Tuesday, May. 06, 2014 | 09:02
Smashing Pumpkins - Gish
i was ambivalent towards The Smashing Pumpkins. great riffs, great solos, some interesting lyrics, but they also felt very derivative. a lot of classic rock stuff i knew, like Pink Floyd and Led Aeppelin, showed up in Smashing Pumpkins songs. it wasn't as blatant as Oasis or "Silent Lucidity", but i couldn't fully embrace their music because i kept hearing other things. strangely, their success worked in their favor, as the omnipresence of the "Disarm" video brought me around to getting 'Siamese Dream'.
i liked the singles from 'Melon Collie', but the album has a lot of muddy, nondescript riffs that i wasn't ready for. that experience kept me from going further in either direction and i stuck with what i had: 'Siamese Dream' and the "Zero" single. i should have kept "Zero", but i sold it thinking i'd get the singles set. that, sadly, never happened.
i think i would have enjoyed 'Gish' then. it's very rock, and not at all grunge. good, if overblown and full of itself. which is another strange thing. i'm often drawn to self-indulgence in rock, be it weird or over the top, but that part of The Smashing Pumpkins repelled me. in other words, i reacted to their music opposite from how i reacted to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, getting into them at the start then not pursuing them, while it took me longer to get into the others but i stuck with them.
