Smashing Pumpkins: Another Jazz Odyssey

According to Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins' multi-platinum double-disc magnum opus Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Virgin) marks their last foray into epic, star-struck big-rock territory. What's next? They've hinted, both on disc and in interviews, that it'll be something decidedly more electronic. Which makes sense, since the Pumpkins have become, first and foremost, a studio band. As their Boston-area performances over the past few years have proved, they're much less comfortable carrying off the gargantuan, mythic scope of their albums in a live setting.

So, as the Pumpkins prepare to make the jump to techno, industrial, post-new wave, and/or points unknown, their new five-CD, 32-song B-sides/outtakes/previously-unreleased compilation The Aeroplane Flies High (Virgin) reminds us of what Han Solo once observed of Imperial Star Destroyers: they dump all their junk before they make the jump to hyperspace.

In what amounts to their second double album in two years, Aeroplane pairs the five singles released from Mellon Collie with their respective B-sides (including the alternate tracks released on European singles, which often differed from the domestic versions), plus five unreleased covers to make the package tastier to their notorious legions of import-collecting fans. It's all arranged pretty much by theme. For instance, on the "Zero" CD, you get five additional similarly thunderous metallic rampages, all of them fairly good in a bludgeoning sort of way, and any of which could have filled the heavy-guitar slots on Mellon Collie. The question of whether you'd be interested in five more "Zero"s is likely tied to whether you're the type to spend $43.99 (list price) on Smashing Pumpkins outtakes, so it would be superfluous to call this, uh, superfluous. Plus, it's pretty clear that the obsessiveness of Aeroplane is completely intentional by the time you get to the "Pastichio Medley" at the end of disc three: 23 minutes of Corgan's discarded riffs strung together (each riff meticulously catalogued in the 36-page booklet, which also offers complete lyrics, opaquely worded liner notes by the band, and an up-to-the-minute exhaustive discography).

It's also clear, to anyone who's ever checked any of the numerous Pumpkins-related Web pages, that Corgan's obsessiveness is second only to his fans'. So there's at least some supply-and-demand justification for this kind of compulsive self-indulgence, and, after all, it's the kind of ritualistic bloodletting we've come to expect from the band who released Pisces Iscariot, an album's worth of outtakes, shortly after 1993's Siamese Dream.

But Aeroplane is by no means required listening. The Pumpkins hint at their future (with some blippy, subtly electronic variations on the same kind of thinly mechanized pop as "1979") and sonically psychoanalyze their past (with some blippy, thinly mechanized covers, including the Cars' "You're All I've Got Tonight," the Cure's "A Night like This," Missing Persons' "Destination Unknown," and Alice Cooper's "Clones"). Although there are flashes of individual-track brilliance ("Ugly," "Blank," and the set's title track) mixed in with proof that the Pumpkins might also have made a decent indie-pop band ("The Boy"), there's nothing approaching the collective magnitude of Mellon Collie. Ultimately, it's an extravagance where another Pisces Iscariot would have sufficed. And as a self-contained epic arena-rock fairy tale, Mellon Collie seemed to preclude the need for the closure that Aeroplane aspires to provide.

-- Carly Carioli