Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream: The Album Review

If the lens with which I see the world had a sound, it would be this album.

Billy Corgan: vocals, guitar, bass, Mellotron, string arrangments

James Iha: credited guitar

D'Arcy Wretzky: backing vocals, credited bass

Jimmy Chamberlin: drums

Mike Mills: piano, David Ragsdale & Eric Remschneider on violin & cello

Produced by Butch Vig, mixed by Alan Moulder

Author’s Note: This post corresponds to the Siamese Dream episode of Vinyl Monday, originally posted 7/24/2023 for its 30th anniversary. Save for audio/editing jokes that cannot be included in a text format, this was painstakingly adapted from the review chapter of the original – no notes to help, as they were lost when the laptop seasons 1 and 2 were made on died. To watch the full episode, scroll to the bottom of this post or visit my YouTube channel here.

What happens when you pair a band in crisis mode with a producer who’s got something to prove? You get an album production that goes a quarter of a million dollars over budget.

This is exactly what happened with Smashing Pumpkins’ 2nd LP, Siamese Dream. Just 3 months after they established their niche of grittier, yet dreamier psych rock, Nirvana came crashing through the door with Nevermind. The album that ruined grunge for everyone. A massive swimming-pool-shaped crater was blown into the rock-and-roll earth; not just for Nirvana, but for everyone in their immediate vicinity. This included Smashing Pumpkins. They’d never been considered “grunge” before this, but now that Nirvana was big, they were suddenly being lumped into the same category. Like what happened with My Bloody Valentine and Loveless, critics start to see all the other grunge bands as lesser-than; the elitist bullshit mentality of “if you were really that good, you would have a Loveless/Nevermind too.” The crater blast also included Butch Vig, who’d produced both the Pumpkins’ debut Gish and Nevermind. He suddenly had a #1 record under his belt, seemingly by accident. He wanted to do it again, but on purpose this time. The Pumpkins were embattled all the way through Siamese production; guitarist James Iha and bassist D’Arcy Wretzky had a messy breakup and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin’s addiction is ramping up to fever pitch. To pull himself and his band out of what was shaping up to be a career-ending slump, frontman Billy Corgan poured all of his perfectionist energy into Siamese Dream...and all of Virgin Records’s and Butch Vig’s energy. After those 3 months, Butch was so thoroughly done with Billy that he handed the mastering job off to Alan Moulder (another Lovelessconnection!) and went on a brief hiatus.

However taxing the project, I believe the outcome to be one of the greatest albums of the 1990s. But I might be biased – it was my very first favorite album.

It’s really hard for me to form independent thoughts about this album. Thoughts that don’t all mush into each other, that is. This is the album I have the longest and most consistent history with. I cannot think of a significant chapter of my life without Siamese Dream in it.

When I was 11, I raided my dad’s CD cabinet and I stole a bunch of his albums. I don’t know why I did it. I just did it. Without hearing a single note, I was instantly transfixed by this album.

While vinyl copies today boast a special redesigned orange-and-magenta foil cover (you’ll need to take a loan out on your house to get any Pumpkins stuff on vinyl!) my dad’s copy had the original white-and-red design. Photographed by Melodie McDaniel, the Siamese Dream cover boasts a composition which bears striking resemblance to the cherubs in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna.

Pictured: Raphael, Sistine Madonna (oil on canvas, c. 1514)

I wouldn’t know who painted Sistine Madonna until my art history education, or even what it was called, but I knew I’d seen those cherubs before. In true little old Irish lady fashion, my grandma has a lightswitch cover with the cherubs printed on it. Her own mother collected angels. Her little stained-glass angel ornament, no bigger than my thumb, hangs over the skylight in her all-green bathroom. She rubs shoulders with theRaphael-print switchplate, and a tiny antique replica of Cabanel’s Venus. My mother has a bird collection. Feathers, nests, birdhouses, a paper-mache swallow bought from an antique store to commemorate the winged home intruder that flew in her house this past winter. And here this album cover was; two little girls in puffy white princess dresses and wire fairy wings. My connection to Siamese Dream was genetic. It had this celestial atmosphere, that which the Pumpkins arguably on their triple-album epic Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

But Siamese Dream is heaven with an undercurrent of darkness. Take the thesis statement of the whole album: “Cherub Rock.” “Beware all those angels with their wings glued on.”

This album interlocked perfectly with my pre-existing curiosity of, “what else is out there?” What’s in the sky? What’s written in the stars? What is death? Where do we go after we die? I was a strange child. These just-abstract-enough concepts sang to my strange heart like little else.

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that, for the longest time, I could not understand a word of what Billy Corgan was saying. For 13 years, I loved Siamese Dream, and did not have a clue what a good chunk of the lyrics were! Seriously, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize it was “Disarm you with a smile” and not “saw you with a smile.” There was no lyrics sheet included with my dad’s CD. And even if there were, I wouldn’t have been able to make out Billy’s handwriting. I was going off vibes and vibes alone! Any mental images were pulled from what little I could understand. Angels with wings glued on, siamese twins joined at the wrist. It was almost Freudian, the way impression were made from dreams. But what I did understand deeply resonated with me. From that much, you can probably gather the kinds of things that were going on with me. Happy children do not contemplate mortality.

All of a sudden, at 24, when I finally got to evaluating this album for its 30th anniversary, I started to hear the words – and get them. Siamese Dream is like this secret language I always understood, but I couldn’t speak myself until it decided it was time.

Since this is a double album, I can’t work within the track-by-track breakdown format that’s become the “norm” on Vinyl Monday, “or else we’d be here for 50 fucking minutes (and I only do that for season finales,)” as I said in the original video.

Oh, you sweet summer child…

Instead, I’ll be going by my double-album format: using specific moments from this track listing to illustrate my points. There will be two exceptions, though.

By nature of the whole “Billy essentially recording the whole thing by himself” thing, I can’t praise individual musicians’ performances like I would normally do. Despite James and D’Arcy being credited performers, Billy admitted in interview to re-recording those guitar and bass parts himself. So there’s no way to know exactly how much they contributed – if at all. It’s hard not to wonder what a true Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream would’ve sounded like. One of my favorite parts about Vinyl Monday is shouting out the player that might not get as much attention. Here, I just can’t. I wish I knew who to credit for that spectacular groan of the bass on “Hummer,” “Geek USA,” and “Silverfuck.” That subtle, meandering, but no less massive bassline has always been my favorite part of “Hummer.”

The one exception to my crediting debacle: Jimmy Chamberlin. Of fucking course he was a jazz drummer. Of course! His fills are all jazz! Jimmy may have been a disaster at this point in his life – Siamese Dream was literally recorded at Triclops to cut him off from his dealers – but man, could he play. Though firing him after the Mellon Collie tour and overdose death of Jon Melvoin saved Jimmy’s life, it killed the Pumpkins’ career trajectory. He is their strongest asset. From the snare rolls at the very beginning of the album to the last pillowy cymbal wash of closer “Luna,” this record is his full range on display. “Geek USA” wouldn’t be the three-headed, forty-toothed monster it is without Jimmy. It’s his strongest performance; I listen to that song and I sit there and I go “how is he even human?” And that’s not counting the Siamese outtakes! “Pissant” and the title track just about blew me off my feet the first time I heard them. Jimmy is the greatest rock drummer alive right now. All the other greats are dead. You know what they say: the drummer either dies first (Moonie, Bonzo) or lives forever (Ringo.)

Speaking of tracks that got cut: I know some of these tracks were tough losses for Billy. “Hello Kitty Kat” especially, he fought hard for that one. But I believe this track listing and sequencing is perfect. Outtakes were cut because they sounded too much like other stronger songs. That being said, I prefer disc 2 to disc 1.

One really special thing about Siamese Dream is its intricate, incredible sound. This record is so textured. Note the dynamics on songs like “Quiet,” the way that guitar solo careens in. The spectacular crunch of these guitars, especially on the A-side with “Quiet” and “Hummer.” This “crunchy” sound has Butch Vig written all over it, it’s the most “grunge”/generally ’90s thing about the album. The heightened presence of guitars on this record come from the sheer amount of them, not so much from volume. Except for the crash-to-earth end of “Rocket” and “Silverfuck”’s descent into hell, those are all volume. Since Billy insisted upon recording everything analog, Butch drew up maps of each song to remember what tracks went where. I’ve seen the clip of him showing off the map for “Soma.” See for yourself, it looks like a goddamn conspiracy with all those intersecting lines.

There were these sounds that were so fascinating growing up. What is the static on “Hummer?” And where did that vintage interview sample on “Spaceboy” come from? There are decidedly ’60s touches on this thing; the magical Mellotron on “Spaceboy” and strings on “Disarm” and “Luna” to mirror it. Billy called himself “cheesy” for the sappier moments on Siamese, I just call him nostalgic. That much tracks; he’s cited such albums as Electric Ladyland and Master Of Reality as formative influences. Billy also had The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy and My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything (both phenomenal defining releases) in his rotation. Two records that Neil Halstead of Slowdive specifically cited as influences on Just For A Day and Souvlaki! You have to see how crazy of a coincidence it is that both Neil and Billy, separated by an ocean but with similarly messy relationship dynamics happening in their respective groups, were spinning Isn’t Anythingand Psychocandy in 1992. (Then again, who worth their salt wasn’t obsessed with My Bloody Valentine in 1992? They did shoegaze so well on Loveless that it literally ruined shoegaze for everyone else!) Souvlaki and Siamese Dream both came out in the summer of ’93, and both have this huge, immersive sound. Neil is more well-known nowadays as a master of sound, especially in his more recent production exploits; Mary Lattimore’s Silver Ladders, Everything Else’s single from last year, the latest Slowdive LP Everything Is Alive. But Billy should be seen as such too. This shared atmosphere honors the dreamy past in the whimsigoth present.

In production and composition, it was all a very intentional process. Note the leitmotif shared by “Today” and “Geek USA” – “I’ll burn my eyes out...” and “I can’t believe it...” Something really special about Siamese Dreamis Billy’s deeply personal and introspective, yet evasive and surreal writing style. The line that comes up for most people is from “Today”: “I wanted more than life could ever grant me.” That’s Billy at his most dejected. It’s all grunge doom-and-gloom, “I hate myself and want to die” and the like. But there’s so much more than that. He taps into the surreal, angels with their wings glued on, connecting siamese twins at the wrist in a dream. In keeping with his ’60s buff ways, he goes totally psychedelic: the opening line of the record is, “Freak out, give in.” “Ask yourself a question, anyone but me, I ain’t free, do you feel love is real?” on “Hummer” treads into Grateful Dead territory.

There’s this pervasive theme of the “other.” Not so much being outcast, on the outside looking in, but being in a bird cage or fishbowl having everyone look in at you. I cannot – will not – articulate how much this theme has always resonated with me. We have the song “Mayonaise,” which Billy has said is the most personal of anything he’s ever written. “Can anybody hear me? I just want to be me” Surely one can see how that’d resonate with an awkward tween. But as I’ve heard more lyrics, things like “Shut my mouth and strike the demons, curse you and your reasons, out of hand and out of season, out of love and out of feeling” wind themselves around my mind. “Cool enough to almost be it, cool enough to not quite see it. Dull enough to always feel this, always old, I’ll always feel this.”

How I feel about Billy Corgan’s writing is how a lot of women feel about Taylor Swift’s. It’s like Billy’s writing from everything in every diary I’ve ever kept. Especially the stuff I was too scared to write down!

(Sure enough: Billy Corgan, Gemini moon.)

Closing out disc 1 is “Soma.” At age 11 to 13, I had an iPod. It was from the lost-and-found at my mom’s work because we were too broke to be buying iPods new, and those people were so goddamn rich they didn’t notice theirs were lost in the first place. I would listen to my iPod, with Siamese Dream on it, outside on the swingset at all hours of the day. I’d be out there from after dinner until my mom had to come get me because it was dark and the coyotes were out.

Point is: for a long time, I thought the crickets on “Soma” were just the crickets in the yard. Lo and behold, the crickets are on the record too. That was a really special discovery.

Lyrically, this song feels like “Today” but a lot more angry; a defiant self-imposed isolation. “Let the sadness come again, on that you can depend on me, until the bitter, bitter end of the world when God sleeps in bliss.” This was absolutely inspired by an off-period in Billy and Chris Fabian’s (who collaborated on the gatefold collage) on-again, off-again relationship. Billy co-wrote “Soma” with James, so there could be hints of himself and D’Arcy in here too. The build from the hazy, dreamy, spacey bridge to the back half of the song just crashing in with a soaring guitar solo, is one I won’t easily forget. This record is loaded with similar moments, but none quite like this. In a league of expansive, it’s the most expansive. In a league of euphoric, it’s most euphoric. I genuinely believe “Soma” is a perfect song.

We’re absolutely rocking with the ’90s soft-LOUD-soft-LOUD cliché. But I can forgive this. No ’90s album was free of this. Being this is a vinyl-centric series, I have to make note of issues with this remix. Overall, it’s fairly true to how I remember Siamese Dream...except for the samples. The one at the end of “Hummer” was so quiet to begin with that your dog might miss it, but it was shortened. The “Spaceboy” talk show interview was entirely washed out, you can hardly make out the words.

In the In The Aeroplane Over The Sea episode, I talked about the drawbacks of putting an album from the CD age on vinyl. Believe it or not, there are occasional downsides to the vinyl format! Side 1 of Aeroplane ends with “Communist Daughter.” This breaks the run-in to “Oh Comely.” Siamese Dream on vinyl breaks up a similar defining moment; side 3 ends with “Spaceboy”’ and side 4 begins with “Silverfuck.” The transition from one to the other is one of the most quintessentially Siamese Dream moments on Siamese Dream. The waking up from the dream. It’s that shock to the senses that you can’t un-hear or un-feel. It’s a shame this sacrifice had to be made to accommodate this physical limitation of the physical format. You can only cram about 22 minutes of music on one side of a record, and sometimes you just need that 24th to make it work.

I first spoke about “Silverfuck” on the Losing My Opinion podcast in March of 2023, citing it among long songs that absolutely need their run time. It was the Pumpkins’ go-to set closer, stretched to its fullest psycho-delic potential. The longest “Silverfuck” on record was performed on 2/4/1997 and lasted a whopping 40 minutes! The album version is composed compared to how they usually did it! This is the song that convinced me Smashing Pumpkins was a psych band trapped in a grunge body. You have the droning bass with the flitting, reverberating licks. My dad always told me not to turn up the volume there, I advise you all of the same thing.

Then comes the moment the whole 62-minute suite has been building up to.

“Bang-bang, you’re dead. Hole in your head.”

Insert the stereo pan that ripped my 11-year-old psyche to shreds. That’s the freakout of the freakout anti-gods. All restraint the Pumpkins had has fallen away. Billy is howling, guitars are wailing, feedback is bent into spirals to the end of the mind. Jimmy never had any restraint to begin with but he’s somehow in the negatives right now! Hearing this as a preteen permanently rewired my brain. You can’t undo that.

My dad also told me this was the best song on Siamese Dream. While I favor “Soma,” dad makes a serious point.

Most consider Mellon Collie to be the Pumpkins’ magnum opus. I believe Siamese Dream claims the ticket. It’s more concise – you have to be a brave soul to sit through any 2+ hour effort – the lows are not as low, the highs are just as high. (Okay, maybe “XYU” is the greatest song the Pumpkins ever put to tape. But my point still stands.) Siamese Dream was my gateway drug. It was my first favorite album, ultimately dictating every single record I’d love after it in some way. It was some challenging shit for an 11-year-old! But it inspired me to seek out other challenging records; to always be broadening my horizons and wandering off the beaten path. I was primed to appreciate heavier records overall, groups that weren’t afraid to crank up the volume. I was set up to appreciate the sounds of the ’60s and ’70s, analog recording, ridiculous drumming, the Mellotron. And I learned to appreciate the art of the double album before I even knew what a double album was. It lead me into goth territory, I loved The Cure in high school. Hell, Siamese Dream might even be the reason I love shoegaze.

30+ years down the line, I think it’s safe to say that this record was worth all the blood, sweat, every tear and every penny Smashing Pumpkins and Co. put into it. It’s a feat of modern music production. If the lens with which I see the world had a sound, it would be Siamese Dream.

Personal favorites: “Cherub Rock,” “Hummer,” “Soma,” “Geek USA,” “Spaceboy,” “Silverfuck”

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!