★★★★★
Billy Corgan once described Adore, the Pumpkins' fourth album, as the sound of "a band falling apart". The Chicago outfit had found fame with their previous two records - 1993's Siamese Dream and 1995's epic double-album Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness - but something was rotting inside. In 1996, drummer Jimmy Chamberlain was kicked out of the band after overdosing on heroin alongside touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin, who died from his overdose. A clean break, it seemed, was needed.
- recordcollectormag.com
2014-10-08
★★★★★
Adore is, without a question, the single most misunderstood album in the Smashing Pumpkins' entire discography, but not for the reasons you might expect. The album arrived in 1998, right as rock bands like U2 began playing around with this increasingly-popular new brand of rock-friendly dance music known as "electronica"...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-10-02
★★★★★
Regardless of what The Smashing Pumpkins have been up to in the past few decades--side-projects, sanctimonious public dismissals of one another, misguided attempts at keeping the band together and defending its legacy while appearing too smug to actually redeem themselves (all of which, like the band, was mainly Billy Corgan's doing)--the music should really speak for itself...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2014-10-02
★★★★★
Here we have the little, lovesick album where the caged rat sings and alienates Smashing Pumpkins fans by the millions--you know, the one that's 73 minutes long and whose first single begins with the lyric, "It's you that I adore/ You'll always be my whore." The one that's called "underrated" so often that, by definition, it can't actually be true...
- pitchfork.com
2014-09-26
★★★★★
Tweet Twilight Fades When the Smashing Pumpkins released Adore in 1998, Billy Corgan, James Iha and D'arcy Wretzky Brown were the mastermind behind a re-embracing and reimagining of the 80s through modern means that still bears its mark on today's music. With the album's reissue, it has become starkly more apparent just how ahead of his time they were...
- www.mxdwn.com
2014-09-25
★★★★★
Rock music's hallowed halls are overstuffed with stories of artists growing disenchanted with power chords and pentatonic scales, or catching listeners off guard with a surprise shift in their M.O. And the higher that artist rises, the sharper the left turn, be it Neil Young's sad robot vocoder party or The Rolling Stones' almost-successful take on disco...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2014-09-23
★★★★★
When Billy Corgan does a reissue programme he doesn't piss around - even his box sets are getting their own box set. The original Aeroplane Flies High came out in 1996, rounding up the five singles from the all-conquering Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness record and expanding each into a six or seven track mini-album. The resulting collection had as many new tracks as its mammoth parent LP, a testimony to Corgan and co's almost comically prolific output at the time...
- thequietus.com
2013-09-12
★★★★★
The Smashing Pumpkins' 1996 box set release, The Aeroplane Flies High, represented the end of Pumpkins era mark one. After culminating their '90s dominance in 1995's epic double album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Billy Corgan and company released The Aeroplane Flies High, a box set of singles from Mellon Collie and assorted B-sides cut during the album sessions. Pumpkins devotees greeted the set with great enthusiasm...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2013-07-30
★★★★★
Three years ago, The Independent's Fiona Sturges wrote a feature called "Imagine no new artists, just endless re-releases" in which she examined the artistic and financial aspects of reissued albums. She concluded by observing that "artist back catalogues are part of our cultural heritage, something to be cherished and preserved, not degraded and exploited"...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-09-05
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