Billy Corgan just announced that the forthcoming Smashing Pumpkins album, Teargarden By Kaleidyscope, will be a 44-track (!) endeavor that will be released piecemeal over the coming months beginning in October—the songs will be released as four-track EPs, 11 in total. And for those of you who don’t really care about packaging and won’t be acquiring physical copies, the music will be completely free. No opt-ins, no mailing-list signups, no talking orangutans! Billy explains after the jump. More »
Earlier this week, speculation that the Smashing Pumpkins had found a brand-new, pretty young drummer–19-year-old Oregonian Mike Byrne of the mathy outfit Moses, Smell The Roses–made its way around the Internet, with a couple of errant Tweets and MySpace messages from Byrne and his Pacific Northwest associates fueling the flames. The band’s official site has decided to put rumor mill to rest, and let people know just why, exactly, Byrne has flown the coop to “pumpkin camp” for the next few weeks: More »
Amigos, it’s been two months since our first expedition south of the border in search of Mexican music. Now that we’ve shaken off the mezcal hangover, it’s time to return to Mexico lindo y querido to have a look-see at two smart alt-rock bands that defy the multiple Mexican stereotypes I (impressively, no?) have managed to disseminate in this very brief introduction. More »
Billy Corgan’s Internet-wide search for a new drummer has apparently ended, and according to Smashing Pumpkins fan blog Hipsters United a (pretty) young man has emerged victorious: Mike Byrne, the 19-year-old drummer/”demoralizer” for the Oregon band Moses, Smell The Roses. There’s been no formal announcement yet, but Byrne did say that he was “off for another couple of weeks at pumpkin camp” on his MySpace page yesterday, and Moses collaborator Ben Spees referred to him as the “drummer of the future” on Twitter. That’s practically a confirmation, right? More »
Billy Corgan has turned a snippet of the Smashing Pumpkins‘ alt-rock staple “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” into a spoken-word bit that will serve as the intro to this Sunday’s Total Nonstop Action Wrestling pay-per-view Lockdown, which will feature a bunch of matches confined to a six-sided cage. (Yes, the lyrics have been altered to fit the cage’s dimensions.) Honestly, the most surprising thing about this development is finding out that Kevin Nash is somehow still able to move around a wrestling ring, despite tearing his quads approximately 53 times over the course of his career. The promo—and a recut video for the song featuring wrestlers appearing in the PPV—after the jump.
Fresh from the inbox, an e-mail entitled SMASHING PUMPKINS UPDATE: “Auditions will be held Friday, April 10 in Los Angeles for drummers who are looking to play with THE SMASHING PUMPKINS. They should send their background info, photos and performance web links via e-mail only to pumpkinsdrummerATgmailDOTcom.”
