341. The Smashing Pumpkins, "Siamese Dream"

 


These days I guess we mostly know Billy Corgan as a joyless, self-important asshole, so it's sort of reassuring to learn that when the band was making this album, he was also a joyless, self-important asshole.  But ONCE AGAIN we must separate art from the artist because this album fucking RIPS.

I somehow never got into the Pumpkins back in the 90's (although I did see them at the Tibetan Freedom Day concert in 1996 at Golden Gate Park, a touchstone for San Francisco Gen-Xers if there ever was one), so I had never heard this album before.  In fact, the only song I'd heard on it was "Today," and that's mostly just because it was permanently on MTV when MTV used to show videos all day and I was home and "between jobs" or whatever.  "Today" is great song!  But there are so many other great songs on this album.  

The whole affair starts out with a drum roll, fittingly enough, since Jimmy Chamberlin's intricate drumming is the driver behind the propulsive sound of this record.  That first song, "Cherub Rock," is a good one, with a great melody and super hooky guitar riff.  Corgan insisted that it get released as a single, over the label's wishes, and of course it tanked in comparison to "Today," but nothing on an album that sold 6 million copies really tanked I guess.

Where has "Rocket" been all my life?  What a great fucking song!  It's like shoegaze on vacation, with that wall of guitar that bends and swoops instead of just lying there.  And I wish I had had "Disarm" to get emo to when I was an angsty teen.  That is some catnip for disaffected youths.

There is just so much going on here.  It must have been a bitch to record all this, which Billy conveniently helped with by recording everyone's parts (except the drums) over again after they left.  Christ what an asshole.  Anyway, the whole recording process - they went over budget by a cool quarter million and it took a month just to MIX - sounds like hell.  The results are pretty amazing, though.

OK we also have to address the elephant in the room and that elephant is Billy Corgan's weird ass voice.  "Acquired taste" might be putting it too mildly; "force fed like a foie gras goose" might be more on point.  At first it's disturbing and alienating, and then you get used to it, and by the end you just accept your fate.  As we all do.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I would say so, yes.

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