Gish, by the Smashing Pumpkins

The Blue Skies Falling Reviews Policy.

I meant to start this awhile ago, but this is a turning point... Scavhunt's over and Pentacost's past. The Next Big Thing, as far as I can tell, is the wedding. And what better place to start than with the first album by my true loves and heroes of the past. In high school, so far as I could tell, the Big Three were Smashing Pumpkins (as of 8/94), Tori Amos (as of 1/96), and R.E.M. (as of 5/96). Smashing Pumpkins equalling GM, of course.

Gish was not the first album I experienced by the Smashing Pumpkins, but it was the first Smashing Pumpkins album. A concise concise history of the group before this era invovles a young, just-graduated-from-high school Billy Corgan moving from Chicago to Florida to start a mysanthropic metal band, the Marked. The Marked was spectacularly unsuccessful, soon dissolved, and Billy Corgan ended up moving back to Chicago to live a hobo-like existence between his father's, a parking garage, and other venues. Billy met backup guitarist James Iha at the record store the former worked at, and they started to play together: two guitars and a drum machine. They later picked up bassist D'Arcy Wretzky after an argument at a club, and Joliet drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, and formed the Smashing Pumpkins.

The earliest days of the Pumpkins, from an exterior standpoint, should have given them all the indie cred anyone should want or need, playing small gigs in Chicago and Milwaukee, but Billy wanted the bright lights from the beginning, and the critics have never stopped bitching. In 1990, SP released "I Am One" and for Sub-Pop, "Tristessa" (both songs feature on Gish), and were signed to Caroline records which produced and released Gish. It was not until after Gish's unexpected success that the Pumpkins signed to Virgin.

Now here are a couple useful details from someone with a slightly-better-than-high-school knowledge of these kids.

1) They weren't grunge. Grunge was Seattle. Grunge was punk influenced. The Pumpkins emerged from the Chicago Rock scene. They were more influenced by Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath than the Sex Pistols. This fact tends to be lost in the psychadelia and fuzzy harmonics that the Pumpkins loved from the beginning. If you compare, say, Soundgarden and Nirvana with the Pumpkins you can hear this difference, especially (to my ears) in how straightforwardly confrontational the Pumpkins' guitar and drums are, but just as much thematically in the wistful, effervescent, and earnest lyrics and themes. When the Pumpkins are ironic, they wear their irony on their sleeves. This fundamental (and debatably naive) preoccupation with building something rather than deconstructing is what sets the Pumpkins apart from most of their peer outfits, beyond any question of musical style.

Naturally, to those who consider all of this music to be "noise," this is a distinction that'll be lost.

2) Gish wasn't their "first sound." Gish was actually an evolved sound that had been worked out almost a third of the way through the Pumpkins' career as a band. Their earliest gigs were dark, brooding, melismatic performances that nevertheless centered around technical virtuosity. The tempo and melody of Terrapin, for example, played at the Pumpkins' first-ever gig at the Double Door matches anything I've ever heard them do subsequently as far as guitar fireworks go. By the time Gish came out, however, they'd delineated several themes they'd explore through the rest of their career, had distilled their sound to something more disciplined and tuneful, and had planted the seeds of the style of "psychadelic metal" that would come to define them.

So enough of the lecture. On to Gish.

* * * * *

I heard this album for the first time lying on the floor of my aunt's new cottage in Douglas, Michigan. It was December 1994, Winter Break, we were over for a visit, and my family was sleeping on the couches and floor around me. So... sound was a concern. I had my grandmother's mono tape player into which I'd plugged a monstrous set of headphones... originally designed for an eight-track, but better suited to for industrial workers testing Sonic Youth's Silver Sessions whilst welding.

Anyway, as I've mentioned, I'd already fallen in love with Siamese Dream, and had hoped that Gish would be more of the same. I was a little disappointmed...
It wasn't until many dozen listens over the next several years that I really came to appreciate this album. Now, it ranks alongside Siamese Dream, Pisces Iscariot, and Mellon Collie for me, represending some of the best of the Pumpkins' work.

I AM ONE

Imagine you are completely unfamiliar with this band. This was the experience of several hundred thousand listeners (including my friend Lyn) who heard this album when it first came out.

The first moments are completely enigmatic and engaging. Jimmy Chamberlin's beats are fast, but more, they're hard... there's nothing reluctant or withdrawn about his fast percussion. More, he seems almost muffled, enclosed, as if he plays in a very perceptibly small space which he completely fills with sound. Enter bass. And then, enter guitar.

The instruments, and especially the guitars, will drive this album far more than Billy's voice (which exerts more of a presence in all of their later work). His singing and his lyrics (much like the religious motifs in 'I Am One' and on the album's cover art) are placement... they are texture. They aren't the voice of the album. This is an aspect of the focus that I have always found to be the signature of Gish.

...

Focus doesn't meen a no feedback or reverb. It doesn't mean a lack of fuzzy sounds or distortion. From day one, the Pumpkins' number one effective musical trick was to alternate soft psychadelic or acoustic passages with walls of pure noise. Gish's trademark is that they employ this device to the exclusion of most others'. You don't have extended holocaust or William Blake allegories, or even a consistant character. The closest you get is a feeling of disenchanment with Catholic theology despite a thorough enchantment with its images, underpinned, of course, with the requisite sex, drugs, and rock n'roll. Even compared to Siamese Dream, this was a very tight production, and the result is streamlined and clean, and in some ways, both lucid and evocative.

i am one as you are three
try to find a messiah in your trinity
your city to burn
your city to burn
try to look for something
in your city to burn, you'll burn

SIVA

Billy recommended not reading too much into the song title, and for once I take him at face-value.
I Am One and Siva are a one-two punch. They both hit hard with a driving, initially hostile edge. Siva, though, if not at instantly accessible as I Am One, truly pulls out the stops on the loud vs. soft. It's almost as if two different songs shuttle across each other, alternately exposed and fully blocked.

The shifts are instantaneous and, if you have the volume set to enjoy the quieter parts, you can be sure your ears will be bleeding through the screams.

Perhaps most spectacularly, however, the song set a trend for a sort of half-modified/half-retained chorus that slides elusively between the noisiest sections.

tell me tell me what you're after
i just want to get there faster

It finds an echo later in Gish on Suffer:

too late to discover peace of mind
too late to recover...

and at its most complex in Soma on Siamese Dream:

i'm all by myself as i've always felt
and i'll betray myself to anyone caught in our ruse of fools

Siva was Billy's favorite song off the album, and he wrote it, of course, whilst floating in the clouds.

RHINOCEROS

It's a nice song that lulls along and picks up at unexpected spots, and it's probably one of the most recognizable off Gish. That said, I think the others are much more exciting.

BURY ME

Probably my personal favorite.

Rhinoceros dissolves into what I can only describe as racing feedback, sounds soaring about each other like the motorbikes on Tron, then suddenly cut short by a single electric ray and a real tough base line.

This song, as opposed to the first three, is largely unknown outside of Pumpkins fans.

The lyrics are some of the most accessible (off the most lyrically accessible album):

shared your kisses
shame your heart
buried me and it hurts

That's, of course, neglecting what's apparently a single, ambiguous incest reference that skews the meaning of the song a little towards weird.

This song is the most brazen and harsh and heart-brokenly sincere on the whole album. I LOVE IT!

And then there's:

CRUSH

Which is also sweet, and soft, and simple. Enjoyable in the same way as Rhinoceros, but even more stripped down.

SUFFER

Suffer is gorgeous. On cassettes and records, it would be the beginning of the second side of the album, and it parallels I Am One in several ways. I Am One begins with sharp, energetic percussion and Suffer taps in with a delicate beat that nevertheless seems to be holding back some speed (which finally emerges four minutes in). Both unambiguously touch on religious themes:

all that you suffer is all that you are
all that you smother is all that you are

SNAIL

Is not a personal favorite of mine. Though it is of many others. It's sort of the Mayonnaise of Gish. It had anthemic potential, and while I'm not surprised it never became a single, I'm somewhat surprised it isn't at least as well known as, say, Rhinoceros or Tristessa.

Snail's most endearing moment is the intro, unaccompanied acoustic strumming that, in its ringing simplicity, is about as awkward and shuffling as a teenager. (Which is probably where this all comes from, right?)

TRISTESSA

Was of course, the small scale hit prior to Gish, along with I Am One, but it's more stripped down and raw, and exhibits a lot less control than the A-side headbangers.

And,

WINDOW PAINE

This song manages to be enjoyable despite a heavy dose of superficial philosophizing above glam rock innuendo. It's about my least favorite song on Gish, but that doesn't mean it doesn't rock out. You can't deny the sexiness of that smooth, nasal "do what you wanna do."

Finally...

DAYDREAM

winds things out with basic chord strumming. D'Arcy sings (often out of tune)... it's fine, I suppose. Similar to Crush, except less pretty and interesting.

And then there's the hidden song:

I'M GOING CRAZY

Which is just plain weird, even while it conforms to a basic song structure. While Stone Temple Pilots could look simulataneously disturbing and ridiculous performing pieces like "Wet My Bed," the Pumpkins here are just deviant and endearing, even as they croon that they're going "motherfucking crazy."

In short...

I gave you an overlong treatise on the style of the early Smashing Pumpkins (which gets about as technical as my mediocre musical vocabulary allows) and then a laundry list of songs. I fully expect that as I get a bit more experience with this "reviewing" thing, I'll get better at it, and perhaps I was wrong to begin by reviewing something I genuinely care about.

But I don't regret the choice.

This is a fine album.

I can see many rockers who hate the Pumpkins on principle nevertheless enjoying Gish.
I can also see that anyone who does not tap her foot to Tristessa or get drawn into Suffer will probably never appreciate this band.
I listened to this album for the first time in winter, and it seemed fit there, originally, with its fisheye cover and its sacred heart exploding on the back of the case.
Later, I came to associate the album with the summer, and especially late May. Rainy days and balmy fog.

Gish is full of that sincere and latent energy we all stored up just before school got out for the summer.

Now, Gish is an access point for me.

I try to tap into that energy each year.

Incidentally, Billy had just turned twenty-four when Gish was released. Yup, that's right. I'm three years older and not 1% as famous. The angst! The angst! I'll get you, Billy.