Corgan rides a sonic tide

Billy Corgan

“TheFutureEmbrace”

(Reprise/Martha’s Music)

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The Edsel ... Chevy Chase’s talk show ... the new Coke.

Now there’s another item for the list of Western culture’s bad ideas: the pairing of Billy Corgan and the Cure’s Robert Smith on the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody.”

Their sepulchral intonation of the pop group’s 1967 heartbreak ballad almost torpedoes the former Smashing Pumpkins leader’s solo debut album, which is due in stores Tuesday. And even though the record has its share of strong moments, that lugubrious indulgence sits there like an open grave on a playground.

Watch your step, though, and you can bask in an often bracing extension of the sweeping, striving rock and emotional vulnerability that made Corgan a beacon of alternative rock in the ‘90s. The richly produced “TheFuture Embrace” is a much more developed record than “Mary Star of the Sea,” the 2003 album by Corgan’s short-lived post-Pumpkins band Zwan.

Here Corgan takes his sonic signatures -- the blend of swoon and snarl, the high-pitched whine, the grandly melancholic harmonies and progressions -- and adds a big dose of electronics, staking out a quasi-Goth territory with echoes of brisk New Order, burbling Peter Gabriel and shimmering Brian Wilson.

The singer negotiates this terrain with his emotional antennae set on super-sensitive, bringing high drama to expressions of longing for connection and salvation. There’s a moment or two of alarm and urgency, but less of the rage that colored the Pumpkins’ music. In its place, Corgan summons a liturgical grandeur that makes this an almost religious embrace.

Richard Cromelin