Main menu
Fretplay home Submit tabs

The Smashing Pumpkins
The Smashing Pumpkins tabs The Smashing Pumpkins discography

Channels
Guitar channel Bass channel Guitar videos Reviews

Message Forum
Guitar forum Bass forum Bands and artists Promote your band Recent discussions All categories

Fretplay.com

The Smashing Pumpkins guitar tabs

CD reviews

The Aeroplane Flies High

The Smashing Pumpkins - The Aeroplane Flies High Audio CD

A fair review of the The Smashing Pumpkins "The Aeroplane Flies High" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all The Smashing Pumpkins reviews here, or go back to the The Smashing Pumpkins tabs.

Band: The Smashing Pumpkins
Title: The Aeroplane Flies High
Rating:

Release Date: 1996-11-26
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: Bullet With Butterfly Wings 2: Said Sadly 3: You're All I've Got Tonight 4: Clones (We're All) 5: Night Like This 6: Destination Unknown 7: Dreaming 8: 1979 9: Ugly 10: Boy 11: Cherry 12: Believe 13: Set the Ray to Jerry 14: Zero 15: God 16: Mouths of Babes 17: Tribute to Johnny 18: Marquis in Spades 19: Pennies 20: Pastichio Medley 21: Tonight, Tonight 22: Meladori Magpie 23: Rotten Apples 24: Jupiter's Lament 25: Medellia of the Grey Skies 26: Blank 27: Tonite Reprise 28: Thirty-Three 29: Last Song 30: Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right) 31: Transformer 32: Bells 33: My Blue Heaven

Flying mid-range
Whenever the throwaway vibe becomes too consistent, the band always manages to throw in just enough interesting material to keep listeners intrigued.
This is an admirable collection of rarities from the Mellon Collie sessions, sure to make any Pumpkinite very happy, though fans not belonging in the obsessed category might want to stick with their better B-sides set Pices Iscariot, as this five disc set tends to cover everything else they ever considered, including mostly stripped down, demo-like takes, many times echoing Corgan's solo work due to his lone input on some tracks. .

Pumpkins greatest/craziest
Corgan has love for many styles and this opal gives you a glimpse into his schizo persona. Smashing Pumpkins came during the grundge period but to label them in that genre is foolish. . . A MUST HAVE FOR PUMPKINHEADS!!! Each cd of a released track from mellon collie contains b-sides that follow (most of the time) the released single's theme. What he lacks in vocals- he makes up in melodies and fantastic guitar licks.

Classic boxset from some of Smashing Pumpkins best work.
True, its based around the singles released from the album, but at the same time its all the extra's that come with it that make it so much more of an experiance, the book art and the b sides make it a nice (and now quite rare treat) for many SP fans, before their sound became truley lob-sided sounds with machina and machina II. I love this boxset. . . let us not forget the horribleattempt of Corgan's Mary Star of the Sea and Zeitgeist

Get this if you a fan that discovered the true gem of their early 90's (and earlier) sound. it is a collectable and worth the pennies you spend on it. .

Amongst all the wreckage, there's a first rate Smashing Pumpkins sequel to Mellon Collie
Sure, they had angst. Unlike Nirvana and Pearl Jam, The Smashing Pumpkins never had all the angst about success that the aforementioned bands had. 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.
.

A 'Smashing' Box Set
Although I am quite a big Pumpkins fan, I think even non-hardcore fans will like it. Contrary to another review on this page, if you are a fan of The Smashing Pumpkins, you are going to love this set. 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.

You can see a complete list of all The Smashing Pumpkins discography, or go back to the The Smashing Pumpkins tabs. There is also a good guide on how to read guitar tabs here.