The Smashing Pumpkins - MACHINA/The Machines Of God POLL.

Not really a fan of this album at all but 'Glass and the Ghost Children' is proper epic.

Yeah, I love 'Glass and the Ghost Children', especially the first half of the track which has some fine Jimmy Chamberlin drumming. I'm actually undecided as to what to vote for here, because there's quite a few of these songs that I like a hell of a lot... 'The Crying Tree Of Mercury' and 'Blue Skies Bring Tears' are the two here that are guaranteed not to get my vote, but I have more than a soft spot for 'The Everlasting Gaze', 'Stand Inside Your Love', 'I Of The Mourning', 'Glass and The Ghost Children', 'Wound', 'With Every Light' and 'Age Of Innocence'.

Of all the Pumpkins albums, this is the one that I'm actually looking forward to being reissued the most... I think it'll be very interesting to see what Billy does with this one.

This could be another five CD/one DVD box easy.

It would be excellent if it was! I'm particularly interested in hearing how he's going to remix the tracks, and hearing how the album was originally conceived.

This is a patchy album but the best songs are really really good. I like the production sheen on it too. I'm going with 'Stand Inside Your Love', just over 'Age of Innocence'.

Imploding Voice, but there's 3 or 4 other songs that would've fit the bill. This album had its moments.

Damn. With Every Light i guess. it's full of amazing songs though that are hindered by the obnoxious production - gatgc, imploding voice, wound, try, siyl, iotm, this time....shame it didn't quite hit the mark

Went with 'I Of The Mourning', just coz.

man i haven't heard this since around the time it came out.

i saw them around this time too, my first gig without parents, a friend's dad dropped us off and waited outside the birmingham NEC arena. so billy came out in a white (wedding?) dress and played some lonely acoustic songs, solo, kinda rubbish, then disappeared off stage. then there was a nervy 30 minute wait, we were thinking that was it, end of the pumpkins (i think it was meant to be their second from last ever gig or something).

so anyway he then came out in a black dress and they launced into 'the everlasting gaze' and holy shit it was heavy. lost a shoe and ripped loads of buttons off my shirt in the mosh pit. we returned to the car, my friend's dad was laughing at us we got in and he put john peel on the radio and my friend and i heard what we called brazillian drum n bass (i think it was just some idm type thing - maybe squarepusher) for the first time and decided it was the best thing ever, a lot better than the gig we'd just seen. and so we sold our guitars, bought interfaces and started downloading all the audio software we could find.

so thanks for that billy!

Very LCD Soundsystem-sounding origin story.

Actually just threw this on last week to see how it held up or whether it sounded better than it did to me in the summer of 2000 when I really, really struggled to like it. Still can really only deal with the same set of "heart music, Echo and the Bunnymen" songs - "Raindrops + Sunshowers," "Stand Inside Your Love," "I Of The Mourning," "This Time," "Wound." I love imagining "With Every Light" as a musical theater number, Billy strolling down the Yellow Brick Road, swinging his arms and proclaiming "Look ma, the sun is shinin' on me!"

Except for "The Everlasting Gaze," which at least punches hard and keeps it brief, all the "heavy" songs are just awful, they smell like a car full of old french fries that's been sitting in the sun in the middle of a parking lot. TEG also just about collapses under the wretched a capella bridge, too - that went from WTF to "oh, that's kinda cool" to "nope, that sucks" in about five listens for me. The whole thing is such a damned shame because just a few years earlier, Billy had a clearer hand on the marriage of heavy rock and passionate teenage poetry than basically anybody in the game, and here he feels this need to separate them out and it leaves the heavy rock songs just adrift in their dinosauric self-insistence. Nothing there, unless there are secrets buried in the ridiculous booklet.

For all that, "Age of Innocence" is one of my favorite Pumpkins songs ever, would have been a perfect closer on any of their records. Desolation, yes / hesitation, no. Now that's some apocalyptic shit I can get behind. I sort of imagine an alternate version of this album where it's bookended by that and "Here's To The Atom Bomb."

Love the idea that the last days of o.g. Pumpkins convinced a thousand alt-rock youth to throw away their guitars and start learning to use Reason and Fruityloops or whatever....

ouch ;) xpost

so charmberlin is a monster, jesus. i still know too many words to these songs, i'm sure at some point recently i've (v drunkenly) sang the breakdown whining baby bit in 'the everlasting gaze'. gonna go with 'stand inside your love' serious early teens nostalgia here ~intense feelings~ can't really be rational about whether or not it's any good

There's only really a couple of songs on this record that I would class as "heavy", though! I still rate 'The Everlasting Gaze', and I think 'The Imploding Voice' is a decent enough song (although I'm not fond of the production treatment on that particular song, hence why I'm looking forward to the remix so much). I'd say 'Heavy Metal Machine' was the worst of all the "heavy" songs, though.

even as like a middle school ultra billy corgan stan i thought "heavy metal machine" was ponderous

"the imploding voice" however is good fun. doctor casino otm generally still

oh my god! heavy metal machine SUCKS

between this and machina ii is probably the best smashing pumpkins record but it feels like billy wanted to pull off a rock pose after adore and it just makes parts of the album incredibly stagnant

the good thing is the songs that actually drift away from this forced narrative actually continue to surprise: "wound" "age of innocence" "with every light" "raindrops + sunshowers"

"i of the mourning" of course is a "rock" song but it finds this purchase naturally, like, say, the material on siamese dream. the last minute or so of it is super thrilling

oh my god! heavy metal machine SUCKS

― yellow jacket (spazzmatazz), Tuesday, April 16, 2013 4:18 PM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

When I listen to it, I usually find myself thinking that the main riff is good but wishing that he'd taken the time to write a better song with it. Production/mix leaves a lot to be desired on that one too, I think. Also, is it just me that cringes a little when Billy sings "If I were dead, would my records sell?"

Suspect my reception of "I of the Mourning" is heavily colored by Pitchfork's review and the comment to the effect of "When was the last time anyone heard their favorite song on the radio?" Classic P4K indie snob posturing obviously but I was vulnerable to that at that moment, and it did contribute to the sense that Billy Pumpkin was aiming for this resonant imagery but just trying too hard, and that rang true for the whole album in a way.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11829-machinathe-machines-of-god/

that line is super dumb but yeah it gets at the record's larger issue

machina ii curiously unaffected by any of that grandiosity but it kinda sounds like shit

oh i should clarify i'm a fan of the production on this album

Voted "Imploding Voice" but after listening I think it's probably "This Time"
More than any other song from the album it really felt like a goodbye note from Billy/the band. I was an obsessed fan and emotional teen at the time and it really felt like the end of an era to me.

Did we do a Machina II poll ever?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

VERY surprised 'The Crying Tree Of Mercury' got a vote and 'Wound' didn't!

for some reason recently I found myself thinking that D'Arcy Wretzky and Jimmy Chamberlain were both dead (my wife was asking me "whatever happened to the Smashing Pumpkins")

Billy Corgan carried on the name with a new line-up (Oceania came out last year), Jimmy Chamberlin has his own band (The Jimmy Chamberlin Complex, which is a bit more jazz-fusiony), James Iha put out his second solo record last year and is apparently going to continue working with A Perfect Circle, and D'Arcy Wretsky generally keeps quiet... although the odd picture over the years has surfaced of her looking incredibly rough, and was arrested a couple of times a couple of years ago for drink-driving and not being able to control her horses on her farm. She was jailed for a few dates for missing court dates for the latter. She may still be doing a huge amount of drugs... who knows!?

whoa, every song on this is suddenly amazing, on par with the first four. this is a big breakthrough for me. "The Sacred + Profane" just caught me way off guard. this thing is rock solid, even if it's imperfect. even more excited for the proper reissue with I & II combined into the intended meta-rock opera (lol... no but im really excited)

ugh, i just reached "heavy metal machine." nevermind

ahhh, "This Time"...yup this record is two excellent halves sandwiching the worst track of Corgan's career

ugh "the sacred + profane" is incredible

I fucking love 'Wound'.

"Wound" is aces

I need to break the album out

Raindrops + Sundrops still does it for me. probably the only track on here that benefits from the glutted production.

Raindrops + Sunshowers that should read.

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

i blow the dust off my guitar
in the attic with the star
i read your letter to feel better
my tears upon the fading ink

Just had a long drive and decided to listen to this all the way through for the first time since, oh, 2002?

I'm still convinced that a 10-12 track album combined out of the best of this and "Machina II" would be pretty wonderful - some absolute highlights here - but as it stands the pacing and length of this record manage to cut it off at the knees.

Being past the 60-minute mark and having to sit thru both "Crying Tree of Mercury" and "Blue Skies Bring Tears?" is simply brutal.

“this time” is a really really really good song by the smashing pumpkins

this would've been an amazing instrumental album.

"raindrops + sunshowers" getting 0 is whack. textbook example of chamberlain's drumming on fantastic display.

I haven’t heard this album in 20+ years. Things I remember about it are the singles (mostly the music videos tbh), the sort of Elephant trumpeting sound on “crying tree” and yeah the drums on “raindrops + sunshowers”. Oh and I also remember t-shirt my father bought me (I guess at hot topic?)… the artwork was actually the highlight of the album for me and I loved wearing that shirt despite not being a fan of the album. Love the typography, the illustration, and those autumn-chic tones that were very late-90s, goth-starbucks aesthetic.

I remember the mix sounding very saturated and lifeless but I guess that was the trend those years.

the mix is pretty terrible, horribly muddy and flat, even by the standards of the time. a real shame because some of the songs are actually quite good beneath all that.

it’s a really strange mix, super blown out and dreamy

i'm a freak and i have always liked the way this record sounds

Oof tried to give this one a second chance and the mix sounds even worse than I remembered. Couldn’t make it past two songs, sorry.

Yeah, can I just vote for the album art?

I was so into that in grade 10. I made a cosplay of Plate VIII for art class. (Even worse: a little folding triptych based on "Bullet With Butterfly Wings", lol)

I guess this was 100% an aesthetic choice by Corgan since the other work Flood and Alan Moulder did around this era doesn’t sound like this hollow mush.

Xpost; the artwork from this album is really cool. Probably their best one next to Mellon Collie.

https://www.kafanov.com/smashing-pumpkins-kafanov

Oh hey love those customized kick drum covers!

ivy knows what’s up

the guitar/synth combinations + the occasional lightstream from iha’s ebow create these beautiful textured clouds of sound

also as murky as it is i can for some reason constantly hear the bass guitar

"try try try" is a beautiful song

yeah that’s my favorite. Otm on the sonics. Also, “glass and the ghost children” has some good space and bass

“stand beside your love” is such a stereotypically pumpkins song but it isn’t a retread, it rules

obv it's insanely overcompressed and that's why it sounds flat to ppl but that overcompression is also responsible for the extremely nasty guitar tone on "imploding voice"

it sounds like no other rock record i've heard, it alludes to loveless obv but is way more interested in being gnarled and ungainly instead of or in addition to being ethereally beautiful, which is the pumpkins thesis statement

also: zwan album and... every album corgan's released since feature far greater crimes against mixing than machina

those are just loud to the point of being imperceptible, this one has atmosphere

sorry for the one thousand posts in a row

i totally prefer the way mary star of the sea sounds over machina, it at least has gorgeous shoegazey guitar tones and isn't so muddy. the guitars on machina could be something but the mix doesn't do them any justice

if machina got a new mix that was just less horribly overcompressed it'd be such a huge improvement, but iirc the original tapes for a lot of it are missing so that wouldn't really be possible

one song where the blur of it really works though is "real love" from machina ii but nothing else really goes that far

"raindrops + sunshowers" getting 0 is whack. textbook example of chamberlain's drumming on fantastic display.

it would've been my vote in a heartbeat

https://i.imgur.com/CniAR7L.jpg

billy posted this list of songs intended for the forever-delayed reissue a few years ago and it works pretty well in sequence up until "with every light" as a closer but no one has any clue if any of this is actually the planned tracklist because he's said a million things about how many tracks will make up the proper album itself vs. bonus tracks for the reissue, what the sequence will be like, etc.

This record sounded even worse to me when it came out because I first heard it on pre-recorded cassette (probably the last album I heard that way). The record company had evidently tried to master the cassette at the same level as the CD and it was completely distorted.

idk since the machina reissue is never coming out should i try to make my own über-machina? i've seen a few attempts on youtube that work pretty well, but it's such a vast amount of material to sequence

corgan's "tracklist" makes no sense to me at all lol

i didn't even try to see if this works but it feels good for a first draft:

if there is a god (piano/vox)
i of the mourning
glass' theme
dross
stand inside your love
vanity
real love
raindrops + sunshowers
try, try, try
speed kills (machina bonus track version)
the everlasting gaze
cash car star
the imploding voice
the sacred and profane
this time
blue skies bring tears (heavy)
white spyder
the crying tree of mercury
in my body
heavy metal machine
wound
innosense
home
glass and the ghost children
if there is a god (full band)
with every light
here's to the atom bomb (machina bonus track version)
age of innocence

i accidentally cut “slow dawn” sorry “slow dawn”

no one knows if that tracklist of billy's is even intended as a sequence or anything and if it is then it pretty obviously ends up being bonus discs of b-sides at some point but no one knows where ("with every light" ending the album proper would be my best guess though). mostly i'm morbidly curious what sort of weird vision he's come up with & i wanna hear higher-fi machina ii tracks

i've attempted to sequence my own machina before but there are a lot of problems like
-the concept is pretty stupid and there isn't enough to go on to make much of it anyway
-there is a stupid amount of material and a lot of it is not great, especially the heavier tracks
-even more of the material is just 'decent not great' which makes trying to figure out whether to include it harder
-the sound of the album annoys me after a while and it all kinda blurs together

and “lucky 13,” which, both weirdly encapsulate the two primary moods of the record: mid-tempo ethereal shit and heavy rawk which is winking at you about its self-importance the entire time

xp

the only song i really wanted to cut was "heavy metal machine" but it's too important to the uh "story"

it is criminal, imo, that "vanity" was not on the album, nor was it a single

disc one would be “if there is a god” -> “this time,” disc two “blue skies” to the end. to the degree that i am familiar with the actual concept of the record (way too familiar), i am not linearly following the story but it’s less jumbled than the albums that came out. afaict things get really bad for our narrator at the start of disc two

I love Heavy Metal Machine, it has always felt like a centerpiece of the album in it's pomposity.

the only part of the album where I’m like “oh no” is the solo vocal segment on everlasting gaze

One day that box set will come. One day.