Bang Bang You're Dead... POLL In Your Head - ILM Artist Poll #87 - SMASHING PUMPKINS - Results

I've only listened to Machina II in full twice, via crappy YouTube rip... I can do without the stuff on the EPs (apart from 'Vanity') but the album itself is OK.

https://i.imgur.com/9jxeIF8.jpg
6. Machina/The Machines of God
38 points, 9 votes

i voted for machina real high so i'm glad it got this far and beat machina ii

also i love that the 1979 ep technically placed twice

it's got "cherry" and "jerry" on it so it deserves it

Machina made my ballot at the last minute, it's definitely flawed but so much of it is great.

definitely grew to appreciate Machina I more with this poll. there's easily a great album between the best of the two Machinas though it could really use a redone mix

https://i.imgur.com/shNXrn1.jpg
5. Gish
126 points, 24 votes, 2 #1 votes

I should listen more to Gish. I never completely clicked with it as such, although I never disliked it and like a couple of songs a lot. It sometimes feels like Jane's Addiction worship to me. This version of "Bury Me" is pretty great, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW3f2k6zb7Y

That was minutes after D'arcy and James broke up.

cumulative effect of gish is so great and captures them in a really interesting protean state (between their post-punky beginnings and the less psychedelic more candied sound of sd) where they were extremely focused on floral patterns and guitar solos and which they basically never revisited again except in brief flashes like "hummer" and "rocket"

it confused me a lot when i first heard it when i was 13. billy with long hair almost felt like a different band to me (and kinda still does)

I forgot that Wretzky and Iha ever dated.

My favourite songs on it are Rhinoceros and Snail which are the closest to where they went on Siamese Dream. The rest feels very different in sensibility to anything else they did pretty much.

lmao the intro to that video sund4r posted

Long haired Jimmy is the weirdest

i like james' taste in dresses

If Adore is above Gish then it's too high.

it is not

Billy making do with a broken low E string like a minute into the song

it....clearly is! xps

this isn't the first time i'll say this itt but jimmy's a fucking monster

since i started learning drums a year ago i've begun to understand exactly what he's doing on each track and it's incomprehensible and humbling

he's also an extremely busy player but few of his parts ever feel busy which is remarkable

so breezy and musical yet so dense

Jimmy is probably my favourite rock drummer ever

Bury Me is so good. That wound up placing high on my ballot, even beating a certain other great Jimmy track. I never owned this on CD so I was less familiar with it before now. Bury Me, Snail, Rhinoceros, and Crush are the ones I love most.

it was so frustrating seeing them in 94 & watching Billy keep getting ahead of Jimmy, trying to speed up the songs midway through. of course Jimmy was up to it but it felt like a dick move & it didn't make the songs better because they kept changing awkwardly.

https://i.imgur.com/RLZ4J0N.jpg
4. Pisces Iscariot
140 points, 25 votes, 3 #1 votes

well i wasn't expecting adore to beat pisces with this crowd so i concede that my first favorite album of all time is prob too high for most

I rarely pull PI out but it really is the most cohesive outtakes record ever

i more readily listen to pisces than sd these days. also i almost made "whir" no. 1 on my ballot

Same for me, and I've 'Whir' up there too.

Pisces is very solid for an outtakes comp but most of it does feel like outtakes for a reason to me. The few tracks that don't though are incredible - Blew Away is James' best, Starla is great obviously, no idea how Obscured didn't make Gish. Whir is nice too but I wouldn't really trade anything on Siamese Dream for it.

fwiw I rated Adore really high on albums but only picked 1 song for my ballot. maybe a lot of others did the same? it works the best as a regular album out of all of them imo

xp Obscured was recorded for SD

I did the same, flappy

fwiw I rated Adore really high on albums but only picked 1 song for my ballot. maybe a lot of others did the same? it works the best as a regular album out of all of them imo

oh good i'm glad someone else thinks this

https://i.imgur.com/Ic8dhTa.jpg
3. Adore
156 points, 22 votes, 6 #1 votes

SD is so cohesive, even monochromatic in its sound, and even though the songs on Adore can be pretty different in style or production (like Appels + Oranjes vs. Dusty + Pistol Pete vs. Ava Adore vs. To Sheila), the feeling of wandering and being lost runs through Adore in a really compelling way. and the way it begins so hopefully with To Sheila and ends on such a down note with Blank Page.

I think SD would just edge out Adore as best to listen to as a whole for me these days. Adore is a little too long but I suppose that does add to the feeling of getting lost in it. Shame through to Blank Page is probably my favourite sequence on any of their albums.

just realized I still have my original CD copies of PI and MCIS, o happy day

they're similar in the sense that they're both really desperate and reaching, big gamble records, where on SD they were determined not to make a dog of an album and go back to working in record stores and serving coffee, and on Adore they're searching like I said and trying to come to terms with losing Jimmy.

and that's not even getting into the lyrics

I don't really know how to reconcile 'Adore is too long' with 'Eye should probably have been put on it somewhere' and the only thing I'd definitely cut is Annie-Dog

Shame through to Blank Page is probably my favourite sequence on any of their albums

otm. hit after hit. the atmosphere they get out of a song as simple as "shame" is remarkable

Gish is sounding pretty nice now. "Snail" is really good. Maybe it just sounded too much like other things of the time in the 90s, idk? P sure Adore will never really be my thing but it was def a daring move for them.

XP

That makes three of us!

whoever said Snail is like the MCIS epics condensed into 4 minutes is so so so OTM

every guitar line in "snail" is fucking amazing

it was painful to not be able to vote for it

very close to the phrasing and delivery on the album, also Billy's voice is uncharacteristically warm and gentle and not screechy, more so than on the take that's on the album

I uh lost ttack at the end here. Prayers answered etc. Well done, folks. Great top 10. Thx ufo

Frail & Bedazzled
Mayonaise
Thru the Eyes of Ruby
Rhinoceros
Hello Kitty Kat
Starla
Drown
Shame
Thirty-Three
Hummer
Obscured
Bodies
Quiet
Plume
Rocket
Crush
Cherry
Muzzle
Set the Ray to Jerry
Blank Page
Glynis
Galapogos
Rotten Apples
Medellia of the Gray Skies
Siva

Is it just me or are the lyrics particularly execrable on BWBW?

― startled macropod (MatthewK), Friday, April 6, 2018 5:44 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk i love them. they're fuckin dumb and great

as i said on the other thread when i first saw the video for this on mtv i thought it was the coolest thing i'd heard/saw. i also think it was the first song i ever heard where the title didn't appear at all in the lyrics

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Friday, April 6, 2018 8:47 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This song was sort of the breaking point for me with SP back in the 1990s. I remember a friend pointing out that the local alt rock station kept playing it right when her clock radio went off, so she kept waking up to "the world is a vampire..." for a week or something. We all scoffed at how dumb the lyric was. But now I like how Brad puts it: "fuckin dumb and great".

Ha, I think that's three or four of us who m/l went off the band when this single came out the first time around. (I partly came around on it too.)

My breaking point was Everlasting Gaze which was such a complete DNW that I dont even think I realized for a while that I had gone off them completely

cool, haven't seen this in a while, just uploaded by Apathy Video.

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

not much live footage of Billy playing piano on the Adore tour (or at all really, until his solo record & tour last year)

My breaking point was Everlasting Gaze which was such a complete DNW that I dont even think I realized for a while that I had gone off them completely

― bedraggled vorticist (Drugs A. Money), Friday, April 13, 2018 1:27 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And so many in here saying BWBW was the immediate buzzkill, and maybe not itt but certainly elsewhere that goes for Ava Adore, too. I wonder what would've happened if Billy got his way and actually released Jellybelly as the lead single from MCIS. No doubt it would've been less successful - I mean what was he thinking? BWBW second single??

the flow of the singles from MCIS is really cool, must've been weird to live through them. BWBW into 1979 into Zero into Tonight, Tonight into Thirty-three. Like what if Jonathan survived and the original lineup stuck together and put out Muzzle as planned for the fifth single? and Zero wasn't really a hit right? The video rules but that one is definitely less known than the videos for the rest of the record, including Thirty-three. But it's still one of their iconic songs.

I didn’t vote for “Silverfuck” but I should have. It’s like an Underworld track only played on rock instruments.

What is a good Underworld epic with OTT dynamics?

"moaner"

not much live footage of Billy playing piano on the Adore tour (or at all really, until his solo record & tour last year)

― flappy bird, Friday, April 13, 2018 9:07 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i saw that fashion awards performance on tv when it happened! it's probably why "crestfallen" is one of my favorite songs

I can't believe only DAM & I voted for Rotten Apples

btw don't think i ever posted this summer 1993 performance of Hummer from Fruit Bat Salad... it's sooo much slower than almost all of the SD-era shows, really it's one of the few existing recordings (and only video afaik) of them playing it at the same speed as it is on SD. anyway it's a sweet video, they're playing at the Unicorn a year later, July 1993, band has already way outgrown the club they're in, it's bizarre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E_C6L2D_pY

like for context this was the same club only a year before. they all sing jimmy happy birthday at the beginning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wEEkb4zBwU

https://www.reddit.com/r/smashingpumpkins/comments/8eefpl

Whaddaya think? I think we did this.

definitely ILM, and also SP doing a tour to promote this thread

that is only about 20k plays per poster, and I certainly did my part

I didn't use Spotify at all but I will take partial credit for this bump

Really regret not voting for Drown. Essential. The road is long...

bought tickets to see them play live for my first time. setlists from last year are pretty good, so I'm cautiously optimistic for a good show. probably should listen to Cyr to prepare.

great thread to reread on a long flight, thanks again to ufo and to everyone. particularly struck by this wonderful post from how's life:

I was a a Drown #1 voter. Got the Singles Soundtrack the week it came out. Took it out to the swimming hole every day and played it on the boombox while we swam. On top of just being a mighty, majestic song, the feedback solo was probably the first thing like that I ever heard and just the way it moved around like the river flowing and the wind and sunshine through the trees. It was like natural and alien at the same time. I wasn't getting high yet - just this ultimate feeling of being 13 years old and totally free. That one and May This Be Love were my favorite tracks on the album - the aquatic tunes.