Album Review: Smashing Pumpkins, "Siamese Dream"

The Pumpkins are never going to be as good as Nirvana. They're already much better.

This album is a seamless lava flow of burning, churning, yearning melodic guitar pouring itself relentlessly over a beautiful sun-dappled landscape, igniting into beauty everything it touches, whilst Corgan's delicate voice weaves the frayed edges of your psyche deeper and deeper into the music.

Geek USA is a drum-pumped monster that's escaped from the laboratory; Disarm a throbbing tense psycho-drama, like a razor blade balanced on an artery; and Spaceboy a golden acoustic dream with a Space Oddity string section. GRADE A

Colin Liddell
Riff Raff
December, 1993

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!