Pisces Iscariot

 After just two albums, the label Virgin, which had taken the Chicago crew Smashing Pumpkins under its wing, had figured out pretty thoroughly that the Pumpkins were more than a flash in the pan. Alternative had become a seriously lucrative business, and since it’s always smart to strike while the iron is red hot, the decree came down that it might just pay off to release something more than a full-blooded album. It was time for another transfusion of pumpkins sound, one that could cement their status even further and reap a few more fruits than originally planned. Pisces Iscariot is a lot more than just a collection of leftovers, B-sides that couldn’t make it onto Gish and Siamese Dream. The quality here is so obvious that plenty of bands, with plenty of albums that were born hard, with difficulty and above all without any real inspiration, have to lower their eyes in front of this record.

Billy Corgan, no need to waste extra words on this, quickly separated himself from the rest of the poser crowd by putting a lot more “juice” into his particular brand of music. It’s all about pure ideas. Still, it’s an intense matter of judgment. In the eyes of mastermind Corgan, only the best is good enough for a Pumpkins record. And the songs on Pisces Iscariot miss that best-by-his-standards quality bar by only a hair.

The album opens with a gentle, introspective acoustic opener, the song ‘Soothe’. It originally came out as a companion piece to the single Disarm, which British buyers had added to their shelves a couple of years earlier. Acoustic guitar and Billy’s fragile vocals. “Hold me / hold me again…”. A parable of pain and vulnerability, just the right introduction. Two main themes. An opening section with light, and a closing one with darker undertones. Then we move on to ‘Frail And Bedazzeled’. It becomes clear right away that this is a song that had to compete with the tracks from Siamese Dream. An energetic explosion of layered guitars. Wild drums that surf through the elements like jazz, so naturally and effortlessly. A confusing solo and fat guitars chip away at Corgan’s vocals, which get lost. And then the break. An a cappella part, expertly mined by the final chorus and a repeating wall of explosive guitars. A bonfire of emotions. A dance of madness. A slightly hazier picture reflects the mental states in ‘Plume’, which was written during the Gish era. Slowed-down rhythms and massive guitars drag you deeper and deeper. Like sinking into the depths of the Caspian Sea. Just a density of slightly distorted sound. A sea of melancholy and Sashing-style weirdness. Beauty. The sonic stimuli ripple from comfort and pleasure to leisurely delusions and provocation. ‘Whir’ fills the hollows with the beauty and eroticism of the stylistic rebirth that came with Siamese Dream. Morning sun and dew on endless plains of sweet pain and solitude that has never sounded so crystalline and lovely. And you can already see the reflection of a million pearls on the surface of the sea of shattered sun. The inventive composition, layering more onto an already heavily loaded cake, pours into a new image of endless cosmic levitation, and it’s precisely that ending, fading out gradually, that makes ‘Whir’ easily one of the finest pieces by the Chicago foursome. ‘Blew Away’ is a pretty country-tinged ramble with James Iha stepping up to the mic. He babbled something similar on his solo record, and the first impression, at least to my taste, is a pretty disjointed pile of crap. In my own internal picture, the Smashing Pumpkins have always been about rhythm and the massive sound of distorted guitars. You only hear them on the solo here, with which Corgan slightly patches up the pretty stale feeling that Iha always wanted a duet with Dolly Parton. ‘Pissant’ is a kick in the right direction. A smear of rage and angry guitars. A guitar cannonade and Corgan’s falsetto. Ecstasy of madness and the urge to escape. Iha and Corgan glide along the necks of their guitars, D’Arcy gets lost, while Chamberlin keeps catching butterflies in a shared net of solid wholeness. The transcendent element is prevented by the chopped-off ending. ‘Hello Kitty Kat’ sends the horizons rippling with a scarlet touch, but with a rather unfortunate vocal mastering job, with vocals that are totally mangled and almost unintelligible, though in feel they’re the “real Smashing vocals”. ‘Obscured’ softens the drive toward apocalyptic collapse with gentle percussion and a duet of delicate acoustic guitars. Like floating above a desert. An arabesque of obscure happiness, tightly interwoven with sorrow and the feeling of flames sweetly burning down in the heart, is spun into a thread that leads to the loveliest acoustic track on this record. ‘Landslide’ is truly a gem in which less is actually more. Acoustics with a light delay and Billy’s storytelling element of the absolute supremacy of melody over words – a recognition of aging and maturing, even if it comes from somebody else’s pen. A fellow by the name of Steve Nicks. “I’m not afraid of changing / Cause I’ve bulit my life around you / Time makes you older / And even children’re getting older / I’m getting older too …” Even melancholics like Corgan fall prey to Peter Pan syndrome. The longest stretch on the record can be described with the words dream, stoned, mirage, deceptive visions and cosmic to the tenth power. ‘Starla’ is really an imaginarium of at least three main themes, paraphrases and feelings that are one, and in that oneness manifold. After a full bloom of sound that builds as if you were turning the knobs on the amp up to the max, the range of intensity is stretched even further by silence and the gentle chiming of angelic bells. ‘Blue’ with a minimalist bass, with which D’Arcy knew how to conjure up movement. And then a cover of the Animals – ‘Girl Named Sandoz’. Psychedelia and a total stoner switch-off. The late sixties and early seventies, done the nineties way. Intoxicating substances practically bubble out of every pore. All so that on hovering once again over the already-seen morning landscape, you feel a purer catharsis. ‘La Dolly Vita’ by that criterion definitely takes second or third place for everyone who listened to a lot of Beatles in their youth. ‘Spaced’ is a return to the more familiar Pumpkins wandering around unknown planets. An echo of distant words and endless calm. We’ve terminated all fears. We’ve cleansed all chakras. Time for a short goodbye and departure to a new plateau. To a new level, which will be different. The probe marked Smashing Pumpkins leaves the worlds known so far and passes into another dimension.

Pisces Iscariot, as a document of its time and of mental evolution, is a jewel that we can, without shame, set alongside Gish and Siamese Dream in the string of Smashing Pumpkins masterpieces. As a compilation of unreleased recordings, it goes beyond mere listing and the formal conditions for calling something an album. The whole is less cohesive than its two predecessors, sure, but the point this time wasn’t to say anything new and fresh. Judas’s kiss wasn’t yet obvious here. They kissed their old selves and began gradually saying goodbye to them. That was already visible on the later releases, which are a completely different story. A story of its own, which was only in the phase of mental construction here. Pisces Iscariot is one of the last impulses of that pure, unspoiled scarlet light radiating from the young heart at the center of Pumpkinland, only nobody knew it yet back then …