The founding member and (I assume) chief songwriter is Billy Corgan. He played in a rock band called the Smashing Pumpkins. Some people (ok, mostly just me) think of the SP’s as a brilliant prog band disguised as rock’n’roll.
Saturday Night Live is a TV show. They have musical guests.
ZWAN is the musical guest this evening.
I’m looking forward to it
btw, the chick playing bass also played with in the band Perfect Circle.
Saw and met Smashing Pumpkins before they were big. It was very cool, and at the time I thought they’d be big. Corgan had long hair and reminded me of Jim Morrison.
I still think that after Adore, Billy Corgan lost some of his natural ‘je ne sais quoi’ and hasn’t been able to write a really great song since.
The album is… decent, but it sounds like a debut album (I know, it is Zwan’s first album, but Corgan has been in the business a bit longer than that) and none of the songs really stick out as far as I’m concerned.
At least thanks to the website, now I know I probably don’t have to buy the album.
It is pretty incredible that you can go to their website and listen to the entire release for free from a flash app.
As I said earlier, ZWAN sounds a lot like post Adore SP’s which for me, meant that many listens were required to grow comfortable enough with to start enjoying.
I was hoping that since Corgan recruited David Pajo and Matt Sweeny that ZWAN would be more interesting than the Smashing Pumpkins, as both of them have a decent lineage of pretty cool stuff (Pajo in Slint, Aeriel M, Papa M; and Sweeny in Chavez).
I was wrong. I heard the album a few weeks ago and would not want to hear it again. Like Skillet says, they sound alot like SP, which for me is not a good thing.
Yeah, I don’t get this band. Is their sappy, crappy, tearful confession-laden debut single any indicator of what I’ll find on the rest of the album? If so I’ll pass.
And what’s David Pajo doing in there anyway? I really like a lot of old SP, and I was really excited at first because I thought that if Billy Corgan was looking to get back to his roots and he had David P. along for the ride something really cool might happen. But that song is just boring.