Siamese Dream

Thirteen tracks in about sixty-two minutes, and the subtractive test bites more than once. Cherub Rock must open: the drum roll and the guitars building one layer at a time announce the method. Disarm is required, the one place the wall is set aside and the wound named. Soma is the long centre, Luna the compelled lullaby of an end, and Today and Mayonaise carry the record’s two faces, bright sound over a dark meaning and a tender melody lifted on the wall. What holds the figure is what the record could lose: a long passage of vamp in Silverfuck’s nearly nine minutes, Hummer’s drifting coda, one of Quiet and Rocket, which run in one mode with Geek U.S.A., and Sweet Sweet, a fragment that neither ends nor turns.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: a damaged childhood and a present depression are fled into a dream of sound, and the dream is both the refuge and the illness. Today states it by irony, a song of despair whose chorus sings “the greatest day” over a bright guitar. Disarm sets a child disarmed “with a smile” and a violence passed down, “the killer in me”. Sound carries as much as the words, and is credited as fully: the guitars build a room in which a hurt person can disappear, and the record shows the room as a hiding place and a sickness at once. What holds it short of the bar: outside the singles the words are impressionistic, and the condition is rendered as feeling more than articulated as meaning.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation is the record’s chief gift, frequent and mostly warm, the transport of massed sound. Cherub Rock rises layer by layer to its first full blaze. Soma is the summit: a long, quiet opening that the band floods with distorted guitars at its middle, a slow heartbreak turned to grandeur, and a solo that climbs over it. Mayonaise is the other height, a tender melody lifted on a wall of guitars. Hummer rises and floats, Disarm has a strange, cold height in its bells and strings, Geek U.S.A. reaches a fierce height of force, and Luna closes in hushed beauty. Eight or nine of thirteen tracks rise. Rocket and Quiet are force without lift, Silverfuck’s vamp is level for long stretches, and Sweet Sweet is a sketch.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Myth is evoked, and its figures recur. The title joins two images, the twin joined at the body and the dream. Cherub Rock sets a mock angel against the scene the band came from; Spaceboy is the child sent out among the stars because he does not belong on earth; Disarm sets a family’s inherited violence, the old figure of the sins of the fathers, in a nursery song with bells; Luna sets the moon as a lover. Together they make an inner mythology of the lost child, and the recurrence lifts it above scattered allusion. What holds the axis is construction: the figures stand apart, neither image of the title governs the sequence, the particular is thin, with no place and no named person, and the archetype is reached by mood.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The inheritance is mixed and plain: the hard and progressive rock of the 1970s, the guitar walls of My Bloody Valentine and the British bands around them, the heavy riffing of metal, and the alternative rock of the American underground. The turn is to join them, and to set against the rawness of the scene around it, in the year of In Utero, a record of maximal production: guitars overdubbed in dense layers, a jazz-trained drummer, strings and bells, dynamics from hush to roar. Against that scene and that year, the turn was a real one. What holds it short of the bar is the path: each joined language was proven, the guitar walls had been built, and the move toward polish was a move toward the larger audience, not away from it.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. A record about escaping a hurt into a dream is made of sound as refuge: the layered guitars build a space large enough to vanish into, the voice is set inside the wall rather than in front of it, and the swing from hush to flood enacts the swing between withdrawal and overwhelm. Soma is the clearest case, a quiet confession that the band drowns. Disarm, which leaves the guitars behind, knows what the wall does not: that the wound has a source. The sequence is counted here, once: it opens on the loudest building of the wall and closes on a lullaby, the dreamer falling asleep. Held short of the top: Rocket, Quiet and Geek U.S.A. are containers, and Silverfuck’s length is permitted, not compelled.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence over thirty-three years. The record has been returned to steadily, above all as sound: guitar players still study its tones and its layering, and its drumming is studied as a model of rock drumming informed by jazz. The reissue of demos and outtakes beside the album has kept its making open to study. Disarm and Today hold readings that are not exhausted, the irony of the second still argued. What holds the figure: the yield is formal far more than semantic, the words of the longer tracks give little more on return, and much of the return is ritual, a known sound replayed and a decade remembered.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The field is the American rock album of the 1990s, the alternative rock that followed Nevermind. The intrinsic force is in the joining: the record showed that an alternative band could reach for the scale of 1970s hard rock and the textures of shoegaze in one sound, and it set a standard of dense, polished guitar production. Little was invented, the reach is mostly American, and the band’s largest effect came with its next record, so the record consolidated more than it redirected. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record broke the band to a large American audience, its three singles stayed in broadcast, and its massed guitar sound is heard across the alternative rock of the later decade and in the revivals of shoegaze since.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival is weighed over thirty-three years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the release of 1993 is still the record heard, and reissues have added beside it, not in its place. Presence is continuous: the three singles remain in broadcast, the album is heard whole, and it is placed high whenever its decade’s rock is counted. That presence is narrower than the widest. It is largely American, and much of it is a decade’s rock remembered. The fabric is more fixed to its year than a plainer record’s would be: the dense overdubbed guitars and the polished production are a sound of 1993, though they have aged without embarrassment. Those two charges hold the figure, which stands far below what has lasted centuries.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing. Chamberlin’s drumming is the record’s highest craft: the roll that opens Cherub Rock, the speed and swing of Geek U.S.A., a jazz player’s touch under rock’s weight. The orchestration of the guitars is a real command, many parts layered so that the wall stays legible, solos placed as climaxes, Soma’s flood exactly timed. Disarm’s arrangement for strings and bells is exact, and Vig’s production keeps the density clear. The faults fall across a share of the record: Corgan’s voice is a narrow instrument, nasal and close, which serves the dream but cannot carry the height the guitars reach; the guitar is near one tone for an hour; Silverfuck and Hummer extend past their writing; Sweet Sweet is unfinished.

Score: 8.9 / 10

One law governs the record: a hurt fled into a dream of sound, and the dream swinging between hush and flood. The two most distant elements are Silverfuck’s long noise and Luna’s lullaby, and they obey the law as its poles, the dream as overwhelm and the dream as sleep. Disarm, the most distant in texture, obeys in sense: there the dream’s source is named. Today joins bright sound to dark meaning, the law’s irony in miniature. The range is fair: hard rock, a ballad with strings, noise, a lullaby, a pop single. What holds the figure: the palette is largely one, the guitar wall at one tone, and narrowness is not coherence; and Silverfuck and Geek U.S.A. tilt toward display, where refuge gives way to the pleasure of force for its own sake.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as depression, longing and withdrawal, and it is the record’s ground. The family is present, a childhood’s violence in Disarm and a child set apart in Spaceboy, glimpsed more than held. The couple is present in Soma, Mayonaise and Luna, as love and its loss. The scene the band came from is mocked in Cherub Rock. The body appears as hurt and as the narcotic of Soma’s title. Labour, the state, history, the sacred beyond a cherub’s name and the natural order beyond the moon are absent. One consciousness joins what is held, and what is held is few orders, mostly inward. That is what holds the figure lowest.

Score: 7.4 / 10