In some ways I feel bad for Billy Corgan. The man is following his muse wherever it takes him, but the places he’s going are very different than the places where he established his stardom. His last album, ATUM, is a synthesizer-heavy, triple disc, concept album about space. Or something. He sold it as a sequel to the albums Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and Machina/The Machines of God, explaining in a 33-part podcast that the main character in ATUM, Shiny, was Zero on Mellon Collie (not a concept album) and Glass on Machina (also not a recognizable concept album). Man, that’s a lot of Billy Corgan to digest. The problem for Corgan is that, except for his instantly recognizable vocals, the album swapped out the heavy guitars of his heyday in favor of washes of synthesizer and didn’t sound anything like the alternative rock masterpieces of Gish or Siamese Dream. The fact that ATUM followed three previous albums that were increasingly reliant on synths was not good news to fans of the old band. This was at a time when he had reunited most of the original band but seemed to be running as fast as he could in the opposite direction of their original sound. His primary audience largely forgot about the band, relegating them to warm feelings of nostalgia. New audiences are hard to come by these days in the age of streaming.

Now Corgan has responded to the pleas of his old audience and released an album that sounds like it would have fit very comfortably on the radio in 1994. On Aghori Mhori Mei, the twin guitar attack of Corgan and James Iha is back, and Jimmy Chamberlin has been turned loose to attack his drum kit once again. The album sounds loose and freewheeling, released from the confines of synths and click tracks. This is a band that is once again firing on all cylinders.

Which isn’t to say that the album is as good as their work from 1990 to 1995, only that it sounds of a piece. The Pumpkins in that golden era of alternative rock were one of the brightest stars in the galaxy, fusing bone-pulverizing riffs and dreamy psych-pop, releasing some of the best singles and albums of the decade. Aghori Mhori Mei is not Siamese Dream Part Two. It is, however, an excellent return to form.

Lyrically this may be the most cryptic Pumpkins album. As if the title of the collection wasn’t enough, song names include “Edin”, “Sighommi”, “999”, “Goeth the Fall”, “Sicarus”. The final track, “Murnau”, is apparently named after F.W. Murnau, the director of the original silent movie Nosferatu. What the lyrics have to do with the director, or his films is a mystery to me. There’s also reference made to Corgan’s interest in Hinduism, with the title word “Aghori” meaning a devotee of Shiva, and “Sicarus” containing the plea “Kali, let’s touch beyonds with us” and “Kali of dawn satnam shri ram” which translates to something George Harrison might have understood. Who really cares when the song has a terrific guitar solo and a cool stun gun riff that heralds the chorus? Not me. I learned in the 1990s to just go with Corgan’s lyrical flow. And what’s a “labyrinth milk syringe” (“Pentagrams”)?

Musically it’s all here, as if preserved in amber from the outtakes of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Riffs abound (“Edin”, “Pentagrams”, “Sighommi”, the brutal “War Dreams of Itself”, “Sicarus”), there’s slower, sludgy tracks (“999”), and floaty ballads (“Pentecost”, “Who Goes There?”, “Goeth the Fall”, “Murnau”).

Corgan is not the only star of this show. While it’s impossible to differentiate Corgan’s guitar leads from James Iha’s, Jimmy Chamberlin’s drums stand out from the distortion. Rolling, tumbling, and crashing like a tsunami on the shore, Chamberlin proves again that he’s one of rock’s greatest drummers ever. On the previous Pumpkins albums he sounded restrained, held in check by the synthesizers. On Monuments to an Elegy he was briefly replaced by the ham-fisted Tommy Lee, who can’t even pronounce the word “subtlety”. On Aghori he’s back and completely fired up, clearly thrilled to be rocking with abandon again.

In an interview with Kerrang this past July, Corgan announced this album and said that “old-school fans will be happy, for once”. It is, in a way, a sad comment. It makes one feel that this triumph of an album is just a throwaway to Corgan, something to get the “old-school fans” off his back so he can go back to space operas and synth-pop. It would be a shame if that were the case. The next album will tell, I suppose, but for now it’s a pleasure hearing two great guitarists and one great drummer turned loose.

Grade: A-