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The Smashing Pumpkins - Greatest Hits - Rotten Apples

by The Smashing Pumpkins

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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-'90s) 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. "Siva" and "Rhinoceros" (from Gish, the Pumpkin's first--and arguably best--album) seamlessly mixed dream pop with noisy goth-rock as prime examples of the Pumpkins' early '90s sound. Apples also showcases three stellar tracks ("Cherub Rock," "Today," and "Disarm") from Siamese Dream, the Pumpkins' breakout 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 like "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