someone pls scrounge up those old Pumpkins msg board posts from where Billy asked people to guess as to the "plot" of Machina and pointed out who got closest
― Simon H., Monday, 19 March 2018 15:38 (six years ago) link
At 15/16, I was definitely more taken with the Machina artwork than the music. I was taking a few hours of art classes every day in high school, and that album art definitely crept into some of what I was doing.
Seems kind of brown now that I look at it again.
― jmm, Monday, March 19, 2018 8:37 AM (twenty-six seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
lmao
i looooooved the machina art. the "imploding voice" art with the androgynous figure seizing a single wave was my shit
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 15:39 (six years ago) link
― Simon H., Monday, March 19, 2018 8:38 AM (fifty-one seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
iirc i actually submitted to this at the time. i was very wrong iirc but who could've guessed the story was that dumb (j/k my idea of it at age 13 probably wasn't any more sophisticated)
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 15:40 (six years ago) link
tbh whenever I see the Machina cover art I think of Bobby Sands' cell walls in Hunger
― Simon H., Monday, 19 March 2018 15:41 (six years ago) link
Oh yeah, I can't believe I forgot this, but I even made a costume of this guy.
https://i.imgur.com/nvlpEgY.png
― jmm, Monday, 19 March 2018 15:42 (six years ago) link
lmao that's awesome
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 15:42 (six years ago) link
brad I will now forever choose to think that billy read your submission and said "fuck that's actually better" and that's what precipitated the original breakup
― Simon H., Monday, 19 March 2018 15:42 (six years ago) link
my biggest literary influences at age 13 were billy corgan and sylvia plath, there's no way it was better
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 15:43 (six years ago) link
I just remembered Blinking with Fists.
― Simon H., Monday, 19 March 2018 15:44 (six years ago) link
i bought it! it's awful
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 15:44 (six years ago) link
but it is a book with a jt leroy blurb on it
ugh now that i'm hearing it i really want to put "innosense" on my ballot
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 15:46 (six years ago) link
it's like the gentlest song he ever wrote along with "luna"
lmao holy shit
― Simon H., Monday, 19 March 2018 15:47 (six years ago) link
I don't think I can not put "Go" on my ballot
ah fuck i forgot "the boy"
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 15:48 (six years ago) link
the problem of james
anybody considering pre-Gish material? it's minor work, though many great songs: There It Goes, She, My Eternity, Jennifer Ever, Razor...
xp if I were to include one, Blew Away would be my James pick.
― flappy bird, Monday, 19 March 2018 15:50 (six years ago) link
Stand Inside Your Love is indeed fantastic, the production of that album is just an unfathomable mess though... and its not as if its aged badly, it sounded like some sort of mastering error at the time
― jamiesummerz, Monday, 19 March 2018 15:50 (six years ago) link
i thought about the pre-gish material but none of it really stacks up with the rest. gish is a huge leap and barely any of it figures into my ballot :(
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 15:51 (six years ago) link
my James pick is Believe.
― jamiesummerz, Monday, 19 March 2018 15:51 (six years ago) link
Blew Away will probably make my ballot, it's by far his best though The Boy is pretty good too
― ufo, Monday, 19 March 2018 15:51 (six years ago) link
I don't know how he went from the vocals on Adore, by far his best singing on a record, to Machina, where so many of the songs have the vocals mixed way too high and not double tracked or effected in any way.
xxp it is amazing how much of a leap Gish is from the late 80s material. and yeah, most of the songs on that record are far superior live imo, save for a special few...
― flappy bird, Monday, 19 March 2018 15:53 (six years ago) link
god, I can't believe how bad "Tales of a Scorched Earth" is. I will just pretend that I never loved that song.
― jmm, Monday, 19 March 2018 15:53 (six years ago) link
i hate "tales" but it's really only over the "whores/f*g" lyric
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 15:54 (six years ago) link
where so many of the songs have the vocals mixed way too high and not double tracked or effected in any way
astonishingly this got worse and worse with zwan and zeitgeist and etc. etc.
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 15:55 (six years ago) link
One of my favorites. A song that rides the edge of a cliff. The most extreme the band got before Machina. The lyrics are such a perfect expression of frustrated teenage nihilism.
― flappy bird, Monday, 19 March 2018 15:56 (six years ago) link
god "white spyder" is so badass. it sounds like garbage but that weirdly deepens its mystery (like "love")
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 15:56 (six years ago) link
xxp TOASE I mean...
and yeah, a lot of my issues with the post-2000 material comes down to the way the vocals are mixed. There are some great songs in there that are rendered near unlistenable because of the mix.
― flappy bird, Monday, 19 March 2018 15:57 (six years ago) link
the acapella break in the everlasting gaze is still one of the weirdest moments in a sp song
― ufo, Monday, 19 March 2018 16:01 (six years ago) link
goddammit i just revisited literally all of these songs a month ago, the timing of this poll, honestly.
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 16:02 (six years ago) link
― ufo, Monday, March 19, 2018 9:01 AM (fifteen seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
lol i remember hearing this for the first time, they had a stream of the song on... amazon???? before the album came out, and when i heard the a capella part i was like "that is certainly a choice"
i love that song though, it is possibly my favorite sp track to air drum to
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 16:03 (six years ago) link
acapella break on Everlasting Gaze >>> acapella break on Frail and Bedazzled
― flappy bird, Monday, 19 March 2018 16:05 (six years ago) link
pffft excuse me no
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 16:05 (six years ago) link
first half of "glass and the ghost children" is the weirdest most ambitious thing billy ever wrote i think, followed up only by "mary star of the sea" and then he generally stopped making songs like this
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 16:07 (six years ago) link
i'd also like to out myself early on as a real big fan of the delusions of grandeur/godhood interview tape warping over the piano figure. "spiders" half of the song is really lovely too
in other words "glass and the ghost children" is on my ballot
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 16:09 (six years ago) link
I love every part of Glass and the Ghost Children. a lyrical masterpiece. "and she counted the spiders as they crawled up inside her" is a beautiful coda. and one of my favorite opening lines ever: "to the center of the earth / or anywhere god decides."
― flappy bird, Monday, 19 March 2018 16:16 (six years ago) link
you say i'm emptywe all know i'm full of shit
^^^ most self-aware dude ever got over the course of how many albums and comps and etc.
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 16:21 (six years ago) link
I may need to warm up to the 'spiders' section again. The psychedelic first half still sounds really cool.
― jmm, Monday, 19 March 2018 16:21 (six years ago) link
lol xp
Chrysanthemum is the most self-aware and healthy song he's ever written imo...
― flappy bird, Monday, 19 March 2018 16:22 (six years ago) link
oh lol i wasn't thinking about zwan but true
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 16:23 (six years ago) link
re: the bad vocals/mixing post-Adore, I believe he took voice lessons (lol) so I assume his thought process was along the lines of, "now that my voice is a PERFECT INSTRUMENT I'm not going to try to bury it"
― had (crüt), Monday, 19 March 2018 16:34 (six years ago) link
― Simon H., Monday, 19 March 2018 16:35 (six years ago) link
"a flower's still a flower crushed to dust inside my hand"
as verbose and obtuse he can be, i'm just in awe of that line and how it so eloquently conveys the self-destruction of SP, how he drove it into the ground, and yet how beautiful it was and how beautiful it remains. "we were going somewhere." it's just a marvel of a lyric & song, the optimistic inverse of Jellybelly.
xxp
― flappy bird, Monday, 19 March 2018 16:35 (six years ago) link
― had (crüt), Monday, March 19, 2018 12:34 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
he took voice lessons before Adore, and it shows. the vocals on every record after that are inexplicable, though I chalk up most of his inexplicable creative decisions to psychosis brought on by the relative failure and rejection of Adore. he hasn't made a truly thru and thru sincere record since then, with the exception of Ogilala.
― flappy bird, Monday, 19 March 2018 16:37 (six years ago) link
one of the things i for some reason really enjoy thinking about whenever i reengage with my sp fandom is how this Objectively Ridiculous person made Objectively Ridiculous music but there's something about the particular presentation, the particular collapse of influences (deep goth genuinely loves boston and cheap trick and queen but we're in the '90s!) in the first five records that makes it work where everything since (aside from like 70 percent of the zwan discography and parts of future embrace and ogilala) has felt undermined or outright ruined by second guessing, which i guess if you're an Objectively Ridiculous person the moment you start questioning yourself is where the nimbus of your exaggerated personality falls apart, where you just kinda stand revealed as this kinda weird dumb baby who had interesting taste and a consuming totality of vision which wasn't ever exactly intelligent or consistent but which was still oddly mesmerizing and you can't ever get back to that bc you have care too much about what your audience thinks or wants and have so much contempt for it
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 16:46 (six years ago) link
i mean the whole glass story is basically "i have contempt for my audience. this is like the wall"
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 16:48 (six years ago) link
I think he panicked as soon as Adore was finished and knew the end or the inevitable decline of the band was coming and he couldn't let SP go out with anything but a super BANG! so how do you top MCIS? I guess he thought the answer was actually making a concept album.
― flappy bird, Monday, 19 March 2018 16:50 (six years ago) link
i guess i don't blame him and the approach produced some of his best work imo but like what is the purpose of a song like "heavy metal machine," it's performative rock
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 16:54 (six years ago) link
oh god i forgot there was a third version of "blue skies bring tears"
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, 19 March 2018 17:14 (six years ago) link