Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream (Virgin, 1993)

This landmark alternative album sounds better once you place it in a 1970s hard rock tradition instead of lineage closer to 1980s goth/post-punk. Makes it easier to forget the speed and power of the Pixies and swallow the slower, sludgier moments when a power chord sustains and sustains instead of getting on to the next measure. Billy Corgan justified his control freak status with a generous display of guitar-god posturings. The production is so luscious and high-relief that you can hear the windings on each of his six strings. 

But Siamese Dream epitomized why “alternative” became such a joke. What alternative was it providing? Quite to the contrary, one could chalk up its popularity to a blandification of shoegaze. Even rejecting a comparison with a truly landmark album like My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 Loveless, one must concede that Siamese Dream makes few demands on the listener. Lovers of "Mayonaise" [sic] [rolls eyes], often voted the best song on the album, claim that the feedback squeal amounts to a hook; others will wonder how something so brief and infrequent could be called any such thing. Listen to the flutter at around 0:22 in "Rocket." THAT'S your hook, Billy (or Butch Vig or Alan Moulder)! Bring it to the fore more clearly! Then repeat it! Why is it buried so deeply in the mix? Compare a song from the same year - Yo La Tengo's "From a Motel 6." There you have a fetching descending guitar figure that gets installed in our hum jukebox via...wait for it....repetition and foregrounding. And yet the Pumpkins sold buckets more records. Why? Because their music requires only minimal investment. In fact, with all the non-snarkiness I can muster, I assume that’s precisely why millions of alt.folk love them so much, just as with Coldplay and Tom Petty  

One more thing: Plug-ugly cover and font     

Grade: B-minus