Smashing Pumpkins – ‘Siamese Dream’ Deluxe Edition Review

Sitting down and listening to ‘Siamese Dream’ seems somehow unnecessary because it’s an album I know like the back of my hand. In my life I’ve owned four copies of the record including this one, three of them were stolen despite being on the verge of having been played to death and yet I still keep forking out for it. And I still keep playing it. What can I say? It’s the mark of a great album, and no matter how many times this disc spins I know I’ll come back to this one again and again too because ‘Siamese dream’ is a once-in-a-lifetime record. Like ‘dirt’, ‘ten’ and ‘superunknown’, the Pumpkins tapped into a unique vein of creativity on ‘siamese’ and, even if all these records are loosely gathered together under the lazy ‘grunge’ tag, the truth is they couldn’t sound more different from each other. For while AiC wanted to be Sabbath and Soundgarden wanted to be Zeppelin, the Pumpkins took on the whole psychedelic genre – reams of sun-kissed sixties pop – and augmented it with a blisteringly visceral hard-rock shield crafting a masterpiece in the process.

What song did you first hear? Did you buy the album and get your ass rudely battered by ‘cherub rock’? Or did you hear ‘today’ on the radio or in a mate’s room and get blown away by the tense dynamic shift from rippling intro to power-chord brutality? Does it really matter when the end result was nearly always the same – one hit and you were hooked by the sheer bitter-sweet lyricism and turn-on-a-dime sonic mood swings that provide the backbone of the album. Like ‘Nevermind’, ‘Siamese dream’ was produced by the seemingly ubiquitous Butch Vig and it is a testament to the prowess of that producer that the remastering job, although raising volume a touch, does little to improve what was already a sonically perfect mix. Guitars hum and crackle with energy, the intro to ‘hummer’ still serves to confuse and ‘soma’…. well ‘soma’ (one of two tracks Billy shared with a disenfranchised James) is still every bit the breathtakingly beautiful centrepiece to the album that it always was. Quite simply the remaster alone is not enough to warrant an ardent fans attention but the extras… well, that’s another story.

Let’s start with the packaging. While some labels stick with the now-getting-rather-tired Deluxe edition format that Universal kicked off some years ago, Virgin have given ‘Siamese dream’ the sort of glittering star treatment it so thoroughly deserves – a treatment matched only by Pearl Jam’s ‘Ten’ reissue – and thus the album now comes in a hefty, heavy-weight card box coated with a glittering, metallic rendering of the album’s original, iconic artwork. Inside the box you’ll find three discs (two CDs and a DVD) as well as thirteen postcards which recreate and expand upon the original booklet and a booklet containing a track-by-track guide and potted history of the album. To say that this is definitive (and, for once, at a reasonable price) is possibly even an understatement. The packaging, then, does not disappoint.

The content meanwhile has been chosen with equal sensitivity, especially given the two compilations of rare material (‘Pisces Iscariot’ and ‘Judas O’) already available. Disc one provides you with the remastered album in all its stunning glory, and, happily, shorn of any ill-advised tacked on tracks thus preserving the original’s integrity. Disc two is where fans will find paydirt in the form of session demos, BBC session tracks (‘Never let me down again’ – the only previously released track on the entire set) and acoustic treatments. At eighteen tracks it is exhaustive and, as with all such discs, it is questionable as to quite how many times the causal listener will return, but it is a generous and well thought-out disc nonetheless. The third disc is another undisputed pleasure – a full concert filmed at Chicago’s metro way back in 1993 which brings together 18 tracks and a discomforting sense of nostalgia, not least for the time when Billy had hair and a sense of humour.

It is the DVD that boosts this set from desirable to essential. The sound and visuals are pristine and the band on fire; D’arcy remains as sultry and inscrutable as ever, her focus all about the mighty bass sound pouring from her speakers, James is far more the scrawny indie rocker than the angelic presence he would portray during the latter days of the pumpkins and his tenure in A Perfect Circle, Jimmy is the powerhouse we all remember – a remarkable drummer who has rarely, if ever, been given the recognition he deserves – and Billy is a feral, mesmerising front-man. Far removed from the dress-wearing, megalomaniacal presence he was to become in later years; damaged by betrayal, death and the erroneous conviction that rock was dead; the Bily of ’93 is alive with enthusiasm for his new material – watch as he launches into ‘rocket’ at the outset of the DVD, or bathe in the glory of ‘Today’ and ‘rhinoceros’, both of which introduce live cello into the mix and try not to feel the overwhelming passion burning out of him. It is this, more than anything, that will thrill fans, particularly those who missed the band during this crucial period, and the set list is a joy to behold too, with ‘Soma’, ‘cherub rock’ and a monstrous ‘silverfuck’ all proving to be highlights of a lengthy, exhausting set.

Overall this is a well presented and well thought-out set that recaptures the glory of the Pumpkins during their Siamese years and something that fans of the band may well find themselves having to purchase. The album itself is a solid-gold masterpiece which has stood the test of time and the extras well worth the price of admission. It is hard, in this day and age of reissues a-plenty, not to feel conned when yet another classic album is unearthed and repackaged, but when it is done this lavishly and with this much attention to detail there may be some justification after all.

…And for those of you wondering – here’s the tracklisting in full: