This gon' be good.

SP has a fantastic catalog and I probably only know about half of it.

Saw them live just once, without Jimmy Chamberlain. They sorely missed him.

i havent said i dont like it, but its a harsh listen.

Friends and Enemies of Modern Music (13 thir13en Remaster)

Not the album 'proper' but it was a pretty mess of a release, the LP starts at track 12 Glass' Theme with the B-Side EPs preceding.

Thanks!!

Gish

…and away we go! On their debut, the Smashing Pumpkins aren’t so keen to let us in the early hints and concepts of what they’ll one day become. They have arrived with a fully realized sound with big fuzzy guitars, a stellar rhythm section, and the nasal idiosyncrasies of their unlikely charismatic frontman. Gish breaks the doors open out the gate with two cathartic blasts in I Am One and Siva, but then spend the rest of the album letting the layers unfold behind Rhinoceros, the slow tempo Crush and Suffer, building textures through Snail and Window Paine, and some good old rock in Bury Me and Tristessa. Daydream closes this out in a understated manner that harkens for me back to the Velvet Underground’s After Hours. Really, you can hear all sorts of things happening here, mostly in the layers and textures that would make them huge and famous in just one more album. On this listen, Jimmy Chamberlin really sticks out as a lynchpin of the group, giving those fuzzy guitars direction and pace. That they came out the gate with an album this good should be a pretty good indication of where things may go.

Lull EP

This seems to be largely built around Rhinoceros, a gem of a track off Gish that builds and explodes across six or so minutes and really encapsulates early Pumpkins to me. The rest is worth further listening, with the cathartic assault of Slunk grabbing you by the lapels, and the acoustic Bye June closing things out quickly, a nice change up where Corgan allows the strumming to keep a decent pace over his natural tendencies to make guitars swirl around each other on some of his slower tunes. This EP is a nice little Pumpkins shot in the arm.

Oh man, this is great, liebzz. So glad you're doing this. Please don't skip the Aeroplane Flies High box set -- if you're doing Lull and Pisces Iscariot, which kind of cover the Gish/Siamese-era b-sides, it's only right that you should open your heart to the Mellon Collie B-sides in the same way. "Box set" is a pretty semantic term too -- it's five discs with 6-7 songs each, 5 of them being repeats from Mellon Collie, so a playlist of the rest shouldn't take much longer than a traditional (albeit packed) double album. But it's some of their most eclectic, creative material -- don't miss it!

The deluxe editions that came out a number of years ago also contain a delightful scramble of oddities, with a handful of essential tracks sprinkled throughout. Perhaps best saved for a second (or third, or fourth!) time through.

The Pumkins from 1991-2000 is just hands-down some of my favorite music ever, with a special fondness for the 1991-1996 period. Unlike some of the other bands from my childhood, SP's music only seems to improve with time, with the singular, immersive sound they managed to stumble into standing out more and more brightly in my mind with each passing year. I can really throw on anything from those first five years at any time and just be transported to the happiest of happy places, though sometimes it takes some emotional fortitude to revisit it, so deeply ingrained it is into so many beautiful and bittersweet life experiences.

machina ii has some good shit. the heavy 'blue skies bring tears' is probably my favorite version of that song, with jimmy pummeling away and belting out a pretty good scream near the end. 'home' feels like the most complete song on the entire record and maybe could have been a decent single. 'lucky 13', 'white spider', and 'cash car star' are pretty good, too. shame the recording quality isn't great, but i suppose that's part of its charm at this point.

yeah, agreed, you'd kind of be doing yourself a disservice by skipping the aeroplane stuff. aeroplane might contain their strongest material, period, which is saying something considering what they were putting out at the time.

Peel Sessions EP

One more EP for the road…this one featuring Siva to open, and burning down the house. This is followed by A Girl Names Sandoz, also featured in a few years on Pisces Iscariot. This is a very solid cover that sounds every bit a Pumpkins song. The quick EP closes with Smiley, a more laid back track but a little gem nonetheless - something I was totally unaware of but happy I found this sitting around in their early catalogue.

Assignment accepted. These things are always full of surprises.

I third this. It would be wise to make a playlist of all those b-sides. It annoying that it's all split up into small divisions, but it works as little EP's because each group is thematic (covers, pop, hard rock, experimental, acoustic...).

Aeroplane is on Spotify so that makes it easy.

i wouldn recommend you to dive into the deluxe editions because there so much stuff is going to be insane.

You should come back after you finish the whole ride.

If memory serves some of them were a little hard on the ears too; Pisces Iscariot especially was ear-piercingly loud. I made a homemade mix of my favorite deluxe edition tracks and the volume jumps on the ones from the Pisces release were almost painful.

There's a lot of buried treasure in there, though.

Pisces is a good example of how prolific Billy was around that time without having to listen to 4 cds.

Pisces was actually my first SP album; I bought it simply because it was the newest product on the market at the time and I figured it would be the best jumping in point. I had no idea it wasn't a proper album in the traditional sense, and honestly I didn't really love it until after Mellon Collie came out later that year and really blew open the doors on my SP fandom. The two tracks that I really loved out of the gate were "Frail and Bedazzled" and "Girl Named Sandoz," which liebzz mentions above.

Despite the harsh sound, Pisces may also have my favorite bonus material of any of the deluxe sets; it's almost a completely second volume of the album.

The beauty of Spotify.

I must make a playlist of The Aeroplane Flies High without the actual singles. I never listen to TAFH to hear the singles.

It's true. Jimmy later admitted that he went so balls to the wall on this album because he had no idea if the band was going to "make it", so he treated it like his own personal business card, squeezing in every little chop he could. And I'm so glad he did.