The Smashing Pumpkins
headlights pointed at the dawn
Some opening declarations to start:
The Smashing Pumpkins were the zenith (nadir?) of the “hate everything which includes hating yourself” attitude of the 90s that I personally find deeply unhealthy;
Billy Corgan has the most annoying voice of rockstar history;
Billy Corgan is the most annoying, arrogant rockstar of music history;
Jimmy Chamberlin was the best rock drummer of the 1990s;
Their two classic albums released between 1993-1995 mean more to me than do most albums, even better ones, and why I put up with points 1-3.
After I fell in love with “Today” via Guitar Hero World Tour that my mother purchased for me to celebrate my 17th birthday, I asked my sister for the Smashing Pumpkins’ CD for Christmas, and she did me one better: she torrented the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography, which led me to obsess over artists’ entire output, no matter how dire they might have gotten. But also, one night, listening to and dwelling on Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness, I found myself overflowing with notes I made of every track and wanted a place to jot my thoughts down, which led me to scrolling through Google to see if there was a place for people to review music, which pushed into music criticism. All these wasted words! I blame my sister and Billy Corgan for all of it.
Gish is modest, not just in length, but also it’s their only album that sounds like it was made by a band and not just the Corgan-Chamberlin duo. Bassist D’arcy Wretzky, effectively replaced by Corgan on Siamese Dream because he could do her parts in fewer takes, is mixed more prominently on this album than ever again, and she gets to sing lead vocals all by herself on the short if inconsequential closing track. Corgan is still developing his songcraft here, so the album peaks early with “I Am One” and “Rhinoceros,” and then slowly comes undone as he rehashes “Siva” into “Tristessa.” Though long, “Suffer” is a highlight on the second side, and I’m not just saying that because Massive Attack’s Tricky made prominent use of it for the appropriately-titled “Pumpkint” when he went solo; the high, eerie guitar notes ping float over the bong-smoke rhythm mix in waltz-time. Ultimately, “Rhinoceros,” “Suffer,” and non-album single “Drown”—whose riff transposed one string lower on the guitar would be the basis for Silversun Pickup’s “Lazy Eye,” a band that copied the Pumpkins as much as they could—were examples of a gentle and even beautiful psychedelia that Corgan unfortunately left behind as he dove deeper into progressive and hard rock.
It’s on Siamese Dream where Corgan took control of the band, recording James Iha’s and Wretzky’s parts by himself, and I’m sure he would’ve done the same for Chamberlin if he could play drums. It reminds me all of Dinosaur Jr.’s inner turmoil, except with a far better band (although credit where credit is due: Dinosaur Jr.’s comeback albums have been the gold standard of how to do a comeback, whereas the Pumpkins’ post-hiatus albums are mostly garbage.) It would be a perfect album if not for “open letter to abusive parents” track “Disarm” (“The killer in me is the killer in you” might be his worst-ever lyric, which is saying something), “Soma” (one of those alt-rock collaborations, this time with R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, that no one would know if it weren’t for the liner notes; see also: R.E.M.’s “Crush With Eyeliner” with Thurston Moore), the “Bang bang you’re dead, hole in your head” bit from “Silverfuck” and that the album comes down too much in its final stretch even if I like all of those ballads individually.
But I rate it perfectly nonetheless because its songs are miniature prog rock epics that combine shoegaze and grunge effortlessly without ever succumbing to the problems of any of those genres that are unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. I rank Siamese Dream higher than the masterpieces of either shoegaze or grunge, though I know the Loveless crowd will hang me for this treason. I know no guitar tone in alternative rock that’s as beautiful as the morning sky high notes that open “Today” or the first 50 seconds of “Mayonaise,” which gets my vote for the most beautiful guitar section of the decade. (The trilling notes around the 30-second mark, peaking up and up until it breaches the atmosphere to see what’s up in space, is my favourite “moment” of any Pumpkins song.) Whereas I thought Butch Vig scrubbed Nirvana too clean for Nevermind, I think he does a much better job on Siamese Dream by giving the electric guitars colour in the prettier sections, but also dialing up the weight on the heavier songs: the riff of “Rocket” actually feels like a taking off, the solo of “Soma” makes the preceding 4 minutes almost worth it, the solo of “Cherub Rock” might be his most expressive, bristling as Corgan leans into the held notes (but I’m in it for that immortal introduction), and the guitar matches Chamberlin’s ferocity on “Geek U.S.A.” which is Chamberlin’s best work, and exhibit A of what I meant when I said he was the best of the biz during those years.
All that being said, I can no longer listen to these lyrics because of their limited worldview. “Today” is a barely veiled suicide anthem (“Can’t live for tomorrow”) whose “pink-ribbon scars” are clearly about self-mutilation; the “Cut that little child” bit on “Disarm” that Corgan fought hard to keep into the song is abortion fantasy so he could address his parents in song form instead of group therapy. “Soma”’s chief melody goes “I’m all by myself / As I’ve always felt.” It all makes you want to hug the dude, except he’s just so darn unlikeable anyway.
B-sides and outtakes from these two albums were packaged up and released as Pisces Iscariot, defensively described by Corgan as a mixtape (“My approach was to look at the album like a mix tape. It was as if I was going to make a mix tape for a friend to say, ‘Hey, check out this other stuff I did with my band that's not on the albums’”), but clearly excessively laboured over by Corgan in its sequencing and even production, calling up Butch Vig to help change “Hello Kitty Kat” after the fact. Criticize Corgan all you want, but no one could say he wasn’t generous to fans: it was an early emptying of vaults that heralded the Aeroplane Flies High box set and then the massive reissues of all the main albums full of self-written liner notes that’s half-poetry, half-history, and half-utter insanity. Despite some heavy glam-psych tracks like that track and “Frail & Bedazzled,” the general vibe of the album is soft, with a handful of acoustic guitar-led tracks like “Soothe,” the Fleetwood Mac cover played straight and unironically, and “Whir.” James Iha gets his own song in the alt-country “Blew Away,” that I think would’ve been a great song if he donated it to Corgan to sing: Iha’s voice is too frail to let the prettiness of the words or melody come out to play. And “Obscured” feels like the hazy psychedelia of “Rhinoceros,” albeit even gentler. 11-minute “Starla” feels like the exact halfway point between their first two albums, the backwards-sounding guitars at the 1:30 mark more indicative of Gish’s lighter touch but in the form of Siamese Dream’s larger epics.
I liken the Pumpkins’ initial trajectory to that of Fleetwood Mac during their most famous and best incarnation, and I’m not just saying that because Pumpkins covered “Landslide” on Pisces Iscariot: modest debut —> stone cold classic —> double album that wouldn’t have been nearly as good had it been a single album instead —> disappointment afterwards. In the same way that Fleetwood Mac couldn’t have possibly recreated Rumours, the Pumpkins let it all hang on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The single disc playlist—mine would be tracks 1.1-1.6, 1.10-1.13, 2.3, 2.5, 2.14—doesn’t hold up next to Siamese Dream, so there’s all these other songs to balance the equation.
The singles that everyone knows are, of course, immense. “Tonight, Tonight” starts with a clumsy-ass line, “Time is never time at all,” but immediately rights itself, “You can never ever leave / Without leaving a piece of youth” as the band blends together their sound with a 30-piece orchestra, predicting Arcade Fire a decade ahead of schedule. The riff of “Zero” is their sharpest, and Corgan actually pulls off that bridge despite the wordiness. You can’t listen to “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” anymore because of the memes, but it’s another great song thanks to the incessant pummel of Chamberlin’s drums framing what is probably the catchiest song on the album. And “1979” might be their best song. I remember the first time I heard it, thinking that the repeated “tuhnghh” sound was the most unique sound I’d ever heard in any rock song—it’s to me what the “SKREE” of “Shook Ones Pt. II” must have been for a lot of people that same year: just an addicting sound-byte—and whereas “Zero” or “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” were anthems for teen angst, “1979” was an anthem for a lot more: entire teenage lives. There’s the outsider attitude (“Shakedown, 1979 / Cool kids never have the time”) the apathy (“We don’t even care”), the hedonism, and the present, and like most of their best songs, something that you can’t imagine handled by any other vocalist.
But there’s lots of great songs around them; even the instrumental opener is a charming piano song that demonstrates Corgan’s secret penchant for good melody-writing, and the Db major chords have an autumnal evening beauty to them that Corgan’s able to tap into: it’s the rare “alt-rock band does piano instrumental introduction” that doesn’t reek of filler. “Jellybelly” is a heavy guitar-drum track without tipping the scales too much as some of the uglier songs on the second disc. “Cupid de Locke” and “Galapogos” are the quiet breathing room tracks a la “Spaceboy” or “Sweet Sweet” that the album needs to build towards “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans,” whose razor-sharp riff is the culmination of everything the first disc has been building towards. “Muzzle” starts annoyingly with Corgan’s nasally whine at the forefront, but he rights it soon after, and his singing has never been so triumphant, and his words never so likeable: “Have you ever heard the words / I’m singing in these songs? / It’s for the girl I’ve loved all along”; it’s one of the few times that it sounds like Corgan’s singing on top of a hill overlooking the city rather than on top of a bridge threatening suicide, and I wish it were the last single on the album instead of “Thirty-Three,” even though that one has a very pretty tune.
There’s a lot of second-drawer tracks otherwise. “Fuck You (An Ode to No One)” is a title in search for a song; the bridge sucks, and the way Corgan snarls “No way, I don’t need it” sounds like it was written the same day as “Intoxicated! With the madness” from “Zero.” The quieter songs, “To Forgive,” “Take Me Down” (written by and sung by James Iha) and “Stumbleine” are nice reprises, but completely unsubstantial, and Iha can’t carry lead vocals. “Tales of a Scorched Earth” is plain ugly, and time better spent listening to “X.Y.U.”; the placement of it after “1979” boggles the brain. And the last block of songs starting with “We Only Come Out at Night” (which sounds like the theme song for cartoon vampires) all feature synthesizers and Jimmy Chamberlain pretending to be a drum machine, which makes me wonder why Adore came as such a shock for everyone: they were well on their way to electronic-rock.
Expanded versions of the five singles from Mellon Collie were packaged up as a luxurious 5-disc box set titled The Aeroplane Flies High and released the following year; ignore any superfan that tries to tell you that it’s essential because it’s full of c-sides to Mellon Collie’s b-sides that already made their way onto the album. The “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” disc is full of inconsequential covers, including a muttered version of “Dreaming” with Wretzky on lead that sounds like so much inconsequential bedroom twee pop that came out in the past 15 years; the ballads on the “Tonight, Tonight” disc feel like demos, and the mewling slide guitars on “Meladori Magpie” feel like an idea that needed another couple of takes to fully bloom. The “1979” disc has some winners, like the helicopter effect on the guitar on “Cherry” that’s a love song that looks ahead to their straight-forward pop songs in the 2020s, and “Set the Ray to Jerry”—excellent subdued drumming from Chamberlin and tasteful delayed electric guitar that pings around him—is the only song here that I would’ve slotted into the main album. That said, “Ugly” from the same disc is emblematic of Corgan’s worst tendencies, and I totally believe he sat in front of the mirror as he sang about how ugly he perceives himself to be (“And I rot in my skin, as a piece of me dies everyday”). Oh, and the title track has that captivating introduction—“The aeroplane flies high, turns left looks right”—which leads into a heavy riff for the rest of the song that’s too cumbersome, slow, and self-consciously ugly to warrant 8 and a half minutes, and the 22-minute “Pastichio Medley” is just hot trash.
When touring Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness, touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin and Jimmy Chamberlin overdosed on heroin; Melvoin died, and Corgan fired the drummer. To replace Chamberlin, Corgan brought in session drummer Matt Walker, Pearl Jam’s Matt Cameron, and Beck’s drummer Joey Waronker on Adore, none of them nearly as interesting or good as the previous drummer’s mix of jazz agility and hard rock muscle, and also traded out the distorted mix of shoegaze and grunge of their previous albums for acoustic guitars and keyboards. Some people claim the album is underrated. They’ll have to explain how to me. Yeah, the mishandling of the band’s image—the music video of “Adore” features perhaps the least-sexy rockstar ever in full goth vampire mode—and lack of clear singles ensured this wouldn’t sell, but it still sold several million copies nonetheless; it still received positive reviews when it came out, and received them two decades later when Corgan reissued it with five bonus discs as part of his ego-stroking. The narrative that the band suddenly went electronic and threw off fans doesn’t make sense if you were paying attention: they were already experimenting with that in the second disc of Mellon Collie and non-album singles leading up to Adore, to say nothing that every other rock band in the late-90s was looking to electronic music for inspiration (also from 1998: R.E.M., PJ Harvey, Pulp).
The chief issue is that Billy Corgan ain’t cut out for singer/songwriter work, and more than a third of the album is ballads. Partly because his lyrics are typically inept—the first lines on this album rhymes “blistered Avalon” with “aching Autobahn” which is, to be clear, a unique rhyme but also heavy-handed; the first line of the very next song rhymes “Adore” with “whore”—but his nasally voice gets in the way, and was more fitting when he was shouting the lyrics over distorted guitars. The guitars sound like shit throughout, including the 4-bar solo that he threw in on “Ava Adore” to try to give it more edge as the lead single, as well as the one that brings “For Martha” to climax looking ahead to MACHINA’s troubled production. And is second single “Perfect” ultimately just a remake of “1979” but worse in every way? That the album ends with a Marvel end-credit Easter Egg nod to the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds just serves to remind us of how Robert Smith already did all of this better in the 80s. Pathetically: Billy Corgan seethed that no one picked up on the album’s double entendre. It’s not just “Adore,” but also “A door.” Reminds me of that kid’s riddle from that Stephen King book: when’s a door not a door? When it’s a jar. Or, when it’s Adore, I guess?
Teenaged me really wanted to like MACHINA / The Machines of God, and the poor bastard went so far as to watch the tie-in animated video clips and tried his best to wring together a cohesive concept album out of this one and its sequel, eventually giving up and cobbling together a decent playlist instead (from this album: only one song, “Stand Inside Your Love”). This is where Corgan completely lost it, and one only needs to compare to the a capella sections of “Zero” to its blatant and far less interesting re-write “The Everlasting Gaze” to see just how far up his own ass Corgan crawled Jimmy Chamberlin’s return doesn’t matter, because the entire thing is overproduced to the point that he might as well have been a drum machine or session musician from Adore.
Even in its obvious content dump glory, MACHINA II / The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music is better; while the first MACHINA album is hideously overproduced, the demos here are underproduced: it doesn’t bring the best out of either Corgan or Chamberlin. That this album was released for free often has had a few people bring it up as an early version of Radiohead’s In Rainbows’ still-unique payment method, but I demur: Radiohead asked people to pay what they wanted and proved that people still valued art given the option to just take it home for free; by contrast, this was just unceremoniously dumped out there because Virgin didn’t honour Corgan’s original vision for Machina to be a double album and then flat-out refused to release this album at all, and Corgan’s ego wouldn’t have satisfied with it never being seeing the light of day.
There’s a lot of stuff no one needs, denoted as alternative versions of songs that were hardly essential in the first place, like the ‘spacey dub’ mix of “Glass’ Theme” that makes me wonder if Corgan understood what “dub” meant, or grotesque synth bath version of “If There is a God.” In this context, it’s easy to miss the alternative version of “Try, Try, Try,” but I find it better than the version on Machina, where it might’ve been a good song if not for the shopping mall production. This version is practically wistful, and the rhyme from “As desires on my ghost trains / Like you said, when it rains…” that connects to the next line, “…It pours down the back of the bitter son / Desperate for love and loves everyone” is actually quite touching for Corgan. The “album” is also better balanced between the heavier songs and the ballads, whereas the previous two albums leaned too hard on one side or the other, including the punk chug of “Glass’ Theme”; the highway chase drums of “Cash Car Star” (originally written for Adore but shelved because *checks notes* Virgin thought it could have been a hit); James Iha’s guitar ringing high over Corgan and Chamberlain on “Dross.” Same as on Adore, I don’t think Corgan’s voice fits ballads like “Innosense” but I find the piano throughout—here’s that word again—wistful; “Slow Dawn” feels like an epic ballad underneath the murky production, the electronic blips sort of actually bringing to mind the imagery it wants to conjure. And if you heard that Billy Corgan had a solo song on the piano titled “If There is a God,” the natural instinct is repulsion, but the song itself is quite touching, the idea of asking God “Who are you this time?” is quite novel, and he sings it as delicately as he can.
If you own the Rotten Apples’ bonus CD Judas Ø released in 2001, then you get some of this album’s best cuts but with better production. (Compare the drum intro of “Lucky 13” here and you’ll see what I mean. The one here sounds like war is on the horizon; the version on Judas Ø puts you in the trenches immediately). In short, a content dump that’s 25% trash and 25% rendered obsolete from the better mixes; look for this only if you think the remaining 50% might be worth your time.
Zeitgeist was the heavily-advertised comeback album that dropped to a thud; credit where credit is due though, the album sounds better than did Machina, and Chamberlin sounds vital again. But in opting to not make an epic album and a collection of hard rock songs, it appealed to no one; not helping is that none of the songs are paired with any notable melody which came easily to Corgan the decade prior — even on the heavy tracks where melody wasn’t the focal point. Immediately after Zeitgeist, Corgan announced that the Smashing Pumpkins would not make another studio album, that the format was dead thanks to changes in listener habits. (I’ve heard the exact same sentiment echoed every year.) Chamberlin soon quit, possibly because he thought Corgan’s plan to “release one song at a time, over a period of 2-3 years, with it all adding up to a box set/album of sorts” was utter insanity, simply stating that “I can no longer commit all of my energy into something that I don't fully possess.” He was replaced by a 19-year old named Mike Byrne.
At first, Corgan made good on his intention for Teargarden by Kaleidyscope: he released songs individually at first, and then packaged them up physically into EPs—most notable are the Led Zeppelin rip “Song to a Son” that kicked off the project, and the deeply grating hook of follow-up “Widow Make My Mind” whose opening two seconds lets you know what you’re in for—and then, seemingly bored of this approach (“the one-song-at-a-time idea had maxed itself out...I just saw we weren't getting the penetration in to everybody that I would have hoped”), Corgan decided to release albums intended for the greater album, “albums within albums,” Inception-style, in Oceania and Monument for an Elegy. Corgan’s new ragtag crew of nobodies put their best feet forward on Oceania, which might explain why it’s the best post-1998 Smashing Pumpkins album: the guitars seem to soar with more ease than they have in a long time, and will ever again. “Pinwheels”’ introduction seems modeled after the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” all needle-point synths and surging power chords while Byrne takes the second half of the 9-minute title track on his shoulders almost entirely. Shame the album is too long and the tracks labored over too much to feel like epics. Monument sees Byrne’s exit, replaced by Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee who pounds the beats out in too-predictable manner, and regardless if the track is tender synth-pop a la Future Islands (“Run2me”) or hard rock (“Anti-Hero”), it blends together in lifeless, icky AOR, but at least the album is short: at 32.5 minutes, it’s their shortest ever.
Corgan reunited with Iha and Chamberlin for—perhaps the worst album title I can think of, and only partially because the second volume never came—Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. I’m sure Rick Rubin would’ve been able to do something for this band 20 years ago, helping usher them away from the deeply synthetic overproduction of MACHINA, but it’s 2018 now, and the best the appendectomy-denier can do for them is turn them to Imagine Dragons on the choir-backed opener “Knights of Malta.” The verses of “Solara” are void of any human effort at all, and had it been a track on Gish, Chamberlin would’ve at least added something to the guitar chug, but no one can be bothered, and yet, that’s still preferable to the alien warble that Corgan goes for during the choruses. At only 8 tracks barely clocking in over half an hour, it’s even shorter than Monument but feels longer because of abysmal failures like these two.
Turns out Corgan wasn’t a fan of Shiny and Oh So Bright released as a proper album because of its length (“It was put out as a formal album, but I said at the time—and I did mean it—in my eyes, it wasn’t an album”), and so he righted that wrong with CYR, marketed as a double album though it’s shorter than Adore, preceded by 10 singles packaged up in pairs like it were Teargarden by Kaleidyscope. Both CYR and ATUM are overlong albums that should come with a trophy for anyone who makes it to the end, and though the tagline of “Pumpkins go synth!” might seem attractive (to whom, though?), Corgan is unable to make convincing happy major-keyed pop songs, and it all feels like a waste of Chamberlin’s talents, but the man hung up the cape a long time ago and has been a shell of his former self since 2000. And so after 3 hours and technically five albums of synthpop, Aghori mhori mei was a short set to “prove” that they could still “rock.” Hailed as a return to form by some, it personally makes no sense to me to disregard Zeitgeist but not this one, so do what I do and disregard both.
Corgan’s limitations were that everything he made after Gish needed to be profound and personal in scope while epic in scale, hence the double album that he touted as “The Wall for Generation X,” hence the multiple concept albums, hence the 44-track album doled out one song at a time with a bad fanfic title, hence the 33-song rock opera trilogy whose story, about the main character from Machina reincarnated with a new dumb name, he divulged into detail on his podcast and not in the actual music, and hence why, even on a miniature scale, he likes to pile on guitars upon guitars, and climaxes upon climaxes. Even his numerous mis-spelt song titles (“Mayonaise”; “Galapogos”) feel more try-hard than they do twee. But with nobody in the band to use as a sounding board, let alone stand up to him—especially when all the original members were given the boot and replaced by faceless audition winners—he flat-out lost the ability to write a good song, you know, the vehicle required to deliver all that supposed epicness in the first place. That Iha and especially Chamberlin keep running back to Corgan makes me think of the Pumpkins were more a cult and less a band: you can never truly leave. Or maybe the tour money is just too good to pass up, never mind that Corgan can’t reliably sing the right notes when outside the studio, and I’m not really sure why anyone would ever see them live outside of Riot Fest. Good for D’arcy Wretzky to have made it out in one piece.
Gish - B+ Siamese Dream - A+ Pisces Iscariot - B+ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness - A The Aeroplane Flies High - B Adore - B MACHINA / The Machines of God - D MACHINA II / The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music - B Zeitgeist - C+ Oceania - B- Monument for an Elegy - C+ Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. - F CYR - D ATUM - F Aghori mhori mei - C+
Great read!
I dig Siamese Dream too but BETTER than Loveless?