Product Description

'Rotten Apples' is a greatest hits package encompasing the music of the Smashing Pumpkins before their inaugural split in 2000. Features songs from all five of their studio albums. Includes the internet only track 'Real Love' and a previously unreleased song 'Untitled'.

Track Listing

1. Siva
2. Rhinoceros
3. Drown
4. Cherub Rock
5. Today
6. Disarm
7. Bullet With Butterfly Wings
8. 1979
9. Zero
10. Tonight, Tonight
11. Eye
12. Ava Adore
13. Perfect
14. The Everlasting Gaze
15. Stand Inside Your Love
16. Try, Try, Try (Album Version)
17. Real Love
18. Untitled

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8741 in Music
• Released on: 2001-11-19
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Explicit Lyrics

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Smashing Pumpkins' greatest-hits album, Rotten Apples traces the band's evolution (or devolution, depending on your feelings about the band's radical sonic shift in the mid-1990s) from its early days to its status among the kings of alt rock. For fans of the Pumpkins' beginnings as a tripped-out indie/art-rock act, Apples opens with some of the band's strongest material. "Shiva" and "Rhinoceros" (from Gish, the Pumpkin's first album) seamlessly mixed dream pop with noisy Goth-rock as prime examples of the Pumpkins' early 1990s sound. Apples also showcases three stellar tracks ("Cherub Rock", "Today" and "Disarm") from Siamese Dream, the Pumpkins' breakthrough album. This disc makes the band's mid-90s' directional swing obvious, though, starting with "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" the aggressive alt rock/alt metal concoction released on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Fans of songs such as "Zero", "Tonight, Tonight" and "The Everlasting Gaze" will be happy to know that pretty much every cage rattling hit made it to this disc, along with the previously unreleased dream-pop track "Real Love" and an untitled new track (that sounds a lot like the Siamese Dream-era Pumpkins) to round out the mix. --Jennifer Maerz

Customer Reviews

Greatest
The Smashing Pumpkins were one of the greatest bands of the 90s, a mixture of dreamy pop and stark grungey metal, set against Billy Corgan's poem-like songwriting. And "The Smashing Pumpkins - Greatest Hits" almost lives up to its name -- there are one or two songs that don't quite fit here, but most of them are indeed the "Greatest" that the band produced.

The songs are pretty much arranged in chronological order, starting off with the hard-rocker "Siva" and heading off into the mixture of hard rock/metal, and eerie dreampop, climaxing with the rich offerings from "Mellon Collie And the Infinite Sadness." With the songs of "Adore," there's an obvious shift in tone, becoming a bit more gothic and less rockish, only to swing back in the slow-burning songs from "Machina," their swan song.

Long after disbanding, the Smashing Pumpkins are still a towering presence in rock -- they debuted in the era of Nirvana, but with a very different kind of music. Their creative use of basic instruments and Billy Corgan's rich songwriting made them much more complex and deeper than almost all rock bands of the time. And "Greatest Hits" follows them through the band's entire lifetime -- from their surprisingly polished debut to the panoramic "Mellon Collie" to their gothic art-rock.

The songs included on "Greatest Hits" are not just the most commercially known, but also several of the best -- "Ava Adore," "Siva," "1979" and "Tonight Tonight." An additional track is stuck on, "Real Love," but somehow it just isn't up to the standards of the other songs. It's nice, but not up to the level of the "Greatest" Smashing Pumpkins songs.

Corgan was without a doubt the creative center of the Pumpkins -- he wrote the songs, filling them with doubts, anger and anguish, and also provided some mind-blowing guitar riffs and his vocals. His high, reedy voice is woven well into the music, giving his poetic lyrics an unusually heartfelt quality. He's singing about love, death, bombs, loneliness in a metaphorical wasteland.

The guitar and bass provide sizzling soundscapes and dense walls of sound, while the percussion is complex and lightning-fast. At the same time, we get the sweeping dreampop -- like the haunting "Rhinoceros" -- and gentler songs, where Corgan slows his guitar down to a gentle acoustic strum. That versatility is one of the things that made the Pumpkins so outstanding.

Rock doesn't get much more original than the Smashing Pumpkins, and several of their greatest hits -- both among fans and critics -- are compiled in "The Smashing Pumpkins - Greatest Hits."

Great American band
I borrowed this CD from a roomate a few years ago. I'd seen Tonight Tonight on MTV before but it didn't do anything for me then.

This is the best way to introduce yourself to unheared of bands, as opposed to picking up one of their albums at random. While bands like The Pumpkins are great, and have had some brilliant songs, they also tend to have done alot of garbage. On the greatest hits, you don't that- it takes all the singles (best of) and presents them in a good order.

I like how they moved away from being a random American grunge wannabe band to go onto morph into this melancholy indie sound in a league of it's own. One offs.

Utterly smashing
The Smashing Pumpkins were one of the greatest bands of the 90s, a mixture of dreamy pop and stark grungey metal, set against Billy Corgan's poem-like songwriting. And "The Smashing Pumpkins - Greatest Hits" almost lives up to its name -- there are one or two songs that don't quite fit here, but most of them are indeed the "Greatest" that the band produced.

The songs are pretty much arranged in chronological order, starting off with the hard-rocker "Siva" and heading off into the mixture of hard rock/metal, and eerie dreampop, climaxing with the rich offerings from "Mellon Collie And the Infinite Sadness." With the songs of "Adore," there's an obvious shift in tone, becoming a bit more gothic and less rockish, only to swing back in the slow-burning songs from "Machina," their swan song.

Long after disbanding, the Smashing Pumpkins are still a towering presence in rock -- they debuted in the era of Nirvana, but with a very different kind of music. Their creative use of basic instruments and Billy Corgan's rich songwriting made them much more complex and deeper than almost all rock bands of the time. And "Greatest Hits" follows them through the band's entire lifetime -- from their surprisingly polished debut to the panoramic "Mellon Collie" to their gothic art-rock.

The songs included on "Greatest Hits" are not just the most commercially known, but also several of the best -- "Ava Adore," "Siva," "1979" and "Tonight Tonight." An additional track is stuck on, "Real Love," but somehow it just isn't up to the standards of the other songs. It's nice, but not up to the level of the "Greatest" Smashing Pumpkins songs.

Corgan was without a doubt the creative center of the Pumpkins -- he wrote the songs, filling them with doubts, anger and anguish, and also provided some mind-blowing guitar riffs and his vocals. His high, reedy voice is woven well into the music, giving his poetic lyrics an unusually heartfelt quality. He's singing about love, death, bombs, loneliness in a metaphorical wasteland.

The guitar and bass provide sizzling soundscapes and dense walls of sound, while the percussion is complex and lightning-fast. At the same time, we get the sweeping dreampop (like the haunting "Rhinoceros") and gentler songs, where Corgan slows his guitar down to a gentle acoustic strum.

Rock doesn't get much more original than the Smashing Pumpkins, and several of their greatest hits -- both among fans and critics -- are compiled in "The Smashing Pumpkins - Greatest Hits." A good place for beginners, but also a good collection for fans.