smashing orange vs drop nineteens (or: america didn't go shoegaze)

I own "Delaware". Haven't played it in years. I think I may be frightened to, i.e. worried it will sound dreadful to me now. I think Drop Nineteens just folded after the second album. Greg Ackell seems to have disappeared, and the only one-time member who I know is still making music is Paula Kelley.

Little known fact: Radiohead once supported Drop Nineteens.

Apparently they got signed w/o having ever performed live...that's my little tidbit of info.

Here's yer trivia -- the two of them had a band going called Hot Rod after she left the Drop Nineteens, and their one album I know of is I think better than Delaware. OOP, but worth scrounging.

Smashing Orange -- heard of, but another Smashing band came along and all. And I have to say that while Les Pumpkins were hardly American shoegaze per se, Billy C. is an open Kevin Shields fan, so maybe they were the most successful of the bunch in the end...

I wish this band had continued to do what they did best...who knows, they could still be competing with The Pixies!

Have been on a bit of a Smashing Orange revival lately. Their early singles kind of anticipate Dandy Warhols/BJM (though without the jokey aspects). At least one song, Sugar, is an out-and-out classic, even though I wish the sound was beefier. All are collected on the 1991 CD.

1st real album The Glass Bead Game is about 1/2 great, kind of a mix of shoegaze and biker rock. Has 2-3 essential tracks. Dirt cheap used. All Girls Are Mine sticks out as a good one to sample. Given that basically nobody in the US seems to know who SO were, this is a pretty underrated CD.

2nd album No Return in the End really isn't bad. Consider what it'll cost to get a copy (like $1 or something, since it's hard to find on filesharing) it's worth picking up for a couple of songs.

Really prefer them to Drop Nineteens. They kind of had the right idea, but never completely matched sound/production and songwriting for a full album. Too bad. Given how much I liked Monica Bullette's mp3 album, it'd be nice if her project The Sky Drops w/Smashing Orange's singer worked out well...what I've heard so far has been kind of meh.

'ANGEL' = the best madonna cover ever to my mind.

I saw Smashing Orange open for Ride (or was it Lush?) at Maxwells in Hoboken, NJ back in 91 (or was it 90?). They were excellent. Able to create that same dense wall of juicy guitar magic the aforementioned did so well. They were def. drinking from the same pool as the English bands of the time and it was good to hear.

That 1991 CD is a good one...think I reviewed it for the AMG, maybe. Maybe not!

Said Madonna cover is good but Long Fin Killie's smokes it.

(downloads Long Fin Killie's version)

Good, good...

I mostly agree w/dlp9001 above. Glass Bead Game had a hard rocking side that the UK bands (what I've heard) didn't. An unreliable source told me he saw them live around this time and they were doing Iron Maiden-like feet-on-monitors/guitar-as-machine-gun moves, and I want to believe this.

Smashing Orange were great. Finally there's somewhere I can say this. Nobody else seems to have heard of them. I never saw them live, I don't know if they ever came to Britain. I can't remember reading about them in the music press. I only heard about them because someone (who I never met) stuck My Deranged Heart and Only Complete In You on the end of a Ride bootleg tape for me in the summer of 91. I then tried and completely failed to find anything by them in any record shop (but endless shop assistants who said 'don't you mean Smashing Pumpkins?'). Eventually, two years later, I found a couple of CDs of theirs. I don't think either of these are proper albums - they both only have seven tracks on. One of them is called 'Above Ming Gardens' (tracks: sugar, cherry rider, whenever, my deranged heart, not very much to see, collide, only complete in you) and the other doesn't even have a name (and has different versions of my deranged heart and only complete in you plus strange young girls, sidewinder, just before i come, felt like nothing, any further it's over). I love both of these, but didn't win anybody else over to them, and for all I knew they'd already split up by that time.

You know, I finally tracked down a cheap copy of the Love American Style album (Rob Montejo's post-Smashing CD from 1997) and once again there's some great stuff on it, and nothing particularly awful. It's more in the vein of the "1991" shoegaze sound, but with better production. I'd expected it to suck, but it does not.

Adding this video, as the album is pretty hard to find/search for. Coming around to thinking that at least a big chunk of this CD is pretty great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao4x0VcW22k

I'm glad there's another Smashing Orange fan here. Honestly I've only ever owned Glass Bead Game but this ^ sounds great, thanks!

Thanks for the mail dlp!!!

Nice, I'll hunt that down. I hadn't known of it. "My Deranged Heart"/"Only Complete in You" is probably one of my most-played 7 inches.