New Release of the Week: Smashing Pumpkins - Rotten Apples

Covering the first decade of the band’s recording career, the album was originally put out in 2001, but has never been released on vinyl before.

This ‘best of’ compilation starts off with tracks from Gish, the band’s 1991 debut. It’s a fine album, if somewhat underrated and overshadowed thanks to the two hugely influential ones which would follow.

Gish also saw the band working with producer Butch Vig (of subsequent Nevermind and Garbage fame) for the first time. With Vig then in the chair again for its follow-up the band would go on to create one of the greatest albums of the 90s, Siamese Dream.

They then managed to top that, certainly in terms of ambition when, minus Vig, they created Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, a sprawling, double-album epic.

Also included are tracks from 1999’s Adore and a concluding track, ‘Untitled’, the original line-up’s last recording before they broke up.

Sound Pick: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Flight b741

For their 26th album (in only 13 years), King Gizzard swap the widescreen concepts of their recent releases for the intimacy of six good friends collaborating on the most bonhomie-laden set they’ve yet committed to wax.

On Flight b741, bandleader Stu Mackenzie says King Gizzard ‘wanted to make something that was primal, instinctual, more “from the gut” – just people in a room, doing what feels right’.

Tapping into the country-fried 70s American rock on which they were all raised – along with the ornery garage-rock roots from which their discography sprang – Flight b741 is lightning in a bottle.

Across its 10 ragged barnburners, King Gizzard flesh out rough skeletons of songs with their improvisations, grooves and a unique pass-the-mic approach to vocals.

The featured albums are available from Sound Records which can be found in Wellington Street, Douglas.