The Smashing Pumpkins Greatest Hits album came out on Tuesday, and I got a copy.
What a misnamed album (actually two). This is a double disc set that contains 12 previously unreleased Pumpkins songs! That’s like a whole new album! Add to that all of their big hits, and you get this album, for $14 at Best Buy!
Wow, it’s so cool.
Album 1 is called Rotten Apples, which is all the hits plus 2 new songs.
Album 2 is called Judas O, which is a bunch of B-Sides and 10 new songs. Bad ass!
What do you guys think of the new songs? I haven’t listened to them enough to make a real call on them yet, but Untitled off of Rotten Apples is a really cool song in the style of the pumpkins in their Siamese Dream/Mellon Collie era.
I was (and am) under the impression that the second disc is a limited time special edition. And only some small number (10,000 in Australia) are being released.
That probably equates to about 100,000 or so (give or take 10,000) in the US.
You could be right about that. On the other hand, they are offering free downloads of all the songs on Judas O in 320 kbps mp3 format at http://www.smashingpumpkins.com . That’s really high quality, so if you burned it, it would sound good.
I’ve been really impressed with them as a band since they broke up, allowing Audiogalaxy to host all of their songs in mp3, offering all of their videos on the website, and now giving away their latest album.
It seems like they are now saying thank you for all the support their fans gave them, and basically saying that everything they produced during that time belongs to us now. That’s really cool. I highly recommend downloading those songs if you aren’t going to go out and buy them.
A million thanks, Lucki Chaarms. When I read that this album was coming out, I just skipped past it, going “Well, I’ve got all their other albums, so why do I need SPGH?” I had no idea it had unreleased numbers on it. I’ll get myself a copy at the earliest opportunity.
(Mind you, the unreleased tracks thing is a very Pumpkins thing to do - Pisces Iscariot and the countless Mellon Collie singles spring to mind.)
Any news on what the band members are doing now? Especially, of course, Mr Corgan?
As far as the band members go, Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain are back together in a new band called Zwan. They have no singles out, but they recently played their first concert, and have a few more to go before (I imagine) hitting the studio.
Apparently Zwan has a little of the flavor, but is thankfully not a Pumpkins clone. This courtesy of the nice people over at Rolling Stone.
However, most of the ‘new’ tracks are somewhat familiar. Untitled received radio airplay (well, at least here in Australia) almost a year ago. Apparently, it was played on a Chicago radio station this time last year as a ‘farewell’ song from the Pumpkins; from there, the electronic recording made its way around the world.
Real Love is a track from Machina II: The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music. Strictly speaking, this recording was offically released, but not as a CD. Machina II was distributed by the Pumpkins (without involving their estranged recording company) as a set of vinyls. The band basically told people to distribute this final album electronically (I have it :))
Here’s to the Atom Bomb is another track from Machina II. Many of the other Judas O tracks can be found on the Aeroplane Flies High boxed set compilation of Mellon Collie-era singles and b-sides; I’ve heard that the other tracks are Adore and Machina I outakes.
nice touch