Smashing Pumpkins at RDS Simmonscourt, Dublin reviewed by Davin O'Dwyer

It is often said that smell is the the most evocative sense, the most likely to trigger strong associated memories.

If this concert proved anything, however, it is that nothing calls the past to mind so vividly as hearing the songs you fell in love with when you were 16 or 17.

A few songs into this epic, inconsistent concert, Billy Corgan and his reconvened Smashing Pumpkins launched into the wondrous opening chords of Tonight, Tonight, and the euphoric reaction of the crowd was the sound of thousands of fleeting teenage memories come flooding back.

With Siamese Dream and, in particular, the wildly ambitious Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, they provided the ubiquitous mid-1990s teen soundtrack and became icons to a generation of adolescents. But the scale of Mellon Collie seemed to deplete their creative juices, and their subsequent releases suffered from the law of diminishing returns and the departure of founding members D'Arcy Wretzky and James Iha. By the time they disbanded in 2000, they had artistically run their course.

Their recent reunion confirms this. Only Corgan and their immense drummer Jimmy Chamberlin survive from the original line-up, and their comeback album, portentously called Zeitgeist, was notable only for having zero impact on the current zeitgeist.

At some point in the late 1990s, Corgan left melody behind, and his more recent output has been a prolonged guitar work-out, but the thousands of fans who filled the Simmonscourt came instead for the evocation of a dimly remembered past.

The Pumpkins obliged, but unfortunately only fitfully.

The timeless riff from Today, a simply gorgeous acoustic, unaccompanied 1979, a furious Bullet with Butterfly Wings - they all served as powerful reminders that when the Pumpkins were on top of their game, they had few peers.

Corgan, looking uncannily like a modern-day Nosferatu, was as possessed in his performance as ever. However, the concert gradually descended into an interminable exercise in turgid guitar 'n' drums histrionics, as breathtakingly self-indulgent as it was tedious.

The crowd, understandably, lost interest, only rousing themselves for a raucous Cherub Rock at the close.