The Smashing Pumpkins
Aghori Mhori Mei LP
With great trepidation I creep, knowing that my boot prints are leaving scars on hallowed ground… But has anyone else struggled with everything The Smashing Pumpkins have released since Adore? Alas, the torches and pitchforks can already be seen marching along the twisting lanes to raise my cabin and leave nothing but dust and bones.
I haven’t been this nervous saying something about a band since I asked whether anyone noticed Queen were, ultimately, a disco band. But the devil’s honest truth is that eight times I’ve tried to love a long player from The Smashing Pumpkins and eight times I’ve been found wanting.
But as the first riff of ‘Edin’ begins I’m left feeling hopeful. After ‘Pentagrams’ and ‘Sighommi’ I’m building momentum towards being delighted with this record.
Listen to The Smashing Pumpkins – ‘Edin’.
Draws From The Early Albums
Maybe it’s the nod to the early albums like Gish, Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness that I like. I understand why the band has fled from those places, Therapy? struggled with demands for “another Troublegum” for two decades before coming to terms with it in Disquiet.
If The Smashing Pumpkins had continued to give us more of what we wanted, they might not be around today. The three-decade wanderlust has given Aghori Mhori Mei the space it needed to be the amazing album it is.
Listen to The Smashing Pumpkins – ‘Who Goes There’.
Consistently Strong
The album is strong throughout. It’s not front-loaded, though the opening triplet is superb. My personal highlights include ‘War Dreams Of Itself’, ‘Who Goes There’, and ‘Goeth The Fall’ all fall in the second half.
There’s also a good mix of riffy, melodic, and orchestral tracks with the track listing being rendered well to provide a flow to the album that has me itching for the vinyl.
Listen to The Smashing Pumpkins – ‘Sicarus’.
What Does “Aghori Mhori Mei” mean?
The title, according to Billy Corgan, is a cipher. ‘You gotta play with the letters and you gotta play with the order and you’ll start to kind of get it.’
Well, this isn’t the first time my fleeting college years have beckoned to me. The hours of working through the ominous Latin chant in Type O Negative’s ‘In Praise of Bacchus’ were hugely satisfying. And here we have another scattering of words to work through. But is this even Latin? Some folks think so.
If it is Latin, which I’m not yet convinced of, it could mean ‘I am ready to die, or with adjustments perhaps ‘I am afraid to die’ or even the ominous ‘I am about to die’. The thing with Latin, though, is it’s not particularly straightforward as you have to interpret intention a great deal. I’m cautious about the ‘aghori/agori’ part of this whole phrase.
But what of the imagery used by the band, such as this Smashing Pumpkins logo with aghori mori mei written in a Gurumukhi or Sanskrit style?
If we follow this language path, dive into the roots of words, and pull them up with some modernization, we might find something like ‘my band is fascinating, not dreadful’.
I can see the attraction of the Latin translations. Who doesn’t like something dark and mystical sounding? However, I wonder if using an album title to respond to critics might be the more believable answer. Perhaps we’ll only ever know if the band show us the back page, where the answers are all listed in small text and upside down!
Written by Fenton on
