Making Up For Lost Time

He fancies himself a martyr, an alt-rock anomaly with a guitar that eats kids, burps thunder and is infatuated with the sound of its own voice.

"Let me die for rock 'n' roll," Billy Corgan howled like he was leading an army of troops into battle, a typically grandiose notion from a man whose sense of self is as inflamed as a house fire.

The song was "Heavy Metal Machine," a yawning expanse of swollen riffs and bristling, reverbed bass lines that gradually builds from a starry-eyed drone to a thunderbolt of feedback and finger-tapping solos, with the bald, vampiric Corgan positioning himself as a cross between Nosferatu and Eddie Van Halen.

Overhead, a retina-burning mother ship of lights created a "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"-worthy visual overload.

This is the Smashing Pumpkins: every last arena rock conceit stuffed into a hybrid of classic rock bombast and art rock pomposity, which the band unleashed with relish at The Pearl at the Palms on Thursday.

Granted, the Pumpkins may have come to fame during the height of the no-frills grunge boom in the early '90s, but they've never had much in common with their contemporaries.

Groups such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden tended to eschew lengthy guitar solos and showy displays of instrumental peacockery -- even though they were all skilled players in their own right -- favoring a more earthy, stripped down aesthetic that stood in dire contrast to the ostentation that defined mainstream rock 'n' roll at the time.

That era was notoriously short on guitar gods, but Corgan was the glaring exception, and he seems determined to make up for any lost time.

Touring in support of the Pumpkins' first new album in seven years, the feral yet spotty "Zeitgeist," Corgan wielded his instrument like a scythe, peppering just about every tune with extended runs up and down the fret board.

The two-hour show was unevenly paced and as passive-aggressive as the band's catalog itself, opening with a dissonant 12-minute take on the roiling "United States," where Corgan scratched at his guitar until it approximated whale calls and played a few ear-bleeding measures of the "Star Spangled Banner," before soon drifting into placid, meditative daydreams ("That's The Way (My Love Is)," "Neverlost") that wrapped a velvet glove around this band's iron fist.

Plenty of the group's signature hits -- "Today," "Disarm," "Rocket" -- were eschewed in favor of prolonged readings of dense and knotty album cuts like "Drown" and "The Glass and the Ghost Children" and an emphasis on the band's latest release.

Unlike past efforts, where Corgan often would trade in a flowery, fantastical lyricism, "Zeitgeist" is an album rooted in the here and now, with allusions to conflict, war and the promise of liberty, which manifested itself even more explicitly live.

"America is a difficult place to be," Corgan chuckled at one point. "But I feel safe that President Clinton is coming."

He mostly was all business though, chiding the crowd a bit for being too loud during an overlong, four-song acoustic set marked by a spare, meandering version of the band's hit "1979."

"I'm playing, I hear this talking, and I'm like, 'I never should have given Celine Dion comp tickets,' " he said. "Celine never stops talking. Try and keep it down, OK?"

Still, it was hard to take Corgan's words at face value since he seldom followed his own advice, blasting forth with one divebombing guitar freakout after the next.

It was all so defiantly, deliberately self-indulgent, a night of hard rock navel gazing of the highest order.

"You should want it all!" Corgan bellowed early in the evening on rugged, near-metal bruiser "Doomsday Clock," aiming to provide as much to anyone who would listen.