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

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.