Smashing Pumpkins: Fresh Fruit or Rotten Veg?

i asked you not to address me and you persist in doing it!!!

Okay, then just pretend that I wrote "their" instead of "his", since I ain't psychic.

fuck you for this btw

Brad, since coming back I've been posting sporodically and without incident until this sudden and to be honest totally unwarranted bout of aggression from you. Again, calm down, because you're acting like a twat.

feel like turrican should've been banned longer, perhaps forever

Okay well, I'm going to get on with talking about music and I'll leave you to talk about me and Brad to yell at whatever cloud he doesn't like the look of today.

you misgendered me again

Ah, sorry, that wasn't intentional.

*they

(I wish there was an "edit post" function on this thing)

new song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O80Kwt4zcxs

can't think of a precedent in their catalogue for this tbh! maybe some of the Teargarden singles? oh boy...

lmfao at Billy's "woah oh oh whoaa whoaa whoaaaaa" vocal being put thru a Leslie

this reminds me of ELO and Magnolia Electric Co. (!!)

Talking about Teargarden - I know that he's pretty much given up on it and junked an entire recorded albums worth of stuff in favour of his solo LP and the "reformed" Pumpkins, but it's such a shame that he hasn't seen it through to completion. As much as I didn't rate it on the whole, there were still a couple of things I liked on Monuments... and the pre-Oceania standalone singles.

I'd love to hear what that canned Monuments... follow-up sounded like. A Zwan box would be the ultimate, though!

in 2009 (lol), he said Teargarden would be 44 songs documenting "the Fool's Journey," which I always thought he followed through on, perhaps unintentionally: if you add up Monuments, Oceania, and the singles, you get about 44 songs, and as far as documenting "the Fool's Journey" - well, Billy definitely followed through on that one.

One track from the scrapped Monuments followup (Day for Night) was used as an instrumental intro to some wrestling show. "Roustabout":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTG0gMkdNs

Also keep in mind that "Solara" is a Monuments/DFN holdover - he wrote about it quite a bit when he was doing that SP Nexus blog in 2014.

wasn't "the spaniards" also supposed to be on day for night

if you add up Monuments, Oceania, and the singles, you get about 44 songs

34 by my count, so I guess Day for Night was supposed to be 10 tracks?

yes and yes

So, he was >< this close to finishing the thing and chose not to! Weird.

Was there ever a tracklisting for Day for Night out there before the release got canned?

no, just a long list of songs and song fragments worked on. not sure if it's still up but you can find all of them on the Nexus blog. it was 30+ titles at least, but that's including Monuments stuff

"alienation" is really good

in fact the last four songs are generally really inspired

how does it flow as a record? three singles so far are all pretty different

it doesn't really flow at all, it's definitely a rebranded ep

right, so not even the jarring but thought through sequence of MCIS? just a collection of songs?

yep

epic

https://flavorwire.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/billycorgan.jpg

it says...something that Billy finally gave up on making a "proper album" or overarching experience *just* as he finally managed to wrangle most of the original lineup back together, but I'm not sure what

this is pretty easily billy's best album since Zwan at least, very pleasantly surprised by this. Knights of Malta and Solara are the only weak tracks and even then neither is that bad (at least relative to a lot of their post-reunionn material). i hope billy can keep things together long enough for vol. 2

idk if i consider it as good as oceania (which i really turned around on after the sp poll) but it's encouraging for sure

Oceania still doesn't do much for me, it's not terrible but the melodies don't stick with me at all

that's exactly how i felt about it for the longest time! not sure what changed

I should give it another try, it just washed over me blankly the half-dozen or so times I tried to give it my full attention

Can’t get over the drumming

yeah mike byrne is terrible, it's a hurdle

local modern rock station is playing the new one that is vaguely in the 1979 vein, it's pretty damn good!

that's "silvery sometimes"! it's a great song

Nothing wrong with Mike Byrne's drumming on Oceania. He's no Jimmy Chamberlin, mind.

counterpoint i'm a drummer and i know what i'm talking about

Yes, so are many people. Including myself.

I personally don't understand how one can listen to the drum track on 'Panopticon' or the title track and reach the conclusion that he's a "horrible" drummer.

cool

one nice thing about the new record is there are a few vocal moments that sound like old billy. it's the best his voice has sounded since zwan imo

solo record helped him sort through some of the vocal shit?

i assume! he did sound p good on that record too. i can't imagine rick rubin worked very hard on the new one but maybe he was able to coax this quality out of billy

I imagine Rick Rubin did his usual style of producing, which is drop in every couple of weeks and lie down on a couch for a couple of hours, make suggestions and go home.

maybe the stripped down rubin shtick arrangements forced billy to care more about vocal performance. or just tea + astrology?

Billy's a Pisces, he picks up on those things.

albini plays words with friends during sessions to keep his ears fresh. rubin naps on couches during sessions to keep his rubin fresh.

"panopticon" is a ridiculously good song i always forget, but byrne is overplaying through the whole thing and has no swing, it's just like a grid of tom hits

I don't feel that Byrne is playing any more or less than Chamberlin would have done on the same track. Indeed, I've often heard criticism of Chamberlin's own playing in general that goes along similar lines - that he's too flashy, that he overplays etc. Obviously, I disagree.

I agree with you that 'Panopticon' is a ridiculously good song - just stacks of guitars playing in harmony. Superb.