The Smashing Pumpkins - MACHINA/The Machines Of God POLL.

Not really a fan of this album at all but 'Glass and the Ghost Children' is proper epic.

Yeah, I love 'Glass and the Ghost Children', especially the first half of the track which has some fine Jimmy Chamberlin drumming. I'm actually undecided as to what to vote for here, because there's quite a few of these songs that I like a hell of a lot... 'The Crying Tree Of Mercury' and 'Blue Skies Bring Tears' are the two here that are guaranteed not to get my vote, but I have more than a soft spot for 'The Everlasting Gaze', 'Stand Inside Your Love', 'I Of The Mourning', 'Glass and The Ghost Children', 'Wound', 'With Every Light' and 'Age Of Innocence'.

Of all the Pumpkins albums, this is the one that I'm actually looking forward to being reissued the most... I think it'll be very interesting to see what Billy does with this one.

This could be another five CD/one DVD box easy.

It would be excellent if it was! I'm particularly interested in hearing how he's going to remix the tracks, and hearing how the album was originally conceived.

This is a patchy album but the best songs are really really good. I like the production sheen on it too. I'm going with 'Stand Inside Your Love', just over 'Age of Innocence'.

Imploding Voice, but there's 3 or 4 other songs that would've fit the bill. This album had its moments.

Damn. With Every Light i guess. it's full of amazing songs though that are hindered by the obnoxious production - gatgc, imploding voice, wound, try, siyl, iotm, this time....shame it didn't quite hit the mark

Went with 'I Of The Mourning', just coz.

man i haven't heard this since around the time it came out.

i saw them around this time too, my first gig without parents, a friend's dad dropped us off and waited outside the birmingham NEC arena. so billy came out in a white (wedding?) dress and played some lonely acoustic songs, solo, kinda rubbish, then disappeared off stage. then there was a nervy 30 minute wait, we were thinking that was it, end of the pumpkins (i think it was meant to be their second from last ever gig or something).

so anyway he then came out in a black dress and they launced into 'the everlasting gaze' and holy shit it was heavy. lost a shoe and ripped loads of buttons off my shirt in the mosh pit. we returned to the car, my friend's dad was laughing at us we got in and he put john peel on the radio and my friend and i heard what we called brazillian drum n bass (i think it was just some idm type thing - maybe squarepusher) for the first time and decided it was the best thing ever, a lot better than the gig we'd just seen. and so we sold our guitars, bought interfaces and started downloading all the audio software we could find.

so thanks for that billy!

Very LCD Soundsystem-sounding origin story.

Actually just threw this on last week to see how it held up or whether it sounded better than it did to me in the summer of 2000 when I really, really struggled to like it. Still can really only deal with the same set of "heart music, Echo and the Bunnymen" songs - "Raindrops + Sunshowers," "Stand Inside Your Love," "I Of The Mourning," "This Time," "Wound." I love imagining "With Every Light" as a musical theater number, Billy strolling down the Yellow Brick Road, swinging his arms and proclaiming "Look ma, the sun is shinin' on me!"

Except for "The Everlasting Gaze," which at least punches hard and keeps it brief, all the "heavy" songs are just awful, they smell like a car full of old french fries that's been sitting in the sun in the middle of a parking lot. TEG also just about collapses under the wretched a capella bridge, too - that went from WTF to "oh, that's kinda cool" to "nope, that sucks" in about five listens for me. The whole thing is such a damned shame because just a few years earlier, Billy had a clearer hand on the marriage of heavy rock and passionate teenage poetry than basically anybody in the game, and here he feels this need to separate them out and it leaves the heavy rock songs just adrift in their dinosauric self-insistence. Nothing there, unless there are secrets buried in the ridiculous booklet.

For all that, "Age of Innocence" is one of my favorite Pumpkins songs ever, would have been a perfect closer on any of their records. Desolation, yes / hesitation, no. Now that's some apocalyptic shit I can get behind. I sort of imagine an alternate version of this album where it's bookended by that and "Here's To The Atom Bomb."

Love the idea that the last days of o.g. Pumpkins convinced a thousand alt-rock youth to throw away their guitars and start learning to use Reason and Fruityloops or whatever....

ouch ;) xpost

so charmberlin is a monster, jesus. i still know too many words to these songs, i'm sure at some point recently i've (v drunkenly) sang the breakdown whining baby bit in 'the everlasting gaze'. gonna go with 'stand inside your love' serious early teens nostalgia here ~intense feelings~ can't really be rational about whether or not it's any good

There's only really a couple of songs on this record that I would class as "heavy", though! I still rate 'The Everlasting Gaze', and I think 'The Imploding Voice' is a decent enough song (although I'm not fond of the production treatment on that particular song, hence why I'm looking forward to the remix so much). I'd say 'Heavy Metal Machine' was the worst of all the "heavy" songs, though.

even as like a middle school ultra billy corgan stan i thought "heavy metal machine" was ponderous

"the imploding voice" however is good fun. doctor casino otm generally still

oh my god! heavy metal machine SUCKS

between this and machina ii is probably the best smashing pumpkins record but it feels like billy wanted to pull off a rock pose after adore and it just makes parts of the album incredibly stagnant

the good thing is the songs that actually drift away from this forced narrative actually continue to surprise: "wound" "age of innocence" "with every light" "raindrops + sunshowers"

"i of the mourning" of course is a "rock" song but it finds this purchase naturally, like, say, the material on siamese dream. the last minute or so of it is super thrilling

oh my god! heavy metal machine SUCKS

― yellow jacket (spazzmatazz), Tuesday, April 16, 2013 4:18 PM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

When I listen to it, I usually find myself thinking that the main riff is good but wishing that he'd taken the time to write a better song with it. Production/mix leaves a lot to be desired on that one too, I think. Also, is it just me that cringes a little when Billy sings "If I were dead, would my records sell?"

Suspect my reception of "I of the Mourning" is heavily colored by Pitchfork's review and the comment to the effect of "When was the last time anyone heard their favorite song on the radio?" Classic P4K indie snob posturing obviously but I was vulnerable to that at that moment, and it did contribute to the sense that Billy Pumpkin was aiming for this resonant imagery but just trying too hard, and that rang true for the whole album in a way.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11829-machinathe-machines-of-god/

that line is super dumb but yeah it gets at the record's larger issue

machina ii curiously unaffected by any of that grandiosity but it kinda sounds like shit

oh i should clarify i'm a fan of the production on this album

Voted "Imploding Voice" but after listening I think it's probably "This Time"
More than any other song from the album it really felt like a goodbye note from Billy/the band. I was an obsessed fan and emotional teen at the time and it really felt like the end of an era to me.

Did we do a Machina II poll ever?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

VERY surprised 'The Crying Tree Of Mercury' got a vote and 'Wound' didn't!

for some reason recently I found myself thinking that D'Arcy Wretzky and Jimmy Chamberlain were both dead (my wife was asking me "whatever happened to the Smashing Pumpkins")

Billy Corgan carried on the name with a new line-up (Oceania came out last year), Jimmy Chamberlin has his own band (The Jimmy Chamberlin Complex, which is a bit more jazz-fusiony), James Iha put out his second solo record last year and is apparently going to continue working with A Perfect Circle, and D'Arcy Wretsky generally keeps quiet... although the odd picture over the years has surfaced of her looking incredibly rough, and was arrested a couple of times a couple of years ago for drink-driving and not being able to control her horses on her farm. She was jailed for a few dates for missing court dates for the latter. She may still be doing a huge amount of drugs... who knows!?

whoa, every song on this is suddenly amazing, on par with the first four. this is a big breakthrough for me. "The Sacred + Profane" just caught me way off guard. this thing is rock solid, even if it's imperfect. even more excited for the proper reissue with I & II combined into the intended meta-rock opera (lol... no but im really excited)

ugh, i just reached "heavy metal machine." nevermind

ahhh, "This Time"...yup this record is two excellent halves sandwiching the worst track of Corgan's career

ugh "the sacred + profane" is incredible

I fucking love 'Wound'.

"Wound" is aces

I need to break the album out

Raindrops + Sundrops still does it for me. probably the only track on here that benefits from the glutted production.

Raindrops + Sunshowers that should read.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVZfKiYOgJM

i blow the dust off my guitar
in the attic with the star
i read your letter to feel better
my tears upon the fading ink

Just had a long drive and decided to listen to this all the way through for the first time since, oh, 2002?

I'm still convinced that a 10-12 track album combined out of the best of this and "Machina II" would be pretty wonderful - some absolute highlights here - but as it stands the pacing and length of this record manage to cut it off at the knees.

Being past the 60-minute mark and having to sit thru both "Crying Tree of Mercury" and "Blue Skies Bring Tears?" is simply brutal.

“this time” is a really really really good song by the smashing pumpkins

this would've been an amazing instrumental album.

"raindrops + sunshowers" getting 0 is whack. textbook example of chamberlain's drumming on fantastic display.

I haven’t heard this album in 20+ years. Things I remember about it are the singles (mostly the music videos tbh), the sort of Elephant trumpeting sound on “crying tree” and yeah the drums on “raindrops + sunshowers”. Oh and I also remember t-shirt my father bought me (I guess at hot topic?)… the artwork was actually the highlight of the album for me and I loved wearing that shirt despite not being a fan of the album. Love the typography, the illustration, and those autumn-chic tones that were very late-90s, goth-starbucks aesthetic.

I remember the mix sounding very saturated and lifeless but I guess that was the trend those years.

the mix is pretty terrible, horribly muddy and flat, even by the standards of the time. a real shame because some of the songs are actually quite good beneath all that.

it’s a really strange mix, super blown out and dreamy

i'm a freak and i have always liked the way this record sounds

Oof tried to give this one a second chance and the mix sounds even worse than I remembered. Couldn’t make it past two songs, sorry.

Yeah, can I just vote for the album art?

I was so into that in grade 10. I made a cosplay of Plate VIII for art class. (Even worse: a little folding triptych based on "Bullet With Butterfly Wings", lol)

Ah, what a shame!

there's a bunch of stuff on mellon collie that's similar enough in feeling but not really anything past that

As a fairweather Pumpkins fan, I'm wondering, are there any songs post Siamese Dream that have the same feel as Soma or Drown?

There are some fine 'lost Pumpkins' post-MCIS songs that I return to a lot:

'Home' from Machina 2.
'Every Morning' from Atum.
'Goeth the Fall' from Aghori Mhori Mei.

I wouldn't say these are at all like 'Soma' or 'Drown' but if you can sift through the dozens of 'wtf is Billy doing this for' songs there's some worthwhile stuff.

Machina 2 stuff only on the deluxe 8LP set, argh

― brimstead, Thursday, June 26, 2025 5:01 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Oh, come on

It’s like this band (or its label) really, really REALLY doesn’t want my money anymore

Record company churlishness is nothing new, and Corgan is prone to reinventing himself every five minutes, but part of me wonders whether actually for real for real retiring the Pumpkins as a brand - in 2001 or 2008 - would’ve been better for the forms eventual reissues could take.

Also of course the music business is drastically different than it was a quarter century ago

he's been pretty open about what the deal is - universal wasn't interested in funding a physical release of the machina 1 & 2 box set once he finally completed it, so he's self-releasing the vinyl box set because vinyl sells better. if it does well, there may be a cd box set release later on too. universal is giving the machina 1 remaster on vinyl a wider release, and the entire box set is getting a digital release and will be on streaming

this is the track list for the complete machina quintuple album with 48 tracks. idk even what a bunch of these tracks are lol

LE DEUX MACHINA
STAND INSIDE YOUR LOVE
I OF THE MOURNING
GOD’S PROMISE
THE CRYING TREE OF MERCURY
SLOW DAWN
THE SACRED AND PROFANE
THE EVERLASTING GAZE
HERE’S TO THE ATOM BOMB
WOUND
GLASS’ THEMR
HEAVY METAL MACHINE
BLUE SKIES WROUGHT TEARS
PALE SCALES
VANITY
AUTUMN
“MACHINA, MACHINA”
RAINDROPS + SUNSHOWERS
GLASS AND THE GHOST CHILDREN
REAL LOVE
THE IMPLODING VOICE
ONE MOMENT
SPEED KILLS
HERE’S TO THE ATOM BOMB, TOO
TRY, TRY, TRY
WHYTE SPYDER
DON’T WANNA BE YOUR LOVER
CASH CAR STAR
DROSS
LUCKY 13
HMM
WITHOUT YOU
WINTERLONG
LAUGH
IF THERE IS A GOD
THIS TIME
BLUE SKIES BRING TEARS
IN MY BODY
INNOSENSE
TRY (AGAIN)
DRAIN
YET ANOTHER PROMISE
HOME
WITH EVERY LIGHT
AGE OF INNOCENCE
LET ME GIVE THE WORLD TO YOU
SOOT + STARS
MACHINA THEME

then there's also bonus tracks:

UNTITLED
BLUE SKIES BRING TEARS (EARLY VERSION)
GO (M2 VERSION)
VANITY (SADLANDS DEMO)
RAINDROPS + SUNSHOWERS (BAND DEMO)
SOUL POWER (M2 VERSION)
HERE I AM (SADLANDS DEMO)
THE CRYING TREE
GLASS AND THE GHOST CHILDREN (PUMPKINLAND DEMO)
AGE OF INNOCENCE (ACOUSTIC DEMO)
ROCK ON
END OF THE JOKE
STAND INSIDE YOUR LOVE (EARLY VERSION)
HOME (HOME DEMO)
IDENTIFY (MOVIE DEMO)
RAINY DAY SONG
LUCKY 13 (M2 VERSION)
SATUR9 (M2 VERSION)
THE IMPLODING VOICE (PUMPKINLAND DEMO)
WITHOUT YOU (SADLANDS DEMO)
WOUND (SADLANDS DEMO)
SPEED KILLS (EARLY VERSION)
WHYTE SPYDER (M2 VERSION)
SUMMER (REHEARSAL)
LET ME GIVE THE WORLD TO YOU (SADLANDS DEMO)
HEAVY METAL MACHINE (M2 VERSION)
I OF THE RADIO (INSTRUMENTAL DEMO)
SLEEPING GIANT
ATTACHED BY SATELLITES (SADLANDS DEMO)
GLASS’ THEME (M2 DEMO)
PROMISE (NYC DEMO)
FUCK YOU (LIVE 12.02.00)

i kinda expect the full machina to be an unlistenable slog but i'm glad it's coming out at last

Yeah, same here, though it would be nice to have an AIFF/FLAC digital option for the digital release. (Theoretically he could at least put it on Bandcamp.)

Thanks for the listing ufo

I have no clue what a lot of this stuff is (“end of the joke”?!) but maybe this was still in that era when they were recording oodles of cuts around every LP

tbh the rereleases of every sp album contained demos for things i didn’t know existed

Setting aside the label's hesitancy to put this out, so fitting for this to be released solely on expensive as hell vinyl, sold exclusively from Billy's tea shop and ending with "Fuck You".

i bet this'll sell out and there'll be a cd

well, i hope. it'd be really nice

HOME
WITH EVERY LIGHT
AGE OF INNOCENCE
LET ME GIVE THE WORLD TO YOU
SOOT + STARS

devastating sequence of amazing songs, fucking bring it

Wow, NOT feeling this new artwork one bit

shoot... there was enough space to fit "heavy metal machine" on this

Huh? It is on this.

i didn't say "wasn't"

the existing tracks aren't just remastered but a new mix too so i'll be impressed if he's managed to make them sound worse than the original mix

i weirdly love the mix... it's the *shocker* vocals that for the first time didn't work for me

one of the big issues i have is the way the vocals just sit so far on top of the rest of the mix, which is heavily compressed and pretty muddy. just burying the vocals a bit would be a decent improvement but i doubt that's gonna happen

he's talked about how he's overdubbed demos for some of the previously unheard stuff on here which i absolutely don't trust will sound ok at all lol

shoot... there was enough space to fit "heavy metal machine" on this

there was even enough space to fit both versions of it on there, unless "HMM" is somehow something completely different

i'm skimming through machina now and i'd truly forgotten just how ugly some of it sounds. what the hell is the mix on "the imploding voice", it's so bizarre

the only Pumpkins song I have time for from era is "White Spyder" and the mix on that is just all clipping

Ratatat

i hope "whyte spyder" will be audible on the box set, that's the track that needs a new mix/master more than any other

something that's obviously missing from this is the deranged, near unrecognisable "once in a lifetime" cover that was a staple of the machina tour

"slow dawn" is definitely my favorite of the volume 2 tracks

does anybody else remember watching them premiere "cash car star" on some stupid fox show in 2000/2001?

hmm maybe it was The Tonight Show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B5fB8b41Qc

guessing that's just a flat Jay's holding

It’s amazing that this appearance happen for a record no one could even buy

"you can download it on the internet!"

the machina reissue is on streaming (just the reissue, NOT the box set yet) and it's kinda strange. some of it sounds pretty much identical, some of it is clearly new mixes (not just the ones labelled 2025 mix on streaming) of varying quality, and "raindrops + sunshowers" now has an extra minute of drums at the end?

the piano + phone call bit in "glass and the ghost children" has confusingly been replaced with some sirens and there's some sirens added to the end too. it's noticeably less brickwalled too although hardly revelatory

Huh

That’s… why?!

Because.

from skimming through it the new mix of "this time" is the most noticeable improvement

not sure why “try” was remixed so the drums sound like they’re underwater

extra drum bars on “raindrops” are pretty dope

i am a little miffed that he made the drums sound notm on the implosion voice lol

lmao replacing the “le deux machina” part of “glass and the ghost children,” adding extra reverb onto the coda… what is going on. well i know what’s going on to some degree. june dies in a car crash during “glass,” so it makes sense there are just sirens now. but… still… the fuck???

… so it was all very obtuse…

he made the drums sound notm

normal* !!! lol

“wound” remains the greatest song of all time

age of innocence sounds great but also the original mix was good too

i should cover that song

it’s still so much a perfect description of my life of complete romantic failure lol

apparently a lot of the changes are just because they lost the original tapes for a lot of tracks so for those billy just went with some alternate mixes he liked that they still had access to. only the ones marked "2025 remix" are the ones that were deliberately remixed for this project. that makes sense i guess but still makes for a strange listen.

it sounds like most of the machina 2 stuff on the boxset is going to be entirely new mixes though

looking forward to when the original masters get “rediscovered” and they try to convince me to buy this for the 30th anniversary.