Gish
| The Smashing Pumpkins
Gish
Gish is the debut studio album by American alternative rock band The Smashing Pumpkins, released in May 1991 through Caroline Records. Frontman Billy Corgan has variously described Gish as a "very spiritual album" and "an album about spiritual ascension".-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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All Music
Arriving several months before Nirvana's Nevermind, the Smashing Pumpkins' debut album, Gish, which was also produced by Butch Vig, was the first shot of the alternative revolution that transformed the rock & roll landscape of the '90s. While Nirvana was a punk band, the Smashing Pumpkins and guitarist/vocalist Billy Corgan are arena rockers, co-opting their metallic riffs and epic art rock song structures with self-absorbed lyrical confessions.
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Sputnik
Gish is an ambitious rock album that showcases Billy Corgan's scrupulous songwriting and the band's capacity for greatness.
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COS
Gish, the Pumpkins’ magnificent, oft-overlooked debut and the first in a string of very high points that occasionally hinted at masterpiece and defined Corgan’s status as a 90’s rock icon. Unlike other Pumpkins albums (and probably only for Corgan’s rookie timidness), Gish isn’t fraught with the obsessive megalomania that he quickly earned a rep for, and if for that alone, it’s an essential part of the band’s canon.
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Classic Rock Review
The album itself has two distinctive influences – a hard-edged, alternative metal and a softer, psychedelic, dreamy influence. On Gish, these distinctions are often pulled apart, making it slightly unballanced overall, top-heavy with the songs with the most punch up front.
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BBC
Given these warring musical instincts, it’s remarkable in retrospect how coherent Gish is, how confidently it shifts between the guitar-revving of Siva and the soft seductions of Rhinoceros. It’s also a surprisingly small and subtle album.
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Audioxide
Gish serves as a fine example of what a debut album should be. It contains dynamic songwriting, offering moments of finesse alongside the fuzzed-up mania, and is performed with a balance of raw intensity and technical prowess.
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Ultimate Guitar
Despite being just a mere ten tracks wide, "Gish" is still a very substantial, versatile listen.
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Drowned In Sound
Gish has its share of rifftastic headbangery, it also has its delicate songs, its weirder moments, and the kind of guitar freak-outs that I probably shouldn’t feel quite so comfortable enjoying.
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Billboard
Gish is where the story begins. Before Corgan became more famous for his interview sound bites than for his music, he was a true rock 'n' roll misfit who could simultaneously melt your face, squeeze your soul, and boggle your mind. That’s what he does on the best moments of Gish.
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Loudwire
The talented Billy Corgan had begun his pursuit of music in his teens, gravitating toward the guitar and taking a job at a record store to continually be around music. He would eventually put together a band that featured James Iha on guitar, D'Arcy Wretzky on bass and Jimmy Chamberlin on drums. But it was clear early on that Corgan was the driving force in the band.
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Diffuser
Nowhere does Gish delve more deeply into the feminine than when bassist D'arcy Wretzky steps to the mic for album closer "Daydream." It's two beautiful minutes of strings and lilting vocals that foreshadow Siamese Dream's "Disarm," but Corgan gets the last word. Ten or so seconds after the song fades out, the head Pumpkin closes out the album with a short "I'm Going Crazy" interlude that, perhaps, foreshadows even more about the band's future.
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Pitchfork
The rarities disc contains a few never-before-heard numbers, a few that have long circulated among fanatics (the Corgan-sung version of "Daydream" is a keeper), and a handful of remixed selections (including their best full-on rock epic, "Starla") that first surfaced on a full-length release via the odds-and-ends release Pisces Iscariot. These tracks do a better job of showcasing the band's various sonic sides than Gish itself.
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Rate Your Music
Impressive musicianship; patchy songwriting. For a debut, Gish is a really solid representation of early 90's alt rock.
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Av Club
Corgan’s ability as a tunesmith was already obvious on Gish, particularly on moody, slow-building songs like “Rhinoceros” and “Suffer.” He also showed an early knack for mid-tempo lighter-wavers like the rousing “Snail.” In its weaker moments, Gish relies on generic, boogie-friendly classic-rock retreads (“Siva,” “Bury Me”) but the physicality of Chamberlain’s drumming—rivaled at the time only by Dave Grohl—gives even the bum tracks a powerful kick.
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Fatbeats
1991's Gish is the debut album by alt-rock pioneers the Smashing Pumpkins. Produced by Butch Vig, Gish not only put the band and their guitar-centric, layered sound on the map, but it also served as one of the earliest releases of what would be deemed the alt-rock movement. Epic cuts like "I Am One," "Siva" and "Rhinoceros" flash a unique and promising potential that would become fully realized two years later with their breakout genre-defining album Siamese Dream.
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Smells Like Infinite Sadness
Gish can really stir up emotions in hardcore SP fans. A bittersweet nostalgia. It shows the band in all their nascent glory, before their behind the scenes soap opera made frontman Billy Corgan one of the most polarizing figures in music.
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Genius
Gish can clearly be heard as a groundbreaking album in the history of what would soon become more much widely known as alternative rock. Gish was, after all, the promising debut of a band that would help alternative rock quickly become part of a new, grungier mainstream. But back in the beginning, Gish was simply the memorable opening salvo by a band from Chicago that really didn’t fit in anywhere in the rock world — that is, until bands like Smashing Pumpkins helped changed the rock world once and for all.
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Last Fm
Gish is the debut album by American alternative rock band The Smashing Pumpkins, released in May 1991 through Caroline Records. Frontman Billy Corgan described Gish as a "very spiritual album".Despite initially peaking at only number 195 on the Billboard 200 upon its release, Gish was eventually certified platinum (one million copies shipped) by the RIAA. Gish was recorded from December 1990 to March 1991 in Butch Vig's Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin with a budget of $20,000.Vig and Billy Corgan worked together as co-producers.
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Alternative Nation
The Stratocaster guitar was the impetus behind the guitar sound on The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1991 debut album Gish, and now he plans on using the guitar as a key component for the band’s next album.
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Uncut
Gish was the first evidence of Corgan’s exacting manner. Recorded in a 30-day stint at Butch Vig’s Smart Studios, where Nirvana had laid down the demos for Nevermind eight months earlier, this was, by alternative standards, a fastidious piece of work. Vig speaks of hours perfecting guitar tone, and Corgan reportedly (and not for the last time) played the lion’s share of guitarist James Iha and bassist D’arcy Wretzky’s parts himself. Lyrically, it’s not much to speak of – a vague angst, sophomoric at best – but Gish is a gem nonetheless. Vig’s warm, radiant production proves a neat fit for Corgan’s dreamy guitar expressionism, and while “I Am One” and “Siva” neatly blend the ethereal and the heavy, it is the record’s softer moments – the lullaby-like “Crush”, and the Wretsky-sung “Day Dream” – that glow the brightest. Bob Ludwig’s remaster job adds fine detail, and a second CD collects 18 tracks, mostly diverting: fresh mixes of B-sides “Plume” and “Starla”, Peel sessions (including a Hendrix-channelling cover of the Animals’ LSD hymn “Girl Named Sandoz”) and “Hippy Trippy”, a fragile early take on “Crush”.
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Phoenix New Times
The album is an alternative/grunge rock masterpiece. The timing for this album couldn't have been better. It not only introduced the Chicago-based band to the world, but it also helped reshape and give more direction to the blossoming alternative-rock scene.
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Music Direct
1991's Gish is the debut album by alt-rock pioneers the Smashing Pumpkins. Produced by Butch Vig, Gish not only put the band and their guitar-centric, layered sound on the map, but it also served as one of the earliest releases of what would be deemed the alt-rock movement. Epic cuts like "I Am One," "Siva" and "Rhinoceros" flash a unique and promising potential that would become fully realized two years later with their breakout genre-defining album Siamese Dream.
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Britannica
The band’s debut album, Gish (1991), with its arena-ready anthems, multitracked guitars, and high melodrama, that helped transform the rock landscape of the 1990s.
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Metacritic
No other LP is more evocative of the raw essence of the Smashing Pumpkins' unique fusions of feels than this ten track collection, by far and away the most collaborative album in their canon.... This deluxe edition of Gish is chock-a-block with quality bonus material.
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Popsike
Disavowing the musical punk rock roots of many of their alt-rock contemporaries, the Pumpkins have a diverse, densely layered, and guitar-heavy sound which while adhering to a punk influenced philosophy in terms of musical delivery, contains elements of gothic rock, heavy metal, dream pop, psychedelic rock, progressive rock, shoegazing, and electronica in later recordings.
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The Gear Page
Gish is an amazing album.
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Music Enthusiast
With a voice pitched somewhere between choirboy and hellspawn, group mastermind Billy Corgan never resembles any type of weirdo you remember from high school. He’s a six-foot-three space alien whose band throws down like Guns N’ Roses on a My Bloody Valentine trip. – Billboard on Gishs’ 25th anniversary. The album is about pain and spiritual ascension.
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Kxci
Gish only met with modest commercial success initially, spending only one week on the Billboard 200, peaking at number 195. However, the album reached number one the CMJ college radio chart. The album was not certified Gold until after the success of their sophomore release, Siamese Dream, and did not receive a Platinum certification until 1999.
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Turntable
ORIGINALLY RELEASED IN 1991, GISH IS THE DEBUT LP from Chicago's Smashing Pumpkins. '91 saw the release of another monumental grunge album, Nirvana's Nevermind, and Butch Vig, drummer and co-producer of Garbage, worked as a producer for both of the releases. And although the former did not contain a song that could match "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or other singles Nevermind that have forever been etched onto our psyche, Gish, explained by Billy Corgan as being about "pain and spiritual ascension," has a firm standing in the history of alternative rock as one of the genre-defining albums that emerged from the '90s. Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness would follow a few years later to thrust Corgan, Iha, Chamberlin, and Wretzky to international stardom, but the psych/'70s rock/shoegaze influence the gang would go on to embody to create their distinct sound are all present in Gish. Check out: "I Am One," "Siva," "Rhinoceros," "Crush," "Daydream," and "Bury Me.
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Elusivedisc
Gish was recorded in Butch Vig's Smart Studios with a budget of only $20,000. Billy Corgan pushed Vig to making this the best album they could. The inclusion of a massive production style reminiscent of ELO and Queen was unusual for an independent band at the time. Whereas many albums at the time used drum sampling and processing, Gish used unprocessed drum recordings, and an exacting, unique guitar sound. Billy Corgan also performed nearly all the guitar and bass parts on the record.
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Album Of The Year
Though Corgan's lyrics fall apart upon close analysis, there's no denying his gift for arrangements.
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Austin Chronicle
An opus of angst and unyielding psych-guitar called Gish brought the Smashing Pumpkins to light in 1991. No hits, but it did have balls, and whether the Chicago quartet was all roaring distortion on "Siva" or whispering love on "Crush," it did so with boldness and a single-minded attention to the almighty riff. Such was the explosive, if culturally low-key, introduction to Gen X's third favorite alt.rock band.
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The Student Playlist
An interesting aspect of the success they found with Gish was how out of step it was with the prevailing trends in indie at the time. Corgan (at this point with long, flowing hair) looked very much out of place on the indie circuit, and the band was embracing huge choruses and winding, quasi-psychedelic instrumental passages just at the point when the rest of the scene was eschewing such excesses, which were associated with the ‘80s stadium rock / ‘hair-metal’ against which many underground bands were kicking.
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Barnes and Noble
Arriving several months before Nirvana's Nevermind, the Smashing Pumpkins' debut album, Gish, which was also produced by Butch Vig, was the first shot of the alternative revolution that transformed the rock & roll landscape of the '90s. While Nirvana was a punk band, the Smashing Pumpkins and guitarist/vocalist Billy Corgan are arena rockers, co-opting their metallic riffs and epic art rock song structures with self-absorbed lyrical confessions. Though Corgan's lyrics fall apart upon close analysis, there's no denying his gift for arrangements. Like Brian May and Jimmy Page, he knows how to layer guitars for maximum effect, whether it's on the pounding, sub-Sabbath rush of "I Am One" or the shimmering, psychedelic dream pop surfaces of "Rhinoceros." Such musical moments like these, as well as the rushing "Siva" and the folky "Daydream," which features D'Arcy on lead vocals, demonstrate the Smashing Pumpkins' potential, but the rest of Gish falls prey to undistinguished songwriting and showy instrumentation.
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Aquarium Drunkard
Gish is an album that unified so many different music fans and musicians.
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Getsong
This album has an average beat per minute of 108 BPM (slowest/fastest tempos: 74/166 BPM).
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Treblezine
While not perfect, Gish is ultimately a classic album for being the seeds from which something incredible grew. But, in a more bittersweet way, it shows a kind of optimism and cohesion in the band that never really came back, even when their music became more sophisticated. Its raw inspiration was energizing and exciting.
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Prnewswire
With the full support and guidance from THE SMASHING PUMPKINS--who've created one of the most acclaimed bodies of work in musical history, selling over 30 million albums--EMI's global catalog reissue campaign will last through 2013; it will encompass all the band's albums and B-sides from 1991-2000, with other release dates to be announced. The pivotal group's many hits defined the alternative music era and continue to resonate on modern rock radio, influencing a whole new generation. Gish highlights include "I Am One," "Siva" and "Rhinoceros," while Siamese Dream features "Cherub Rock," "Today" and "Disarm." Both groundbreaking albums were produced by Butch Vig and Billy Corgan.
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Exclaim
Gish just barely squeaked into the Billboard 200, largely ignored until grunge and the alternative explosion hit months later. Even then, the second Pumpkins album, Siamese Dream, acted as a gateway for most of those who purchased Gish, much like Nevermind did for Bleach. Flaunting a nu-hippie look and guitar-driven sound that wasn't clearly any one thing (metal, prog, classic rock, psychedelia, goth, grunge), the album was unique but overlooked, most likely because it lacked a strong radio single in a very competitive market.
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Metro Times
Gish is still a messy introduction, overcrowded with fuzzy guitar attacks, songs that go on past their breaking points, and Billy Corgan's incomprehensible ramblings.
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Music Omh
Gish is rife with leftover hair metal flavours and heavy on relentless – if a bit unguided – ambition.
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Surviving The Goldenage
Gish was released at a weird time. It missed the grunge boom by a matter of months but that is probably okay because it was not exactly a grunge record. The record bounces between hard rock influenced guitar riffs and psychedelic trippiness.
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Prefix
The riffs are heavy and drenched in overdrive and built for arenas. Corgan may be getting his brood on, but his wailing is more about immediate impact, the feeling of his voice more than the words. Gish was, in these moments, a big goddamn rock record, the kind of thing destined for locker-room boomboxes and the stereos of IROC-Zs. And time has taken it and made it into one of those weird major-label releases we deem an indie-rock classic. It’s got character; it’s weird; it can’t be just some mainstream muscle flexing because it’s too intricate.
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Glide
The pivotal group’s many hits defined the alternative music era and continue to resonate on modern rock radio, influencing a whole new generation. Gish highlights include “I Am One,” “Siva” and “Rhinoceros,” while Siamese Dream features “Cherub Rock,” “Today” and “Disarm.” Both groundbreaking albums were produced by Butch Vig and Billy Corgan.
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Napstar
The Smashing Pumpkins' debut established the foursome as the pre-eminent college radio band of the early '90s, upping the bar for the rest of the decade. Not all of the songs on Gish work, but some of the band's finest moments ("Siva," "Crush," "Rhinoceros").
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Imdb
The Smashing Pumpkins are the best band in the whole wide world. There is nothing to compare to their song writing, mellow distortion and acoustic sounds.
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