Gish

You could say that whatever Smashing Pumpkins touch turns to gold, or at the very least picks up a platinum sheen. Gish is no exception: it debuted at No. 195 on the US chart, and by May 2005 the sales counter on this first album had stopped at 1.1 million copies sold.

A couple of months before the debut of another band that defined the nineties, Nirvana’s Bleach, the first album from Chicago outfit Smashing Pumpkins, Gish, came out. They named the record after silent film star Lillian Gish. Recording started in December 1990 and dragged on at Smart Studios in Wisconsin until March 1991. Production duties on the debut were mostly handled by Butch Vig, producer and drummer of Garbage. It was clear even during the sessions that nobody should expect a copy of the punk approach that shaped and chiseled the sound of the Seattle grunge crowd, because Billy dreamed of the glitz and kitsch of arena rock, into which he could weave the engravings of metal riffs and the epic sweep of art rock, structurally added to back up the confessional notes of Billy’s outpourings. Even if the magic dissolves easily once you start picking the lyrics apart, Corgan’s writing style rested on mysticism, almost ethereal imagery and a strong sense of melancholy. The impulses are so distinctive that they transcend the narrowness of bare personal confession in a way that borders on the incomprehensible, while the point of the images is grasped intuitively. It’s almost like following the narrative threads of Led Zeppelin, who were one of the key sources of inspiration for the young Billy. The guitars are smeared Pixies-style, yet they hit harder than the flagbearers of nineties sound, Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The music manages to breathe less obtrusively, but still with an unmissable imperative. Arrangements were always his stronger suit, and that shows from the very first listen. You can feel the fullness of everything: from heavy guitars and delicate rhythm to psychedelia and easy fluidity, all merging into an organic whole of minimalism and the posturing of reinterpreted pop-artism.

The album opens with ‘I Am One’. Chamberlin’s feel for rhythm and the heavy yet very bright, optimistic guitars recall Sabbath’s chase after the groove. The rocking rhythm that washes over you in waves is followed by a very typical Smashing Pumpkins solo. Nervous, but order hides within the confusion of chaos. The hard undertone of the opener carries over into ‘Siva’, which melancholically yet with distorted amplification continues the sentiment of restrained speeding that the first few bars of the intro unfurled. In the second half the passions settle, and it feels like Corgan’s wailing vocal, interwoven with the guitar harmonies, is trying to calm you down. The sine wave of eruptions and gentler passages alternates thoughtfully and meditatively. The first softening of this hard-hitting discourse comes with ‘Rhinoceros’. Smashing Pumpkins are sentimental and tender, but within the contours of softness there are spikes and eruptions of pure distorted energy. ‘Rhinoceros’ is a classic example of Corgan’s feel for the melancholic side of songwriting and the structural logic of a song. Floating guitars, a beefed-up, thick bass and almost jazzy percussion accents, dissected by the syrupy sound of a warm, sexy guitar. Nervousness and calm, repetition and build-up drive the inner rhythm of sliding into realms of the sensual. Love and a personal state of near restraint. Dance. Gentle spurts of heart’s blood straight into your ear canals. ‘Bury Me’ follows and picks up the pace. It sounds like some kind of expected heart arrhythmia. After the feedback comes a very concrete bass line and syncopated guitars, and once again there’s no avoiding the simultaneous dialogues of a fragile vocal that, as if tearing and getting lost, fills the gaps in the contours of the honeyed, heavy wall of guitars. Among the prettier and more striking ballads is ‘Crash’, an acoustic, almost R.E.M.-like meditation of picked scales and bittersweet pain or morning daydreaming, which would go hand in hand with ‘Snail’, a song you can easily picture played on big stadium stages in front of a crowd of thousands succumbing to the manipulative techniques of Corgan-style esotericism. Zeppelin drew heavily on the oriental engravings of eastern melodicism. ‘Suffer’ captures that moment almost instinctively and unconsciously. Picture a desert, a herd of camels and the tents of Tuaregs setting out across the desert of realization. “Too late to discover piece of mind… / Too late to recover…” A Doors-like creeping of bass and drums and a minimalist guitar. The path to other spheres is the next track, ‘Snail’. The renewed awakening of fiery red undertones feels like a return to life. Pure beauty. Aesthetics at work. ‘Tristessa’ reaches for slightly rawer shades of heavy guitars and rawer drums. ‘Window Paine’ puts the brakes on the tempo. Once again you find yourself in a world of apparitions and murky shadows. Once again you’re before the altars of getting stoned, having visited Kashmir in your dreams. Liberation. Whatever you’re doing, you started too late. ” Do what you gonna do / And say what you gonna say / You start too late…”. The gradual layering of ragged guitars is essential here for building up the mantra. The acoustic closer is balm for a torn and wounded heart. Scheherazade tells and spins dreams, but this time, after Hypnos’s whisper, D’Arcy steps in with ‘Daydream’. The string duet that rounds out the song is sensual and gives no hint that it’s their first foray into a studio. The boys and the girl want to prove they’ve got you in their grip. Completely. After a few seconds’ pause and silence, the album surprises you with the hidden track ‘I’m Going Crazy’. That’s Corgan’s answer to D’Arcy’s tenderness. Madness as a reply to emotion. The last verse is left unsung. Corgan poetically leaves the doors open for the story to continue, in a way that, if you’ve let yourself get all worked up up to this point, leaves you waiting and gasping for a bit more sweetness, obscurity and pain. Weirdness is a perfectly expected and natural state, and the craving for an encore could only be satisfied a few years later, when the Big Bang, the hit-maker album Siamese Dream, shook up the plains of the Smashing Pumpkins universe.

Looking back, Gish was a preview of what Smashing Pumpkins had to offer in this first phase. The record promises broader horizons, which, according to the band’s frontman, opened up entirely by design and by plan, and that planning and purpose never feels forced or distracting. The discourse was fluid and subtle from day one. Partly thanks to the successful collaboration with production wizard Butch Vig, who softened the rough edges just right. The debut may sound a little naive, but a good indicator of the formula’s success was the hordes of fans who made the atmospherics of goth rock, shamelessly flirting with heavy metal, their own. The ego was suppressed and unimportant, at least at first glance. What mattered was the message, which was cast wider and which hid the key to the Pumpkins universe. People from long-forgotten black-and-white photos started to speak, and the story evolved into an epic that goes on. This is the first fragment. The last one hasn’t had its turn yet.