CD Odyssey Disc 693: Smashing Pumpkins

I’ve felt a little down the last couple of days. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I also can’t deny it.

Then this afternoon I started to recover and now I feel pretty good, just really hungry. I’ll be eating my dinner as I write this review.

Disc 693 is…. Gish

Artist: Smashing Pumpkins

Year of Release: 1991

What’s up with the Cover?  Behold the might of the fisheye lens! Just look at Billy’s hands – they appear enormous! The fisheye – guaranteed to instill any picture with artistic import! OK, maybe not this one.

How I Came To Know It: My friend Greg introduced me to the Smashing Pumpkins when we were room-mates. I always thought they were OK, but never liked them as much as him. I bought this one years later, remembering that I liked a few of the songs.

How It Stacks Up:  I have only two Smashing Pumpkins albums; this one and “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” I’ll put “Gish” second.

Rating: 3 stars

What a depressing bunch these Smashing Pumpkins are, but like the Smiths before them they fill a listening niche when you are feeling a bit wan and unwanted. Kind of perfect for me the last couple of days, and yet still not enough connection to call “Gish” great.

Which is odd, because objectively, this is a pretty great album. Given it is the Pumpkins' first it has a remarkably mature sound, although that could just be that early nineties grunge-fuzz that tends to blend everything together into a low hum.

Despite the fuzz, the power of the songwriting shines through very well. “Bury Me” is a powerful blast of pure rock and roll that had me thinking favourably of Soundgarden. “Bury Me” doesn’t have that hint of funk that Soundgarden has, but the ability to crunch a groove and not lose the tune is here. “Tristessa” is also a strong track with punk sensibilities and a bravery to break everything down musically and not lose the listener. It helps that a grand James Iha guitar solo immediately follows the breakdown.

On the ‘rockin’ out’ front I also wanted to like the album’s lead off song, “I Am One,” but somewhere early in my listening experience I got this idea that it sounded like a Guns N’ Roses song. Once the notion took hold it was hard to shake – after each musical interlude, I kept expecting Billy Corgan to sing about dancing with Mr. Brownstone or wanting to take me down to Paradise City. I doubt the band would appreciate that, but since I called them proto-Screamo in my last review I think this is an improvement.

The Pumpkins have a softer side as well, and “Gish” has a couple of winners here in “Rhinoceros” and “Crush.” Both these songs have big, balloon-like sound with calm easy chords that amble their way along into wistful melancholia. Corgan’s voice, which can have a bit too much scream in it sometimes, sets a lovely tone here; innocent and thoughtful. Both tracks do a good job of breaking up what would otherwise be a tiring wall of sound.

Unfortunately, other slow songs like “Suffer” and “Window Paine” fall into a droning self-absorption that fails to connect. The lyrics on "Suffer" are particularly insufferable:

“All that you suffer is all that you are

All that you smother is all that you are”

Morrissey would be proud, but I’m not. “Window Paine” tries to have it both ways, alternating between atmospheric drone and deconstructed feedback.

The album ends with “Daydream” featuring a vocal from bassist D’Arcy Wretzky. Her voice and the song are both soft enough to be a palate cleanser after “Window Paine” but the song tries for art and only manages trite.

There are plenty of good moments on “Gish” and the talent is clearly there, but it only occasionally plucks my heart-strings, and so I don’t put it on that often. When it does hit, like on “Bury Me” or “Rhinoceros” it hits hard, but the moments are too intermittent to score more than three stars out of five.

Best tracks: Rhinoceros, Bury Me, Crush, Tristessa

CD Odyssey Disc 632: The Smashing Pumpkins

It was a fun weekend, starting off with drinks with my coworkers, and morphing into my first community theatre in a decade (a performance of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” at Langham Court Theatre). Then it was a friendly game of Ultimate Frisbee, an evening with a good friend preceded by a day spent decorating our newest addition – our hidden bookshelf door!

I could write an entire entry about how happy I am with the new door, and the great work that John of “A Cut Above Joinery” did, but why bother when Sheila has already done a fine job of it. To check out the Hidden Bookshelf, visit the entry on her blog, Sheilaephemera! If you also would like some great woodworking, check out The Cut Above guys on Facebook.  These guys are amazing!

And if you are wondering why we would build such an elaborate door, the answer is partly to dampen sound but also because it was fun! Life should have some adventure in it, and why can't that adventure start in your own home?

Disc 632 is….Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Artist: The Smashing Pumpkins

Year of Release: 1995

What’s up with the Cover? I assume it is an artist’s rendering of our title gal, Melon Collie, experiencing her sadness in the infinite vastness of space. You know, Melon, the universe may already be contracting, which means your sadness is not actually infinite.

I guess I’m a “universe half-full” kind of guy.

How I Came To Know It: My old roommate Greg put me onto the Smashing Pumpkins but we were already in our own places when this came out, and I only heard bits and pieces of it for years. Then maybe ten years ago I spotted a used copy on sale at a local record store (Lyle’s Place, I expect) and took a chance on it.

How It Stacks Up:  I have two Smashing Pumpkins albums – this one and 1991’s “Gish”. I might one day get “Siamese Dream” but I’m in no hurry. Of the two I have to put “Mellon Collie” tops.

Rating:  3 stars but almost 4

“Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” is a hard album to classify. It has the thick crunch grooves of stoner metal, but it also has that melodic fuzz of grunge. At times it is sweet and sad. At other times it is angry and shout-y.  I guess you could say it is proto-Screamo – I’m sure front-man Billy Corgan would love that. Don’t judge the Smashing Pumpkins for the horrors that came after, though; they can only answer for themselves.

On that front, there is a lot to recommend “Mellon Collie,” which shows the range the Smashing Pumpkins have as a band at this point of their career, both in terms of the songwriting and the many styles they incorporate into a single record. Some songs are crushing metallic grooves and others are symphonic pop numbers that are light and airy. Despite this the album still feels like a cohesive whole.

The problem isn’t one style or the other, it is that there is too much of both. Like so many double albums before it, “Mellon Collie” is just too damned long. At over two hours of music and 28 tracks this record shows a band that has come off some commercial success and given a bit too much free reign to do what they want. I hate soulless record execs as much as the next guy (maybe more) but one was needed here to tell these guys to tone it down.

Still, any album that can have the smoldering stoner rock of “Zero” alongside the uplifting symphony of “Tonight, Tonight” nail them both, and then later combine the two styles into the nine minute opus “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” is getting something right. Hell, getting a song called “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” to live up to its pretentious name is a feat in and of itself.

My favourite song on the record is “Bullet with Butterfly Wings.” Few bands do angry and disaffected as well as the Smashing Pumpkins, and “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” is the biggest, shiniest jewel in their golden crown of gripe. The song gets its angry on early, opening with:

“The world is a vampire, sent to drain

Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames

And what do I get, for my pain

Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game”

Before launching into a churning and irresistible guitar riff as Corgan spits the chorus:

“Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.”

As much as I often want Billy Corgan to just lighten up, if he did he wouldn’t be able to write classics like “Bullet with Butterfly Wings.” Unfortunately, writing this stuff requires you to be at the edge, and it is inevitable that other songs like “Fuck You (An Ode to No One)” fall off the edge of Anger Mountain and become directionless frustration.

The album experiments freely, and for the most part it works. Not so much, the excess distortion of “Love.” Some would say the distortion – which is so bad it almost prevents you from hearing what Corgan is singing – is a sign of the times. I would reply that this may be true, but that doesn’t make it good.

Despite all their rage, the Pumpkins are more than a rat in a cage, and on “Mellon Collie” they prove it with genuinely tender songs. The oddly spelled “Galapogos” is an introspective mood piece that has an emotional core to it that rings true despite lyrics that are slightly overwrought.

And the groove and the emo come together nicely for the mid-tempo, “1979,” the Pumpkins most famous song. This song is a bit too perfect to fit on a double album so full of misfit anthems, but I found it refreshing for Corgan to write a song where the outcasts feel one with the night, instead of awkwardly trapped inside it.

The album was flagging by the second half of disc two. This could be that the songs lost some of their quality, or it could be I was just fatigued with hearing so much of the same music. This record could easily be a four star masterpiece if they had just edited it down a bit. Everyone likes a little sadness, but no one wants it to feel infinite. For that reason despite the classic greats on “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” I’m bumping it down to a three.

Best tracks:   Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Tonight Tonight, Zero, Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Galapogos (sic), Porcelina of the Vast Oceans, 1979, We Only Come Out At Night, By Starlight