in all its fragmented glory, belonged to the fans who had stuck with the band through their various metamorphoses.

Today, "Machina II" occupies a curious position in the Pumpkins catalog. While the band has continued in various forms for over two decades since its release, with Corgan recruiting new lineups and even reuniting with some original members, this album feels like the true end of something essential. It's the sound of creative exhaustion transformed into art, a document of a band pushing against the boundaries of what an album could be in the digital age.

The Smashing Pumpkins' later work has ranged from competent to inspired, but nothing has quite recaptured the magic of their 90s peak or the fascinating brokenness of "Machina II." This album stands as a reminder that sometimes the most interesting art comes from the spaces between official statements – the B-sides, the outtakes, the experiments that reveal more about an artist's true nature than their carefully crafted masterpieces ever could.