Smashing pumpkins gish

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Gish

The Smashing Pumpkins Caroline; 1 991

originally published September 30, 2010 on Probably Just Hungry

A highly emotional Black Sabbath. A overly sensitive Led Zeppelin. A Van Halen that’s not afraid to cry. These are possible ways I’d describe the Smashing Pumpkins on Gish, their first LP. As you’ll see plainly from the sample tracks, these guys know how to rock. The album starts with chugging drums, bomping bass, and a blast of distortion - like any typical hard rock record. The difference is in the themes (and ultimately in the artwork), which aren’t about paranoia, war, or men made of iron. Instead, the themes are distinctively softer: love, hope, imagery from eastern religions. They even have a song about flowers and snails. (No joke.) Effectively, they took the sound of 70s British metalheads and combined it with the sentiments of 70s American hippies. This is kind of hard to see in the album art, but the mix of aesthetics is still present. First, the colors: a deep shade of a something that I find to be the deepest of colors - pur- ple. Furthermore, the background is given a texture that gives the illusion of rich velvet. A portrait of the band, taken with a fish-eye lens, sits dead center with colors extremely muted. Providing the frame is a string of red metallic beads, and to match the band name and album title are scribbled in silver ink. The darkness and texture are present enough to show that this is a record with mysteri- ous qualities and some sinister sentiment. The purple faux-velvet look suggests a medium’s seance table, or a display case in a curio shop. Maybe the beads are part of the display, glimmering on the matted surface. But then there’s the band’s portrait... isn’t this an odd bunch? For every pair of tight jeans and every head of long hair, there’s a flower-print shirt and a rampant case of multiculturalism. (Not


that metal bands are racist/sexist or anything, but you would lose at any game of ”Spot the Asian/Woman” in metal bands before 1 980.) What I find most interesting is the black-and-white photo that’s been colored during postprocessing, as if to mimic photos like this but with an optimistic twist. ”I Am One” ”Rhinocerous” The first sample is the first track on the album and the one I mentioned early with chug- ging drums, etc. As the intro plows forward, you’ll understand why I chose this track as a sample. It has religious imagery and it’s a hard rocker for sure, but the real reason it’s right here right now it boasts 4 lead guitar solos, 2 rhythm guitar solos, and a bass solo. Let’s leave it at that. The second sample track illustrates the ”quiet-loud-quiet” dynamic that the Smashing Pumpkins continued to use throughout their career, and that illustrates the hippie-metalhead contrast mentioned before. The jangly, envelope-filtered, undistorted guitars very quickly turn into crunchy, loud noisemakers and soaring solo machines. And of course, amidst the blazing fretwork we find lyrics about trees, balloons, and ”ice cream snow”. Message-wise, this album/art combo is nearly perfect. The artwork puts down one coat of metal doom and one coat of hippie mystique, and puts a friendly(ish-looking) group of folks right in the middle with a black-and-white photo, colorized artfully. The music is entertaining, sounding heavy and reading light. Perhaps most importantly, Billy Corgan can wail ”Flower, chase the sunshine!” as much as he wants and for some reason it doesn’t seem trite.


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