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

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.