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

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

my #10

3:24 this octave progression omg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS-ThN4aEDU

When you wake up you're all weak / POLLING your life away

https://i.imgur.com/UcjcOSp.jpg
2. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
218 points, 29 votes, 10 #1 votes

https://i.imgur.com/ZL2EDRT.jpg
1. Siamese Dream
252 points, 32 votes, 13 #1 votes

fair

Justice

Siamese Dream
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Gish
Pisces Iscariot
Adore

I voted for more Mellon Collie tracks, but SD is the albumest album

hard to argue with these results

sd is really beautifully paced for a record that's an hour long

close enough

re: results

I can't believe gish is only no.5. By far their most fascinating album if you ask me. So full of psychedelic goodness. The drumming always totally kills me. A monster of an album. The only album after that i liked was mellon collie as it was so varied.

first album i ever bought on CD. zero regrets.

xpost to SD pacing comment

also alex otm – had i voted, i woulda had Gish as #2.

I had Gish #2. I ignored it for a long time and was blown away when I finally looked backward from SD.

everyone feels so locked in for 45 minutes.

sd is really beautifully paced for a record that's an hour long

really all of their pre-Machina albums are perfectly paced, Billy's deep listening habits paid off when it came time to arrange his own records

Full album results:

1 Siamese Dream 252 32 13
2 Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 218 29 10
3 Adore 156 22 6
4 Pisces Iscariot 140 25 3
5 Gish 126 24 2
6 MACHINA/the machines of God 38 9 0
7 Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music 16 7 0
8 The Aeroplane Flies High 12 3 0
9 1979 EP 10 2 0
10 Lull EP 6 2 0
10 Ogilala 6 1 0
12 Rarities and B-Sides 4 1 0
14 Earphoria 2 1 0
14 Zero EP 2 1 0

Billy's deep listening habits paid off when it came time to arrange his own records

I will choose to interpret this as meaning that Corgan was a seasoned participant in Pauline Oliveros's sonic meditation exercises.

lol

http://www.crestfallen.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bc_bv.jpg

lol at no one voting for oceania

yeah i was a little surprised that ogilala (not even a pumpkins album!) was the only post-machinas album to get a vote

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.