The Pumpkins were my absolute favorite band in the heyday of 90s alt rock/grunge. I saw them once in St. Paul during their Adore tour, and it was amazing. But something about their music just didn't seem to age well with me - which very well may have been my tastes changing versus the band. I don't know. Machina didn't click, and I never really got into Zeitgeist or Oceania. I did buy Rotten Apples and enjoyed it immensely, but it was their older music.
Whenever I watch one of their music videos on YouTube, it's very bittersweet. I still love their older work - MCIS and Adore are absolutely wonderful. But it's the universal story of losing your adolescence.
I didn't really get into Daft Punk until the early 2000s, so my context was very different. I'm still sad to see this breakup, but I guess I don't feel it the same as SP. Funny, that.
I guess it's another example of "when you got into a band" as seen throughout this thread. Saw them at my first "big" concert at Lollapalooza 1994. 17 years old and it was the coolest crap I'd ever seen.
Gish is awesome and Siamese Dream will always hold a special place in my heart, but I always felt like Mellon Collie was the start of Corgan's long, slow descent into self-indulgence. If Siamese Dream was their Appetite for Destruction, Mellon Collie was Use Your Illusion (two parter at that!) I guess you could do worse, though since both are solid.
And I guess Lies would be analogous to that album with the Stevie Nicks cover.
Yep, very similar experience here. I find listening to music from that time period just makes me melancholy (err...no pun intended), so I mostly avoid it now. I'm not sure if this is because it brings me back to that time, or if it's the general mood of the music itself...probably both. I guess it makes sense that the music of a given time would reflect the general mood of the people coming of age at that time.
I don't know where else to go with that thought...ah whatever. ;)
Smashing Pumpkins were the best in the early nineties. Gish and especially Siamese Dream are great albums. I saw them at some festivals around then. Amazing.
I still get chills when I hear the guitar intro on some of the tracks from those albums.
I saw them during some of their later tours and though they were great gigs, I think I had drifted away from their music and in fact the whole scene. I was getting into electronic music in the late 90s.
What was the issue? Was it the length of the show, the aura of Billy Corgan (and his horrific aesthetics), renditions that somehow made the original versions worse?
Guy was obviously talented but I don't think he's the best judge of his strengths. There's a couple of songs from Adore and Machina where the music videos manage to make the songs drastically worse for me.
I saw them play Mellon Collie too. Did they play their > 25 minute version of XYU? Christ, everyone but Billy Corgan was bored 15 minutes into that but it just kept going and going and going...
Since I don't go to live shows, I tend to just have the disappointment of finding out that I only like some of my favorite bands' albums, because the arc of their own musical careers doesn't match my own tastes.
Why can't performers just stay the same forever, producing a never-ending sequence of similar but distinct works?
> Why can't performers just stay the same forever, producing a never-ending sequence of similar but distinct works?
Because they're artists. Even the record company-manufactured acts consider themselves artists.
On a human level, they're already performing the same pieces of music thousands of times - in rehearsals, concerts, recordings. It must get incredibly tedious after a while. You want them to write the same type of music all their lives as well? You monster! :-P
There is one English psychedelic outfit I like called "Ozric Tentacles". Every album is pretty much identical. And it turns out that I really like that album, so I have bought it ten times over the years, plus a couple of live albums.
This happens in part because whenever the people behind Ozric Tentacles want to make something different from their trademark sound, they'll usually put it out under another name. If you go to their site right now the front page advertises recent albums from two different side projects with even sillier names than "Ozric Tentacles".
(The Ozrics are far from the only band to do this, they're just the first example that comes to mind.)
There are other bands I like where every album is something different. King Crimson, for instance, is a different lineup for pretty much every album. Same bandleader, some people return to perform in multiple incarnations of the band, some are only there for one album and some tour dates. I love some of their albums and some are flat for me. I'd still grab another one if I heard that Fripp had declared that the current assemblage of musicians he was working with was an incarnation of King Crimson, because the albums that work for me work really well. If it's a dud I just consider it a down payment on the next hit.
Despite having seen them live a few times, I only own one Ozric Tentacles as I figured there’s no need to buy any of the others. :)
I always figured that the members got their musical satisfaction from their side projects. Thought I haven’t listened to them in years, I actually preferred Eat Static which was formed by two of the Ozrics. Similarly, another band I listened to at the time, System 7 was formed by members of Gong.
This was around the time I was discovering what’s now called “electronic dance music”. As a music listener, EDM was much more exciting and interesting than much of the guitar-based music in the mid-nineties.
I mean, there's the odd band I like everything of (eg, Jethro Tull), but other times either the "new stuff" isn't "right", or -- when I come to a band late in their career -- I work backwards only to discover I don't care for their early stuff.
I always found it amazing that Deftones managed to change their sound with each of their 9 albums over ~25 years, never fell off quality-wise* and never alienated their fanbase (even if some of those releases weren't 100% to everyone's taste).
It's very rare for a group to avoid the "churn out crap" stage of a musical career.
I always thought Foo fighters were pretty great. I listened to them a lot in the 90s. I looked up their best hits a few years ago, and I was shocked by how many incredible songs they have.
They headlined Glasto a few years ago. It’s an amazing gig, I watched it on YouTube, really incredible interacting with the crowd, some really special moments.
