I knew who this band was, and I was weary about them, ‘Today’ and ‘Disarm’ had been all over the tv and radio, and I was trying to decide whether they were an edgy rock band or a lame wussy college indie band. Anyhow, I came home from school one friday afternoon, turn on the radio, and ‘Bullet with Butterfly wings’ came on, I turned it up really loud, I thought it was the greatest thing i’d ever heard. The next day whilst watching the trusty saturday morning new release show on the tv, it came on again, I rushed to the tv, I plugged in my microphone into the stereo, and recorded it off the tv onto a blank tape. The sound quality wasn’t that great, but I didn’t care, and i must have played and rewound that poor quality recording over and over again for weeks. It would be another 2 months until christmas came around and I was able to go to the music store and buy the album. It was a double album, so it was 2 casette tapes in this cardboard cover. It felt like you were getting 2 for the price of 1! Anyhow, as soon as you press play, the album begins with the titicular track,a ‘nice’ piano piece for a minute or 2. It’s like the beginning of a magical journey. And it IS a magical journey. This wasn’t a grunge album or an alt. rock album, this album was soo varied. It was filled with loads of songs that were clearly 60’s-70’s influenced psychedelia and prog rock, but then other songs were fresh sounding angsty thrashing industrial rage, and then would go off onto some mellow interlude song before exploding into a radio friendly pop rock jingle. It is chaotic and schizophrenic, it is bi-polar disorder in musical form, it’s a piece of art, and it is theatre. And ‘Floods’ production, it’s not all cleaned up overproduced radio rock, It was murky, it sounded like it was recorded underwater. This album was in my walkman whilst I walked through Porirua cemetery every day heading to school, and I’d have it playing constantly as I sat alone at home playing my Sega Mega Drive afterwards. Most of the time when an artist does a double album, it can be ‘career suicide’, it can end up being a big bloated mess that is has too much filler, and is too time consuming to sit through. But this album was not like that at all, I’d play it constantly and months later, have songs I barely noticed before become my new favourite, it never got tiring. The Smashing Pumpkins, if they had quit after this point would have gone down as a legendary band, this was their ‘White album’ and no matter how hard they tried they were never going to reach this height again.