Cast the POLLs Aside: the definitive SMASHING PUMPKINS albums poll

Voted Mellon Collie. Siamese Dream has a few good songs but is kind of boring and overrated. Mayonaise remains one of their best songs though.

Mellon Collie is the easy pick for me, although I'm still pissed because my wife bought me the fancy vinyl box, which, while a lovely thing to look at, sounds like utter shit. If you are going to make an expensive collector's item, make sure that you don't completely screw it up.

what are people's complaints about MC again? Is it some hangover from nineties prog-distrust?

xp Did she get it for you right when it came out in 2012? The first pressing was recalled. "Zero" is overcooked beyond belief. I got a subsequent pressing and it sounds great.

flappy bird - I love 'Love'. Those phasing guitars

if i cut anything from mellon collie it'd be the aggro tunes ("fuck you," "tales of a scorched earth," "xyu")

yes, I believe that's it, "Zero" is indeed very distorted.

xxp

"love" rules. when i first heard it i thought my cd player was broken

yeah it's a strange thing about "Love." Whenever I think or talk about cutting it or not liking it, I can't think of a single song on TAFH that would fit better in that slot. I do love the sound of the absurdly flanged out guitars and Billy's distorted vocal. Sweet guitar synth solo from James on there too. I always appreciate it when I listen to the album in sequence (pretty much every plane ride I take), but I never listen to it on its own. I've cycled through being obsessed with every other song on this album though.

i tried to make an alternate mellon collie tracklist but i think the last seven tracks are all potential "last tracks" which gives it a weird rhythm https://open.spotify.com/user/unbornwhiskey/playlist/4MWIKGgMknTs6PsiCCGCSd

anyway if you were looking for a replacement for "love" in the regular order, imo "cherry" works

mellon collie was my first pumpkins record and like one of the first cds i ever bought and for some reason it's hard for me now to see the flow between tracks as anything but fractured and distracting. wish anyone but flood and billy had tried to stitch something coherent out of this material, but maybe it's impossible lol

for such a long album, it's really well sequenced. It's as though Billy said to himself 'right, I'm going to write a song to round off side 2 of the second disc or something...

I have a huge amount of love for the silly songs at the end, especially 'Beautiful' and 'We Only Come Out At Night'.

oh yeah that's the best part of the record imo

haha. i wrote that about the sequencing before your post Brad.

It was my first Pumpkins album as well, and I was just young enough to pretty much take the whole thing as an infallible, incontestable whole.

yeah now i think "1979"/"tales of a scorched earth"/"thru the eyes of ruby" is a...bit much

i'm learning how to play drums rn and i've been going out of my way not to listen to jimmy bc i don't want to intimidate myself that hard. anyway that plan didn't work out. wtf is even going on in "porcelina"

There's a lot I might cut from MCIS but "Love" would definitely be a keeper for me!

the fills on "muzzle" are giving me vertigo

the James Iha song is hideous

what are people's complaints about MC again?

It's way too long and the only songs on it I ever actively want to hear are the singles; I've enjoyed other songs on the album but I literally have no memory of any them and never feel like going back through the entire album to get to know them.

PI no question. the first two are still a pretty dece listen, though nostalgia may be weighing heavily for me here. i really can not abide anything else.

Brad you cant cut "xyu" bcz Billy Corgan is made of shamrocks!

(Or more aptly "nmade nof shnam nrocks")

Anywats, voted Pisces without a thought.

I have yet to come across a sequence for Mellon Collie I prefer to the original, which considering it's 28 songs + a full 2 hrs (making it easily the longest studio rock album I have ever owned), that's sort of remarkable.

Still, Siamese Dream > Adore > Mellon Collie > Gish > the rest.

the original vinyl press from 1996 has a totally re-ordered sequence, it's an interesting alternate perspective but in no way better than the standard sequence:

Side 1 – Dawn

1. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
2. Tonight, Tonight
3. Thirty-three
4. In the Arms of Sleep
5. Take Me Down

Side 2 – Tea Time

1. Jellybelly
2. Bodies
3. To Forgive
4. Here Is No Why
5. Porcelina of the Vast Oceans

Side 3 – Dusk

1. Bullet with Butterfly Wings
2. Thru the Eyes of Ruby
3. Muzzle
4. Galapogos
5. Tales of a Scorched Earth

Side 4 – Twilight

1. 1979
2. Beautiful
3. Cupid de Locke
4. By Starlight
5. We Only Come Out at Night

Side 5 – Midnight

1. Where Boys Fear to Tread
2. Zero
3. Fuck You (An Ode to No One)
4. Love
5. X.Y.U.

Side 6 – Starlight

1. Stumbleine
2. Lily (My One and Only)
3. Tonite Reprise
4. Farewell and Goodnight
5. Infinite Sadness

Pisces Iscariot works remarkably well as a suite, considering it's a b-sides comp

Man, SP were my first love. I used to ride my bike to the local record store just in the hopes that they gotten a new $25 import in. Live stuff, interview discs (kindly shopkeeper: "You know there's no music on this, right?").

I always tried to love Adore (I was 16 at the time, my grandpa bought it for me), but it's still never clicked. I vote Mellon Collie (barely) over SD and Pisces. Oh man, Gish...

The Machinas are a downright sludge. Some really great songs, but I find the albums tough to get through from end to end.

Flappy bird, you're right: you could put together a comp of stuff from Zeitgeist until today that I would have been ecstatic with had it come out in the late 1990s.

*had gotten

never listened to the MCAtIS vinyl ordering but it looks like a slog, just a "guiet side" / "loud side" pairing three times over.

I like that ordering

Pisces Iscariot works remarkably well as a suite, considering it's a b-sides comp

― TARANTINO! (dog latin), Friday, April 15, 2016 3:56 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Otm, and I'd go so far as to say that it's curated so that it can function as a decent intermediate point between Siamese Dream & Mellon Collie...hell I've even begun to think of it a little as SD's "Twilight to Starlight"

you could put together a comp of stuff from Zeitgeist until today that I would have been ecstatic with had it come out in the late 1990s.

feel like i'm up to this challenge but i also feel like i diverge with most people on what the good sp reunion tracks are

Mellon Collie has all my favourite things about them even though the sequencing is a mess but idk if there's really any way to make it make sense without cutting it down. I don't really care for a lot of the heavier tracks but it's impressively solid. It's a really fantastic sounding album too - it's strange how much worse Adore sounds, which is probably the biggest weakness of that.

Adore largely has great songs and I really like what it seems to be going for but the textures are too muffled and gloomy and really let it down.

the mix on Zeitgeist is horrible iirc

I really disagree that adore sounds worse than mellon collie although I'm not sure how you're determining that!

i was just thinking about how lovely "perfect" sounds yesterday. imo it's closer to a shoegaze song than anything on sd in terms of writing, layering, etc. but every element still feels really in focus even as it rushes by

I agree that Adore is gloomy, but I find the production really striking and not dated at all. That was the first album where the songs went through dozens of different arrangements and versions before Billy settled on one that would go on the album, but going through the demos and outtakes, there aren't any songs on the album proper where I prefer one of the different versions. Some of the b-sides though... the solo vocal + piano arrangement of "Saturnine" is beautiful, and I can't stand the ugly industrial grit of the Rarities & B-Sides version. "Appels + Oranjes" is the one thing on there that sounds very 1998, but I still love it. The "What If?" demo of that song is pretty cool as a curio, sounds like a folk song, but it's no way superior to the album version. I will say that the version on "Pug" they played on the Arising! tour in 1999 fucking slays the version on Adore.

How many of y'all have heard the mono mix of Adore? It's not drastically different, although "Crestfallen" benefits from being sped up a little bit.

lol i was going to mention the first vinyl record i ever owned was adore bc i really wanted to hear the mono mix

btw this is my comp of SP2 keeper tracks...

Cottonwood Symphony
A Song for a Son
Quasar
Panopticon
The Celestials
One and All
Being Beige
That’s the Way (My Love Is)
The Rose March
United States
Sunkissed
Monuments
Stellar
99 Floors
Pinwheels
Bleeding the Orchid
Spangled
A Stitch in Time
Oceania
Superchrist
Tiberius
7 Shades of Black
As Rome Burns
Violet Rays
My Love is Winter
The Chimera
Inkless
Again, Again, Again (The Crux)
Gossamer
Owata

My contradiction here is that Chamberlain was by far the most talented artist on the Pumpkins but my favorite record of them is Adore, the only one I get back to beyond the singles.

amazing show from 20 years ago today, incredible sounding bootleg for an audience recording. insane setlist, featuring a few songs they rarely played live, only on really good nights (Here is No Why, Bodies, Farewell and Goodnight). really worth a listen if you're a big MCIS fan.

https://archive.org/details/tsp1996-04-15.flac16

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Tonight, Tonight
Zero
Fuck You (An Ode to No One)
Here is No Why
To Forgive
Bullet with Butterfly Wings
Thru the Eyes of Ruby
Porcelina of the Vast Oceans
Disarm
By Starlight
Geek U.S.A.
Cherub Rock
Muzzle
---
1979
X.Y.U.
---
Germans in Leather Pants (tease)
Today
Mayonaise
---
Bodies
Silverfuck
Farewell and Goodnight

The production on Adore doesn't sound dated as much as just quite weird and singular in a way that doesn't really work for me. Mellon Collie is so warm and up-front while Adore is muffled and blurry, with a weird shine to it. I'm mostly just not fond of the muffled tone of everything, though it's definitely not as bad as Machina which went much further with that weird dull glossy tone. It's very strange to me that they went for that after how lovely the tones are on the previous albums. Sometimes it feels like it's aiming for a sort of retro production style but taken in a different direction?

I'd never thought about it before but I agree that it has a similar feeling to shoegaze. A lot of it feels more about things being implicitly felt, rather than easily picked out, especially the percussion which often doesn't have much weight to it. It's a very interesting mix. I still really like Adore a lot despite disliking the production though, Annie-Dog is the only weak track.

I hate many of the songs flappy bird listed, especially "spangled"

Adore still sounds amazing. If anything it makes me wish some bits of MCAtIS were produced the same way

ma belle
stellar
lightning strikes
violet rays
tom tom
the fellowship
astral planes
bring the light
panopticon
cottonwood symphony
one diamond, one heart
pale horse
death from above
being beige
anti-hero
one and all

that's about it

They never topped Gish. What an amazing psychedelic album.

i added spangled at the last minute. one of those songs that's so stupid but won't leave my head, even though i haven't heard it in nearly six years. i'd add tarantula to my list, i guess. seems like the consensus is that all the best Zeitgeist era songs were left off the album and relegated to those Best Buy/Target/Wal-Mart exclusive editions. What a fiasco.

Not really, he just divested his energy out of the band. His solo albums from 1998 and 2013 show that he has nothing going for him.

i like let it come down ok

he plays some nice geetar on that one Fountains of Wayne song

he's great with an ebow

"Everyone has a misguided perception of...my brain."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRlJlJBAQQs

All started with Gish for me, and SD was the soundtrack to pretty much all of puberty. I dont think I played any other CD more in my life than SD. Hanging out with them and drinking Jack Daniels in their tour bus after a Rotterdam concert was the high point of my teenage years.

I unashamedly love all their albums up to Machina, which disappointed, and after that I gave up. Which felt odd to do, breaking up in a way. Age-wise it was perfect timing: when Machina came out Billy just wanted to "rawk" (after the Jimmy debacle, the death of a fan in Ireland, Jonathan Melvoin od'ing) and I saw why. I at that moment tried to squirm away from my teenage years, and develop my musical taste further by taking an interest in Alvin Lucier, Can, Throbbing Gristle and the likes.

But my love for all albums up to TAFH (their swan song for me, to my ears) is undying. And looking back and being asked this question now, this can only be between Mellon Collie and Adore. And it's a nigh on impossible choice to make, as they are complete opposites.

Great story, thanks for sharing. Can only imagine what the vibe on that bus must've been.

Billy played "This Time" for the first time since 2000 recently. I always loved this overlooked song, it's really sweet and very sad- all about the impending collapse of the band...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vto9efbruA0

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Results are about right.

Yep, could've easily predicted the outcome of this one.

no votes for Machina II though? sorta shocked. who tf voted for monuments to an elegy

I never understood the sd love. After the amazing gish which was new, fresh and psychedelic as hell to me sd was where they became mainstream. Boring almost classic rock. Mellon collie was a return to form after that as it had great tunes sd didn't have. I guess it was also the production on sd which did not work for me. Too slick.

I agree, I almost never listen to the album proper because the production is so homogenous. But my favorite live era of the band is 1994 - they were like a paramilitary unit, and the SD and Gish songs sound great played really fast and with a lot of venom.

bombs away!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLHEitwq20w

man, that really brings out the song's kinship with "ace of spades." not in a bad way.