Beauty. James Iha. 1998. Hut/Virgin.

 Employees at Sound Warehouse began playing the Smashing Pumpkins’ debut record, Gish, in heavy in-store rotation upon its release in 1991. It resonated with my peers in a similar way that, contemporaneously, records by Jane’s Addiction and Depeche Mode had also. That is, it jettisoned qualities like sophistication and subtlety and irony, and instead connected with its listenership viscerally, like hard drugs do, or rough sex. It was naively pretentious and, like so much of the music of that time, rudely cool. This resolute indifference was Smashing Pumpkins’ marketable strength, and they were unselfconscious about appearing dim-witted. It isn’t that their music isn’t intelligent, but it’s intelligence hollowed out, then stuffed with more intelligence until all you’re responding to is a formal density without any artistic impulse or spontaneity. Enjoying this music is like admiring an automobile factory or a construction site. Or those bodybuilders so packed with proteins that their bodies are well into deformation. Seven years after the release of Gish, and the sale of millions of records later, guitarist James Iha shrugged off the tropes of nineties hard rock and released Let It Come Down, his quietly masterful debut solo album. It’s a thoroughly accomplished pop record—a very specific form of pop. Namely, the weed saturated seventies mellow pop you hear on post-All Things Must Pass George Harrison records, only better. Iha, the studio performer, is relaxed in ways that the ex-Beatle, obsessed with his role as interpretative voice for eastern spiritual values, rarely was. The non-single track Beauty is buoyant, understated, and pleasantly mediocre in the way of all seventies AM rock. Its affability evokes summer afternoons, high school truancy, boyfriends and girlfriends, and hastily rolled spliffs in the car ride to the municipal park. It reminds us that the sense of freedom we became familiar with when we were young is now the luxury we understand as adults that allows us to waste our time, our lives. If Crackerbox Palace had a jukebox, Beauty would be its outstanding tune.

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