POLLcelina of the Vast Oceans - ILM artist poll #87 - SMASHING PUMPKINS (voting open until 2 April 2018)

I don't think I can not put "Go" on my ballot

ah fuck i forgot "the boy"

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.

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

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 :(

my James pick is Believe.

Blew Away will probably make my ballot, it's by far his best though The Boy is pretty good too

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...

god, I can't believe how bad "Tales of a Scorched Earth" is. I will just pretend that I never loved that song.

i hate "tales" but it's really only over the "whores/f*g" lyric

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.

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.

god "white spyder" is so badass. it sounds like garbage but that weirdly deepens its mystery (like "love")

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.

the acapella break in the everlasting gaze is still one of the weirdest moments in a sp song

goddammit i just revisited literally all of these songs a month ago, the timing of this poll, honestly.

the acapella break in the everlasting gaze is still one of the weirdest moments in a sp song

― 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

acapella break on Everlasting Gaze >>> acapella break on Frail and Bedazzled

pffft excuse me no

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

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

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."

you say i'm empty
we all know i'm full of shit

^^^ most self-aware dude ever got over the course of how many albums and comps and etc.

I may need to warm up to the 'spiders' section again. The psychedelic first half still sounds really cool.

lol xp

Chrysanthemum is the most self-aware and healthy song he's ever written imo...

oh lol i wasn't thinking about zwan but true

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"

lmao

"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

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, 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.

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

i mean the whole glass story is basically "i have contempt for my audience. this is like the wall"

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.

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

oh god i forgot there was a third version of "blue skies bring tears"

yeah I love Machina, I just don't think its 'concept' stands up to scrutiny because I don't think there's really much there. but the songs are great. Heavy Metal Machine is justified only by the concept, that they could take the most braindead butt rock riff and turn it into a satirical thing, "if i were dead would my record sell?" yet they played it at nearly every concert in 2000 and in 2007!

all right here's something embarrassing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU5-EG7eVLw

i watched this, like, daily when i was a kid. at the time (don't ask me why i know this ok i was an aspiring anime music video creator) amvs were harvested from videotape and then crudely edited together on a computer and i thought this one, set to one of my favorite sp songs and including most of my favorite series, was just sooo beautifully and almost seamlessly woven together, lol

anyway "with every light" slaps

am i the only one who thinks that 'this time' it's the best 'machina I' song and of their best?
weirdly i also became a fan with 'machina'. i can't count the nights i tried to figure out what 'glass and the ghost children' was all about, as my English back then was even poorer than it is nowadays.

lmao that's awesome brad

i love that song though, it is possibly my favorite sp track to air drum to

"The Everlasting Gaze" is funny because it's such a deliberate, forced attempt to Rawk Out With Your Old Drummer Out, but the last 20-30 seconds rocks so hard you don't care

also this might seem weird but Machina and the Manics' Know Your Enemy are inextricably linked in my mind, both seventh albums following their respective broody keyboard albums, both kinda bloated and try-hard, both with lead singles that announced "hey we're not dead!", sometimes literally

With Every Light and This Time are highlights on Machina. Sincere and moving ballads.

Y'all heard The Everlasting Gaze demo "Disco King"? a real stone jam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf7GrTnvX6g

also this might seem weird but Machina and the Manics' Know Your Enemy are inextricably linked in my mind, both seventh albums following their respective broody keyboard albums, both kinda bloated and try-hard, both with lead singles that announced "hey we're not dead!", sometimes literally

huh i like this analogy. they're also both better than their reputations suggest

I remember reading about how the cover for KYE was originally going to be a mirror (because the enemy...is YOU!!) and tbh that's almost Corgan level pretension lol

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0f/Time_youcover01.jpg

I think my ballot is done. 25 was a dastardly number to have to whittle it down to.

i had a conversation with someone recently where he declared the best pumpkins release is the 1979 ep and tbh hard to disagree

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, March 19, 2018 2:48 AM (sixteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I disagree.

The last Pumpkins album I own is Machina 1. I don't know whether to go digging in the reunion albums or stick to the stuff I used to love.

Oceania is the only one that you really need to hear, as it's excellent. 'Panopticon' in particular rules. Predictably, Brad is wrong about the record.

nah I agree with Brad - it's making all the right moves but the songs just aren't that exciting or moving

Anyhow, thinking about what tracks I vote for, several selections from MACHINA spring to mind (and no, MACHINA II isn't better - don't be daft) as well as one or two things from Pisces Iscariot ... I can only think of one track from Adore that is a no-brainer for a Pumpkins ballot.

I was excited and moved by the record, therefore yer wrong.