One of the great lost treasures in the current musical landscape is the band who were great at B-sides. It was an art form that just doesn’t exist anymore – “they’re such a great Bonus Tracks band!” just doesn’t cut it. Some groups were such masters of the format that albums collating their B-sides are up there with their best – think Oasis’s The Masterplan, Suede’s Sci-Fi Lullabies, The Smith’s Hatful Of Hollow, Nirvana’s Incesticide.
That’s a list for another day, though. Here we are honing in on the best Smashing Pumpkins B-sides with a few outtakes thrown in for good measure. The Pumpkins, of course, had their own imperious B-sides album in 1994’s Pisces Iscariot but were on such a profusely creative run during that decade that they could’ve had a few more. To avoid repeating what is already regarded as a classic, I’ll avoid anything that features on Pisces Iscariot on this list of the ten best Pumpkins B-sides and outtakes (songs included on the Mellon Collie…-era B-sides collection The Aeroplane Flies High are available for inclusion, I don’t want to snooker myself too drastically).
The period around their sprawling 1995 masterpiece Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness was an insanely fruitful time for the Pumpkins. This slow-building rock stomper took a leftover riff from the album sessions and added a Pumpkins first in the spoken-word vocals, neatly dovetailing Corgan’s anguished delivery on the chorus.
One of the James Iha-written efforts out of the handful his domineering bandmate would allow to be recorded, 1979 flip-side Believe is the sort of melancholic alt-country gem that Iha would more fully explore on his 1998 solo album Let It Come Down.
The decision to leave this soaring, Rick Rubin-produced effort off of 1998’s underwhelming Adore is one of the most baffling in Pumpkins history. It was even played live during the Adore tour but Corgan apparently nixed it because he didn’t want it released as a single and it wasn’t in-keeping with Adore’s no-catchy-songs aesthetic, so onto the shelf it went, eventually surfacing as an extra on Adore’s 2014 reissue.
Hey – I was just joking that there were no catchy songs on Adore, OK? But it is true that there was a lot of Pumpkins material floating round at the time that was better than some of the songs that made it onto that record. Take this effort which wound up on the Trent Reznor-produced soundtrack to David Lynch’s Lost Highway, a moody electronic-pop number injected with a menace much-missed on Adore.
Not to say Corgan wasn’t stashing away his rockier songs at the time. This pulverising cracker was recorded during the Adore era only to be scrapped, a different version eventually emerging on the band’s free, internet-only 2000 album Machine II/The Friends & Enemies Of Modern Music. Once again, Corgan has gone wonky with his album choices – if this was included on a tighter-edited version of sister album Machina/The Machines Of God, that record would’ve been so much better.
The band’s rampaging The End Is The Beginning Is The End was the only good thing about the 1997 horror show that was Batman & Robin and this slowed-down, inside-out eerie take on the track from its B-sides got its own moment in the spotlight when it was used in a trailer for the 2009 film Watchmen. The Pumpkins have had a few goes at evoking the gothic, sinister expanse of Disintegration-era The Cure and this is the best of them.
One of the best things about Pumpkins B-sides is that sometimes you get a song that’s just delightfully in the moment whereas perhaps some of their album tracks were a little over-thought. This snarling, new wave-y little cut from the Thirty-Three single is one of those, a brilliantly throwaway rock tune capturing a band having their moment.
A intra-band favourite, this dreamy, minimalist mid-tempo track was originally written during the Gish era with Corgan planning for it to feature on Mellon Collie... That was until producer Flood deemed it not good enough, his opinion holding huge sway with the frontman. It eventually surfaced on The Aeroplane Flies High compilation and works as a sort of parallel universe version of the Pumpkins where they never bought any distortion pedals.
They’ve got all the distortion pedals on this coruscating Machina II outtake, though, a barbed riff-centric song that sounds like the feistier cousin of Mellon Collie’s Tales Of A Scorched Earth. Again, its inclusion on Machina (over, perhaps, the plodding Heavy Metal Machine?) would’ve made all the difference.
The band’s 2007 return Zeitgeist had some decent moments without ever hitting the heights of their early days. But it could’ve been better if Corgan hadn’t had another case of tracklistingitis, relegating this yearning acoustic-rock entry to the low-level and mostly-ignored American Gothic EP.
