Been There, Heard That

Smashing Pumpkins and Velvet Revolver, Treading on Familiar Ground

The Smashing Pumpkins broke up ugly in the twilight days of the Clinton administration, after years of accusations of drug abuse and artistic tyranny (and those were the good times). Frontman Billy Corgan formed another group -- the not-that-bad Zwan -- and briefly went solo before deciding to cash in on his trademark sound by reuniting with his faithful drummer Jimmy Chamberlin for the new disc "Zeitgeist."

In the years since, bands such as My Chemical Romance have appropriated the Pumpkins' baroque mix of heavy metal, glam rock and '70s stadium bloat. Corgan now makes little effort to distinguish himself from the band's legion of imitators: He hasn't updated the Pumpkins' sound, merely excavated it. Imagine a middling late-'90s Pumpkins disc without an iconic hit, without whatever spark of invention they once possessed and without half of the actual Pumpkins (founding members James Iha and D'arcy Wretzky have been replaced by fill-ins), and you're beginning to get the idea.

"Zeitgeist" feels mostly untouched by any musical or cultural event since the band's breakup -- never a good idea, especially not for anyone planning to name an album "Zeitgeist." For every track like the taut "Tarantula" or the prickly opener "Doomsday Clock," there's a draggy opus like "United States," which takes a novel, But What Does This Mean for Billy Corgan? view of world events ("Revolution blues / What will they do to me?").

The Pumpkins are stealing mainly from their earlier, more innovative selves. Not so Velvet Revolver, whose second album, "Libertad," also arrives today. VR sounded like dinosaurs from the first -- less a flesh-and-blood band than an animatronic beast stitched together from discarded Guns N' Roses and Stone Temple Pilots riffs.

The supergroup (composed, not coincidentally, of former GNR and STP members ) also has nostalgia issues: If for the Pumpkins it's perennially 1995 in Chicago, for Velvet Revolver it's 1991 on the Sunset Strip.

The best tracks here ("Let It Roll," "She Builds Quick Machines") are brisk, streamlined, glam-tinged hard-rock numbers focused mostly on girls, cars and pills. There's a smattering of awful ones, too: "American Man" and "Spay" are as bad as you'd think. (Worse, actually.) There's also a charming, gentle cover of E.L.O.'s "Can't Get It Out of My Head" that makes wise use of Scott Weiland, who may be rock's most tightly wound singer -- the harder he tries to simulate vintage rock-and-roll abandon, the more dyspeptic he sounds.

Like "Zeitgeist," "Libertad" traffics in the generalities of revolution and freedom without having much to say about either. It's hard to tell if the Latin American revolutionary tropes that pepper "Libertad" denote a newfound interest in geopolitics, or if the band has merely decided to take its cues from Rage Against the Machine instead of, say, Faster Pussycat.

For Velvet Revolver, which makes entirely decent records without appearing to have had one original thought, maybe ever, this creative aimlessness almost doesn't matter. For the Pumpkins, onetime innovators who now seem content to plunder their own back catalogue, "Zeitgeist" feels like the year's most craven reunion.

Over to you, Spice Girls.

DOWNLOAD THESE: Smashing Pumpkins: "Doomsday Clock ," "Tarantula" ; Velvet Revolver: "Let It Roll," "Can't Get It Out of My Head"

The Smashing Pumpkins are scheduled to perform Aug. 5 at the Virgin Festival, Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore.