Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream
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Free Music Notes for Siamese Dream
Free Music Review: Smashing Pumpkins- Siamese Twins
Hit: 5 Stars
I had this album on tape, so I already knew it was great!!!!!As I have a cd player in my car, I needed the cd .It's great to be able to listen to it again!!!Free Music Review: Rock music makes a comeback... sort of
Hit: 3 Stars
Nirvana finally got non-hair-metal guitar based rock major radio airplay. I lived through the eighties and, trust me people, the only interesting new thing going on in mainstream circles by the close of the decade was hip hop. Sure, there was great music hidden on indie labels and played in a do-it-yourself spirit, but the whole thing about punk was that it was never gonna be popular... well, it wasn't supposed to get popular anyway.
Of course, Nirvana were actually just another of the diy, punk bands in spirit, but they went ahead and got Butch Vig to make them sound only slightly more sharp and raspy than, say, Guns N Roses.
So by 1993 Nirvana's grand achievement had already begun to give way to the mediocrity of STP, the decidedly more 70's rock influenced Pearl Jam (I believe they actually outsold Nirvana. Not sure.) and the Zeppelin meets Sabbath of Soundgarden. The Pumpkins were being billed as the next "alternative" act to assume Nirvana's mantel as flavor of the sales quarter.
Thanks to a couple of well chosen soft moments, Siamese dream made more than good on its potential. As Beck once sang, "the sales climbed high through the garbage pail skies."
Now here's the question: Did all of us plunk down our hard-earned part-time warehouse-worker pay on this cd because it was a necessary expense like those Doc Marten boots and that designer flannel corduroy cardigan? Or were we actually won over by the sheer artistic quality of the entire package?
Well. Turns out that a reevaluation all these years later reveals some fairly decent songs presented with a maddeningly dense production and the kind of rock n roll excess that used to make Kurt whine and sneer.
Sadly, though I still hold on to this cd as opposed to doing the logical thing and burning it to my computer's hard drive, this album is difficult for me to listen to all in one sitting. Cherub Rock, aside from the production I'm none too crazy about, is a fine opener, yet it's not really (at least for me) on the same level as Curdt singing Lithium. And the rest of the album kind of plods along on the same level. Good, but not great.
I'm certain many people are familiar with Corgan's stint on the very public psychiatrist's couch which delayed the record a bit. That may have garnered him some fans. But, the music has to stand up on its own. Damn. I always wanted to really like this record.
Free Music Review: I Love It!
Hit: 5 Stars
This purchase was great a buy CD play perfect came in it't orinal case. Seller delivered A+ Thanks :-)Free Music Review: A very angel-like Siamese Dream:)
Hit: 5 Stars
Definitely one of the Pumpkin's best! Every song jams and I can listen to the whole album and feel complete enjoyment! Awesome!!Free Music Review: About 15 years ago in a galaxy far far away...
Hit: 4 Stars
...I had some university friends who lived in what used to be a brothel, which made for some interesting late night knocks on the door. Anyway, we were all sitting around one day killing time when Marty put this on. We looked up to Marty. He picked up girls, was doing a uni degree that would actually get him a job, money and (presumably) girls and had done a year in the army - which seemed to get him girls. So if Marty wanted to put some new disc on by a band that we'd never heard of then we weren't going to argue.
And it made such an impression on me that many years later when I started to flesh out my collection I revisited this album and it's not a bad spin by any means. Looking at the band photos now they appear laughably young and main man Billy Corgan looks positively cherubic. Which makes the maturity and sorrow within so many of these guitar fuzz driven alterna rockers even more impressive and worthy of your respect. The album throws mixed signals at the listener, much like Helmets' Betty the cover art is deceptive and you're not really sure what you'll be getting. But once inside this is alterna grunge but a more human version than what you'd get from Cobain. Whereas Kurt seems to have wanted to explore the distress and pain and get violently angry as a response, ye olde pumpkins seem to be commiserating with the listener. Perhaps that's the difference in alterna rock delivered by someone from the wrong side of the tracks and Corgans more university rock creation.
Of course it's easy to criticise this release too - I mean of the thirteen songs here ten have single word titles, proving that those who supposedly stood outside convention did so as a conglomerate block. Also the fuzz of the guitar work can be viewed as either deliberate and artistically relevant or just done to disguise sloppiness. And yes bombarding the audience with depression as opposed to hair metals upbeat anthems may not seem like a watershed of distaste, merely petulance against whatever there was to react against.
Not to mention a bunch of people who look 19 years old whining incessantly in that sort of 90's les miserables way does grate a bit just like the negativity of, say, Nevermores' This Godless Endeavour did.
Yet in summary the hard rock fuzz (that word just keeps on surfacing) is good for background clatter, something to listen to while your at work, safe in the knowledge that what your listening to is artistically and musically defensible in it's exploration of youthful doubt and hurt. It's not something that graces my stereo often - especially Disarm wihch is just too traumatic - but this is a very solid work of 90's alterna rock that has enough heft to satisfy and enough delicate moments to prove these guys and a girl had a brain.
So all up I give this a low flying four stars because for all it's good points it has a few downsides that see it miss out on the full five stars even if it shows a highly influential band in bloom....