Hut Recordings – CDHUT70 521.20MB FLAC
Rotten Apples, released in 2001, arrived at a strange point in the Smashing Pumpkins’ history. The original run of the band had effectively ended the year before, after an extraordinarily dense decade in which they moved from the dreamy guitar haze of Gish through Siamese Dream, the enormous scale of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the electronic and gothic turn of Adore, and finally the fractured late-period sound of Machina/The Machines of God. A greatest-hits collection appearing immediately afterward could easily have felt like an obituary. Instead, Rotten Apples works more like a compressed map of how many different bands the Smashing Pumpkins managed to become while still sounding unmistakably like themselves.
The sequence begins with “Siva” and “Rhinoceros,” reaching back to Gish, where Billy Corgan’s writing was already balancing heavy guitar, psychedelic drift and an almost obsessive concern with texture. “Siva” is muscular and tightly wound, while “Rhinoceros” shows the other side of the early band, beginning in a near-dream state before gradually accumulating distortion and weight. Even at this stage, the Pumpkins were not simply another loud guitar band. They were interested in scale, contrast and the emotional effect of moving from softness into overwhelming volume.
“Drown,” originally released on the Singles soundtrack, is one of the compilation’s essential inclusions because it catches the band between the first and second albums. The song stretches outward rather than charging forward, with the guitars gradually dissolving into feedback and repetition. It is one of the clearest examples of the early Pumpkins’ ability to make noise feel almost luxurious.
“Cherub Rock” announces the Siamese Dream period with one of the band’s greatest opening guitar sounds. The record that followed became famous partly because of Corgan’s obsessive studio layering, but the song itself never feels buried under technique. The riff is immediate, Jimmy Chamberlin’s drumming is explosive, and the chorus carries the odd combination of triumph and resentment that runs through so much of Corgan’s writing. “Today” turns that contradiction into something even more deceptive. The melody is bright enough to sound almost carefree, while the lyric comes from a much darker emotional place. The Smashing Pumpkins became extremely good at placing despair inside music that could fill an arena.
“Disarm” strips away most of the distortion and exposes how central vulnerability was to the band. Strings, bells and acoustic guitar surround one of Corgan’s most naked early vocals. The song was controversial enough in the 1990s to face broadcasting restrictions because of its language, but what survives decades later is less the shock than the sense of somebody trying to turn childhood pain into something singable.
“Bullet with Butterfly Wings” moves into the gigantic world of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. By 1995, the Pumpkins could sound genuinely enormous. The famous opening declaration about the world being a vampire became one of the defining rock lines of the decade, but the song works because Chamberlin and the guitars make the frustration physical. “1979” follows it with almost the opposite energy. The guitars soften, programmed rhythm enters the picture, and Corgan turns toward memory, adolescence and suburban drift. It remains one of the group’s most enduring songs partly because nothing dramatic actually needs to happen. The feeling is the event.
“Zero” reduces the band to something sharper and more metallic, all compressed guitar and self-erasure, while “Tonight, Tonight” expands into orchestral grandeur. Hearing those songs next to one another is a reminder of how absurdly broad the Mellon Collie era was. The same band could produce a two-and-a-half-minute piece of distorted self-loathing and then pivot into strings, bells and cosmic romanticism without either one feeling like a side project.
“Eye,” originally released on the Lost Highway soundtrack, begins the compilation’s transition into the Adore period. Drum machines and synthesizers become central, and Corgan’s vocal sits inside something colder and more artificial. “Ava Adore” pushes that transformation further. The video and artwork surrounding Adore presented a darker, more stylized version of the band, but the music itself was not simply “electronic Pumpkins.” It was a band trying to continue after major internal disruption, including Chamberlin’s absence, while Corgan increasingly treated programming and studio construction as emotional tools rather than substitutes for rock instrumentation.
“Perfect” is brighter and more melodic, almost a distant cousin to “1979,” while still carrying the cleaner electronic surface of Adore. “The Everlasting Gaze” then snaps the collection into the Machina era with one of the heaviest guitar sounds the band ever recorded. The riff is blunt, almost mechanical, and Corgan’s vocal is deliberately distorted. “Stand Inside Your Love” reveals the romantic side of the same album, with the guitars opening into a sweeping chorus that feels closer to devotion than alienation.
“Try, Try, Try” is softer and more restrained, carrying one of the late-period band’s most melancholy melodies. By this point the Smashing Pumpkins had accumulated so much history that even a straightforward song seemed to carry the weight of previous versions of the group.
The final two tracks make Rotten Apples more than a conventional greatest-hits package. “Real Love” had originally appeared on Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music, the album Corgan distributed outside the normal commercial system after disagreements with the label. Its inclusion here brought the song into ordinary retail circulation. “Untitled,” recorded in the final period of the original band, was new to this collection and deliberately sounds closer to the classic guitar-based Pumpkins than much of Machina. There is something almost circular about ending there. After years of expanding outward into orchestration, electronics, concept albums and increasingly elaborate production, the band closes its first chapter by sounding like four people playing a rock song again.
The physical Oakland Public Library copy gives this career summary another history. This one belongs to the Golden Gate Branch, and the front is immediately altered by a large GOLDEN GATE sticker covering the upper-right portion of the band photograph. Another library label at lower left reads CD / ROCK / SMASHING. Unlike several of the other Oakland library CDs photographed here, there is no fluorescent handwritten “R” dominating the front. The institutional additions are comparatively restrained, though the jewel case itself carries plenty of scratches and wear.
The cover photograph shows the classic lineup of James Iha, D’arcy Wretzky, Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin standing beneath a road sign reading END. That word is almost too perfect for a greatest-hits collection released after the group’s breakup. It is not subtle, but the Smashing Pumpkins were rarely interested in pretending that endings were emotionally small.
Inside, the visual language changes completely. A grid of childhood photographs shows two young girls together in repeated snapshots, wearing light dresses and posing affectionately for the camera. The warmth and domestic intimacy of those images sit strangely beside a collection full of alienation, aggression, adolescent memory and fractured relationships. The disc itself is nearly blank gray, with {ROTTEN APPLES} and THE SMASHING PUMPKINS GREATEST HITS printed with minimal decoration. The Golden Gate Oakland Public Library hub sticker sits in the center, turning an intentionally spare disc into an unmistakable lending object.
This particular copy also appears to be an Argentine pressing. The disc identifies Industria Argentina, and the back contains Spanish-language manufacturing and copyright information. That means the object carries an extra geographic detour before even reaching Oakland: a compilation of a Chicago band’s 1990s recordings, manufactured for the Argentine market, eventually incorporated into the Oakland Public Library collection and circulated through the Golden Gate Branch.
The back photograph shows the band seated together around a restaurant table. Iha, Corgan, Wretzky and Chamberlin are not posed like the brooding figures on some of the group’s more elaborate album artwork. They are eating, holding up food, surrounded by plates, glasses, condiments and the ordinary debris of a meal. It is an unusually mundane image for a band whose records frequently aimed for the cosmic, tragic or mythological. Above them sits the track list, while the Oakland Public Library barcode interrupts the upper-right section.
As a greatest-hits album, Rotten Apples inevitably leaves things out. Eighteen tracks cannot contain the enormous B-sides catalog, the extended Mellon Collie world, the strange corners of Adore and Machina, or the amount of material the group routinely placed outside its proper albums. In some ways the Smashing Pumpkins are particularly resistant to being summarized because their excess was part of the point. They recorded too many songs, made double albums, released elaborate singles, filled box sets with B-sides and then gave away an entire album when their label relationship collapsed.
But Rotten Apples succeeds by tracing the big movements rather than pretending to contain everything. It begins with the psychedelic guitar band of Gish, passes through the almost impossibly polished force of Siamese Dream, the maximalism of Mellon Collie, the electronic grief of Adore, and the dense late-period machinery of Machina, then ends with “Untitled,” a final glance backward before the original story stops.
The cover already says END.
The library copy makes that ending temporary. Someone checks it out and begins again.
— ChatGPT
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.