On The Smashing Pumpkins’s fourth studio album, the band trades in its guitar heavy grunge-influenced playing for the more subtle, sensual textures that pervaded the band’s previous album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Gone are the roaring guitar and vocal screams of Billy Corgan, replacing them, the subdued synthesizers and mellow atmosphere of Adore.

At first, this seems to be a natural progression for the band. Essentially cutting out the middleman of Mellon Collie, an album that switched consistently between hard rock/metal blasts and slower, midtempo atmospheric ballads. Dedicating an entire album to a clear strength of the band that had yet to be fully explored sounded promising.

Billy Corgan’s angst-filled lyrics still fill the album, and to his credit they show more maturity than his previous work, perhaps because they are no longer being backed by the accompanying rage of the heavy guitars. This only aids to Adore‘s mission to provide an atmospheric experience. However, Adore clocks in at 73 minutes, and while that is certainly less than their huge double album Mellon Collie, without the pace-breaking heavy rock songs spread through the ballads, many songs on Adore tend to drag on which ends up applying to the album as a whole.

Consider Mellon Collie to be a hap-hazard mess of styles if you want, but at least it kept the listener guessing at what was coming next, and ultimately made for a more engaging listen. On Adore, the average song is five minutes long and the album’s brooding atmosphere can sometimes be overbearing, which will definitely make this a difficult listen for some fans of the band’s rage-fueled energy on their previous three albums.

However, Adore‘s indulgence also comes with its strengths. Adore is arguably the first album the band released that actually has an appropriate flow to it, as each song smoothly transitions into the next. Siamese Dream and others felt like they were just a collection of songs, damn good songs as they were. This makes Adore a very tight-knit and consistent album.

Yet, the lack of any particularly strong singles and shift towards a more restrained style of music may prove to be too alienating for some listeners. Adore is a solid album and respectable endeavor that most listeners will find something to appreciate about. Most likely in the popular tracks “Ava Adore” and “Perfect.”