Customer Reviews

The Aeroplane Flies High

5 star:		(99)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Smashing Pumpkins have always been known for their amazing catalogue of non-album songs. Some of their best tracks are hidden amongst various singles and compilations. Still, only the most devoted of fans run out to buy every European import and obscure tribute album, and SP realizes this. Released during what was undoubtably the peak of their success, "TAFH" was the band's second "odds and sods" compilation (check out "Pisces Iscariot" for some wonderful "Gish"- and "Siamese Dream"-era b-sides and outtakes). It compiles the five "Mellon Collie" singles, containing a total of 28 b-sides (mirroring the 28 tracks on "MCIS") and five exclusive new-wave covers.

As to be expected with any b-sides collection, there are ups and downs throughout the box set. The hidden treasures are there, though--I've always believed that the "1979" single is ohe band's best releases, proving that SP has power-pop down to an art. The single also contains one of the greatest Pumpkins songs around, "Set the Ray to Jerry," a track that was at one time slated to appear on "Siamese Dream."

So...excessive? You bet. That's always been the name of the Pumpkins' game, and they pull it off masterfully. "TAFH" is a must-have for any music fan, and sits beside "Mellon Collie" as one of the great rock releases of the latter 1990s.

Buy this if you liked every single song on Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and you're very into the soft smashing pumpkins songs. Don't buy it if you just want something that rocks. The Zero single is the only one of the five that really rocks. Not that that's a bad thing. There are a lot of amazing songs on here, but unless you're a really big fan, don't buy this. If you liked James Iha's "Take Me Down" then you'll like this set, there are 5 more James Iha songs on here, and they're just as good, especially "The Boy" and "Said Sadly". There are also some cool covers. "My Blue Heaven" ends the collection in a very strange, surreal way. Don't expect this to be as good as the album. After all, these are all the songs that the Smashing Pumpkins didn't want to put on Melon Collie because they liked the other ones better. If you're a big fan of their soft stuff, you'll love this. My favorites are "Marques in Spades", "Meladori Magpie", "The Last Song", "The Boy" and "Pennies". Most of the songs on here are love songs that show you how shallow and phony most love songs you hear now really are.

If you loved Mellon Collie, then you must listen to its necessary companion. It includes 33 tracks (5 of them are the Mellon Collie A-sides), out of which you can find all the B-sides. There are 6 covers, 2 James Iha compositions, 1 Corgan/Iha instrumental, and one huge, mostly instrumental, 23-minute collage of bits and snippets of outtakes and rehearsals of 1993-1995 sessions. The rest is pure Corgan. It all makes an almost 2-hour set.
Seems excessive? Maybe so. But it shows a breathtaking span of styles, moods and qualities. There's screaming heavymetal ("God"), distorted guitars a la 70s ("Tribute to Johnny"), naive charming pop ("The Boy"), simple but intense ballads ("Cherry"), country-ish attempts ("Meladori Magpie"), anthem-like serious songs ("The Last Song", a ballad, or "The Aeroplane Flies High, Turns Left, Looks Right", a rocker), acoustic straightforward confessions ("Blank"), devastatingly tender chants ("Medellia of the Great Skies", "Rotten Apples"), and even a 1920s song, "My Blue Heaven", with only voice, piano and cello. In "...Said Sadly" James Iha sings with the then-Veruca Salt vocalist Nina Gordon.
I think more or less one half of the songs could have made it into yet another album; the other half is for the curious or the die-hard fans. But the best part is really worth it. Some of the songs could have been great singles, such as "Transformer". It's a pity many of those tracks aren't listened to in the radio.
The covers show some influences on the group: The Cure, Blondie, Alice Cooper, The Cars, Missing Persons and George Whiting & Walter Donaldson (the 1920s guys).
There's an assorted mixture of approaches, but it is truly amazing those 28 tracks were recorded at the same time as those 28 found in Mellon Collie. More than 40 written by Corgan only!
The packaging is lush, and the 44-page booklet includes all the lyrics, plus many b/w photos of the Mellon Collie tour (taken by Corgan's girlfriend, Yelena Yemchuk), plus all the complete discography of the group until 1996, plus a literary Corgan introduction (a short text).
(By the way, the booklet's page 1 opens with a beautuiful b/w photograph of a black swan, no doubt one of the earliest hints to the name of Corgan's current band, Zwan.)
All in all, I love this box set.

Elaborately packaged in the kind of box in which people used to store vinyl singles, THE AEROPLANE FLIES HIGH is a set of 5 CDs, each containing a single from the Pumpkins' 1995 album MELLON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS along with several B-sides. The singles are "Bullet With Butterfly Wings," "1979," "Zero," "Tonight, Tonight" and "Thirty Three," and the B-sides number 28, some of them previously unavailable in the U.S. THE AEROPLANE FLIES HIGH celebrates the chart hits while fetishizing those B-sides; they run the gamut of Pumpkindom, from stadium anthems and classic-rock ballads to metal thrashings and GISH-era indie rock.

The "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" disc alone offers five covers: The Cars' "You're All I've Got Tonight," Alice Cooper's "Clones (We're All)," the Cure's "A Night Like This," Missing Persons' "Destination Unknown" and Blondie's "Dreaming." These covers reveal the true heart of the Pumpkins, a band whose love of pop music is so unabashed and wide as to disallow any attempts to pigeonhole the band's sound. Some might consider this singles box-set business a bit of a self-indulgent vanity. But it's a perfect forum for the Pumpkins, who have always followed their whims and not commercial strictures.

Now that it is out of print, "The Aeroplane Flies High" is likely to join the list of essential Smashing Pumpkins releases that have become increasingly hard to find at conventional record store outlets (a list that includes various b-sides, promos, soundtrack work and the internet-only "Machina II"). A specially-priced boxed set of all the "Mellon Collie" singles, the twenty-eight new b-sides found here were recorded during and shortly after the sessions for that gargantuan epic and all of them (barring the five New Wave covers and "Pastichio Medley") could've fit easily onto that work. Indeed, "The Aeroplane Flies High" might as well be termed "Mellon Collie Pt.2", for everything here is five-star quality. In spite of being b-sides, there is not a trace of filler, and indeed some of their best-ever songs can be found in its contents: "Set The Ray To Jerry", "Tribute To Johnny", "Medellia Of The Gray Skies", "Meladori Magpie", "Last Song", "Ugly", "God"...the list goes on. The musical styles cover every ground from hard rock to acoustic balladry to lengthy epics (the title track) to compact pop to everything in-between. The five cover versions are probably the weakest here, although "You're All I've Got Tonight" and "Clones" are worthwhile. "Pastichio Medley", a fascinating edit of over forty instrumental jams, is impressive just on the basis of showing how much music was flowing out of the group at this time. The accompanying booklet features photos, lyrics and a complete official discography of all releases up to 1996. It all comes in a bizarre op-art carrying case which makes it a truly distinctive collector's item, albeit one that went double platinum. If you can find a copy, get it, as it is likely that these gems--as essential as any of their regular album releases-- will become harder to find as the years pass.

The Smashing Pumpkins created a sprawling, rich rock masterpiece with "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness." They also created a lot of songs that didn't make it to the final cut, but ended up being attached to the singles as a series of EPs. "The Aeroplane Flies High" collects those five EPs together, and creates a B-side/single collection that is well worth having.

The first song on each disc is a song from the "Mellon Collie" double album, but the five or six songs that come after each single are unique to the EPs, originally from various recording sessions. These songs are often as good as -- sometimes even better -- than what did make it onto the albums.

Each EP has its own mood, and its own self-contained flow, keeping the B-sides from feeling tacked on. One is hard and angry, one is bitter, one is soft and sweet, one is feel good, and so on. As a result, the full range of what the Pumpkins were able to do -- rock, pop, metal, ballads and experimental -- got put on full display, in all their glory.

For example, in the "1979" disc, the Pumpkins get to explore their alt-pop side, while the "Zero" disc explores bitterness and loneliness, sticking to their hard-rock sound. Not to mention the orchestral/acoustic flavor of the "Tonight Tonight" EP, with its subtle strings and laments, and a lo-fi reprise of the title song.

But there is no lag in quality, just because the B-sides didn't make it to the final cut of "Mellon Collie." Songs like "The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right)" prove that Pumpkins B-sides are still exceptional, including covers of bands like Blondie and the Cars (yes, that IS Blondie's "Dreaming" you hear Corgan singing, strange as it is).

The heart of the Smashing Pumpkins was Billy Corgan, and Corgan's talents shine in most of the songs here. He delves into orchestras, distortion, lo-fi acoustics and jazz, all in the name of experimentation. Corgan's complex songwriting resembles poetry set to music, and his high, slightly offbeat vocals seem well-suited to the songs he sings. James Iha also wrote and sang a bit on these collections, including a pretty duet with Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt.

If fans have the EPs already, then they will already have the content of "The Aeroplane Flies High." But if they don't, this exceptional collection is definitely worth getting and keeping. A wonderfully overblown collection of B-sides and singles.

If you liked Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness more than is healthy, if the songs on the album tapped into something deep down inside you, if you like the soft with the loud, then for God's sake, BUY THIS BOX SET!

Five cds of Pumpkins magic, some of these songs will have you wondering why they didn't make it onto Mellon Collie, or maybe why MCIS wasn't a triple instead of a double album.

In time, every single seems worth the price of the set by itself, and you get FIVE, count 'em, FIVE of them, each one a mini-album of greater inherent worth than most of the stuff in record stores today.

Buy it for the loud. Buy it for the soft. Buy it for the amazing album that is Mellon Collie, and the amazing band that is the Smashing Pumpkins!

Unlike Nirvana and Pearl Jam, The Smashing Pumpkins never had all the angst about success that the aforementioned bands had. Sure, they had angst. It was the mid 1990s and it was grunge. Most bands had angst. But Billy was smart enough to market it. For Billy, he wanted to be a rock star, and that's what he got to be.

And not only that, he was the most prolific songwriter of the whole grunge movement. I have assembled my own Pumpkins' B-Side/Rarities CD-R collection, which is a full five 80 minute cds, comprised entirely of material that was released officially but never released on their six studio albums. This box set is a testament to his prolific writing. What's also a testament to Corgan is just how GOOD all these B-sides are. He's kinda like Dylan in that Corgan's outtakes, at least in this period, is just phenomenal.

For their third album, MELLON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS, the band turned in one of the most ambitious (and some say indulgent) albums rock ever saw. It was a double album with a two hour running time (long even for a double album), and Corgan and Company did everything from folk, dreamy pop, jazz, heavy medal, hard rock, and new wave. Listening to Corgan was somewhat akin to listening to an amalgamation of David Bowie, Husker Du, and a good number of 1970s rock bands. For my money, MELLON COLLIE is a flat-out masterpiece, easily the best album the band ever did, and on par with Soundgarden's BADMOTERFINGER, Alice in Chains' DIRT, Pearl Jam's TEN, Mudhoney's, and even the critical darling Nirvana's NEVERMIND. In my view, MELLON COLLIE really is my generation's version of Pink Floyd's THE WALL. It's that good.

But here's the amazing thing. After the band released the double album in 1995, they released this box set just a little over a year from MELLON COLLIE. As good as MELLON COLLIE is, and even given its rather abnormal length, listening to this sounds like the band actually cut quite a bit of incredibly entertaining material here. In fact, they could have followed MELLON COLLIE up with a new album in 1996 or 1997, and it would have been just as big a hit as their magnum opus.

But the band didn't do that. You see, Corgan, kinda like Ryan Adams (though that comparison may be a bit unfair to Corgan), is very much about the rock star image, and AEROPLANE FLIES HIGH is designed just as much for the retro throwback to 1960s and 1970s record releases and that era's rock culture as it is to release new material.

Rather than assembling a second album (or, as I like to think of this box set, a third disc to MELLON COLLIE), Billy supplemented each of the five singles drawn from MC with 4 to 6 new songs, gave each disc its own kind of mini-album continuity, and released it in a rather cumbersome box set. All told, there's about one hundred and forty minutes of music here, longer than the original album, which is already something of a monstrosity when it comes to length.

Each disc follows its own flow.

Disc 1, the "Bullet with Butterfly" single, has the lead track, a great mellow acoustic number sung by James Iha and D'arcy and then several covers.

Disc 2, the 1979 single, is the rock/pop EP, and has some of the best songs on the entire set.

Disc 3, the "Zero" single, is the more hard rock and metal EP. The single has the only really bad song here, the twenty three minute "Pasticho Medley". Esentially, the song (if you can call it that) is a bunch of roughly edited snippits of all these unfinished songs and recordings the band made during the album sessions. In fact, the medley is rather jarring to listen too, as it feels like Corgan was going to make an epic instrumental of all his unreleased songs, but rather than write interconnecting instrumental parts and transitions, all this music just butts up against each other. I've listened to AEROPLANE for a long time, and I only made it thru "Medley" once. Trust me, life's to short to listen to it any more than that, and even once is questionable.

Disc 4, the "Tonight, Tonight" single, focuses more on the ballad, dreamy pop sound, and has one of their all-time definitive songs ("Rotten Apples").

Disc 5, the "Thirty Three" single, is the most wide ranging in sound, featuring winding guitar epics to rather experimental cover choices.

Now, lets look at THE AEROPLANE FLIES HIGH had the band chose to release this as a regular album. First off, dispense with the already released songs. That knocks out about twenty minutes. Then knock off the utterly disposable "Pasticho Medley". That's roughly forty five minutes gone. Then delete all the covers. After this musical exorcism, you're left with roughly seventy five to eighty minutes of original music. And it's some of the best music of the Pumpkin's career.

You don't get better music in the grunge genre than "Set the Rays to Jerry", "Ugly", "Pennies", "Believe", "God", "Medallia of the Grey Skies", and the rest. I fully believe had they released the music in a more user-friendly format, the resulting album would be as highly regarded as SIAMESE DREAM and MELLON COLLIE, and as it is, of all their B-sides AEROPLANE sounds most like MELLON COLLIE, enough to be a third disc of that album. While I've never been a fan of the title cut (gets a little monotous for my taste, and strangely enough they cut almost a minute off it on ROTTEN APPLES), "The Aeroplane Flies High" certainly does have an epic guitar feel to it, and would have fit in well with MELLON COLLIE.

And of course, we have one of the Pumpkin's best songs, the aforementioned "Rotten Apples". The song's so good they even named their greatest hits package. It's one of my top five favorite songs of not only the Smashing Pumpkins catalogue but the whole grunge scene indeed. What the hell Corgan was thinking (for you know he is the band, as evidenced by ZIETGIST) when he cut the song from MELLON COLLIE I'll never know.

As evidenced by how popular the band was in 1996, when Virgin Records released the set it sold tremendously well. A limited edition release, the box reached #42 on the Billboard charts, and sold 300,000 units (1.5 million discs in all), generating a platinum disc for the band. Originally intended to be limited to 200,000 copies, Virgin Records produced more after the original run sold out due to overwhelming and unexpected demand

Overall, the set has some of the Pumpkin's best songs here, and this is the closest thing we have to the great lost Pumpkins album. Well, this, and the Reel Time demos they cut before GISH.

EDITION NOTIES: This set is now unfortunately out of print, and has been since 1996. You'll have to buy it used or ebay it.

*For the smart consumer, you should know this box set curiously omits one officially released recording from the MELLON COLLIE era. This is the instrumental "Infinite Sadness", available now on their Rarities/B-Sides digital downloads. The song was originally released on the vastly reconfigured MELLON COLLIE vinyl album, which also included the "Tonight, Tonight" reprise found here.

Contrary to another review on this page, if you are a fan of The Smashing Pumpkins, you are going to love this set. Although I am quite a big Pumpkins fan, I think even non-hardcore fans will like it. Wheather you like the sorrowful splendor of Adore, the more up-beat feeling of Siamese Dream, or just the pure beauty of Mellon Collie, you're going to love this set because it has it all. There's even a bit of almost heavy metal-ness in the song 'Pastichio Medley' which is just 25 minutes of guitar riffs piled into one track. I know how bad that sounds now, but think of it like this: the riffs are like those catchy openings of songs like 'Today', 'Thirty-Three', and 'Here Is No Why', and they sound surprisingly good end-to-end.

The tracks on this set still have that famous Smashing Pumpkins feel to them; I don't find them any less enjoyable than the songs on Mellon Collie or Adore. In fact, a lot of my favorite songs are on here. There's such a great variety: there are beautiful covers songs of The Carrs and The Cure, songs featuring mainly D'arcy and James on vocals, angry songs, sad songs, happy songs....oh, I could go on and on. I have to point out that D'arcy's voice is absolutely amazing on 'Dreaming', as is James's on 'The Boy'. Listen to the samples; I think you'll like what you hear.

And then there's the cost factor. I actually bought mine here on Amazon for $40. It was not new, but was still in mint condition. Listen to the song samples, and if you like them and you can find it for a reasonable price, just go for it. Believe me, you will not regret it. This is truely a beautiful piece of art that I am very passionate about, and I hope you fall in love with it as much as I have.

What I have to say is simple: If you love the Pumkins, you will love the box. Easy.