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I love this record. One of the most underrated albums of the 1990s. For many, however, this album isn't anywhere CLOSE to an easy listen. The Allmusic review doesn't really do justice to how utterly alien many of these songs might sound to an average listener. It's as if some hardcore punks took the discographies of Queen, Fugazi, David Bowie, and Sonic Youth, shattered them into tiny bits, then re-arranged them in an artful collage, letting the seams show where they may.

The sound of this album famously failed to connect with audiences as well as Epic, Shudder to Think's label, had hoped. Despite a well-selected single, the weirder-than-it-seems "X-French T-Shirt," the album fizzled. Mainstream listeners weren't exactly ready for a band which combined atonal stop-start riffage, sweet but fragmented melodic hooks, dense harmonies, impossibly knotty time-signatures, and surreal glam-rock vocals sung in an unapologetically operatic and over-the-top style. These are all pleasures to be found on this album, to be sure -- but they didn't quite sound like pleasures to most mainstream listeners in 1994.

And yet, even though this album failed to connect with mainstream audiences during the time of its initial release, it did connect with certain audiences and a few critics. Its stature and influence has certainly grown since then -- if only by a small measure -- but in quarters where this album is loved, it is LOVED, and you can hear its influence clearly in the sound of bands like Deerhoof and The Mercury Tree.

I've not heard of Sound of Ceres before, but on Allmusic's advice, I took a listen to "Emerald Sea." It's certainly an odd listen, but not without points of reference. I would describe it as a sound-story album, in the tradition of some of the weirder offerings of late-60s bands like The Moody Blues. It also strongly recalls some of Stereolab's stranger outings.

This album occupies a strange niche. The arrangements are orchestral-pop, but seem to feature mostly synthetic instruments, and lots of reverb -- hence the "dream-pop" association. But don't expect something like Beach House. The songs here are, structurally and melodically, often a little jarring, with nothing that melodically connects as one might hope a pop-song would. And yet, that's not to say there isn't a guiding musical logic; it's just that things overall sound a little mathy or theoretical, rather than warm. Strange intervals and odd chord-changes abound. This makes for a listen which often feels like an exploration of paradoxes -- too jarring for easy-listening, yet too soft-focus and abstract to command one's whole attention. My ear found nothing to grab hold of. There's nothing here which even resembles a pop-hook, to be sure -- and while that renders the album a little off-putting, it's probably also intentional.

Do I "like" what I heard? Well, I probably didn't enjoy it enough to give it a second listen. But there is merit here, I think. There are actual ideas being explored, fresh ideas, of both musical and thematic variety -- and that's always a good thing. I didn't really connect with it, but I can imagine that somewhere out there, there might be a "scene" for music like this. It does have a recognizable aesthetic, and it would probably be easier to get into music like this if one were listening with others who were also into it.

I don't normally listen to videogame soundtracks -- but when I played Heart Machine's 2016 indie hit "Hyper Light Drifter," one of the many things which impressed me about that excellent game was the score. Ambient but evocative, electronic but warm, restless but melodic, Disasterpeace's music for the game perfectly complemented the game's story of a doomed adventure through a beautiful but dangerous alien landscape. It is moody and vulnerable; it wanders through desolate landscapes and thickets; it travels without a beat, until a beat is found; sometimes, drums suggest battle approaching, and the music swells to a terrifying din; it buzzes, it scrapes, it chatters, and recedes.

Disasterpeace is apparently one guy, a composer by the name of Richard Vreeland. Vreeland's work here is exceptional. This music might have been written for a videogame, but it's so strong -- it has such a distinct and compelling ambience -- that it really stands well on its own. That said, this collection doesn't play like a collection of distinct songs so much as one continuous fabric of inter-related themes.

There are, to be sure, tracks which stand alone. I might recommend "The Midnight Wood," because of the way it feels like a self-contained composition. Here, Vreeland builds interest around a contemplative and ever-so-slightly askew synth-arpeggio. The soft but persistent beat creates an understated tension, and the slightly unexpected shifts in the arpeggio invite closer listening. Patiently, Vreeland introduces other elements, as well as variations to the primary motif -- new textures, new timbres -- until the piece has gathered a depth which suggests deep introspection underscored by melancholy. It's a very nice piece, and only one of many many favorites in this collection.

Since discovering this album, I've found that I like putting it on in the background when I'm at work; it works very well as ambient music. But I've also created a playlist of some of the calmer pieces on this album (of which there are many), and I like listening to that as I drift off to sleep. It's excellent music to daydream (or night-dream) to.

It might be hard to argue that this album is highest-tier KG -- but for all its diversity, this album provides a very solid and coherent listen. It's interesting how, even on a record like this, where KG is presenting bits and bobs from all over the map (rather than focusing on a smaller selection of sounds), the end-result still all feels like the work of the same band. The production certainly helps, as everything here is given the same level of studio-polish.

It's true that some people might prefer the overall consistency of an album like Nonagon Infinity to the deliberate hodgepodge presented here. But personally, I think there's a strong argument to be made for this sort of hodgepodge. It has its own appeal. To be frank, some of KG's more "consistent" albums can start to feel a little monochromatic after a handful of tracks. The diversity presented here keeps things fresh throughout.

And after the pandemic, on an album whose title, in part, seems to be celebrating a sense of "togetherness," it only seems right that KG should present such a disparate assembly of tracks. There is a pleasing conceptual quality in this.

This album is a film-soundtrack to the 2013 Spike Jonze film, "Her," which is about a man who falls in love with an artificial intelligence. Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett scored the film with original music, which is collected herein.

I can't tell you how much I disliked this album upon its release. Revisiting it recently, I find that my opinion has softened a bit.

As a 90s kid, I'd been a deep fan of Gish, Siamese Dream, Pisces Iscariot, and Mellon Collie. At the same time, I'd been aware of the allegations regarding Corgan's extreme ego, and I really disliked the way he was shaping his public persona into some kind of petulant bat-child. The Nosferatu look did him no favors, and his continual ranting in interviews about how "nobody respects the Pumpkins" was very off-putting.

Prior to the release of Machina, Corgan announced, via his blog on the band's website, that he'd heard the voice of God, and that God had charged him and his band with saving the world through their music, or some such nonsense. He announced that he was renaming himself to Glass, the Pumpkins would now be known as The Machines of God, and their next album would be the first in a series of divinely-inspired works. Epic eye-roll.

Although it wasn't clear at the time, Corgan later revealed this bonkers blog-post to be part of the concept of this album -- an album upon which Corgan adopts a cartoonish persona based on the public perceptions of him, and the band similarly plays cartoon caricatures of themselves. This sounded to me then, and still does sound to me, like a thin excuse for Corgan to write his own ego a blank-check.

All of this baggage was impossible for me to dismiss when this album came out, and because of that I found it hard to hear anything good in the album at all. Frankly, it's still hard to hear the goodness in this album through all of its problems -- but now I would tell you that THERE IS GOODNESS HERE, and it's worth the finding.

The baggage is enormous. Beyond the context in which the album was released, you also have to contend with the production (by Flood), which makes everything sound as fake, as harsh and as digitally-cold as possible. Corgan's voice, in particular, sounds more unpleasant than ever. Flood has produced a number of great albums by great artists (including the Pumpkins' own "Mellon Collie"), but here he's just made an enormous number of bad decisions. I speculate that these decisions were made in the service of attaining a "futuristic" sound, but they sound spectacularly bad as applied to the Pumpkins.

If, however, you can hear past the overwhelming narcissism and the cold robotic production, you may find, as I now do, that the songs themselves are actually pretty good. Corgan did turn in some winners here. "Everlasting Gaze," "Stand Inside of Your Love," and "Glass and the Ghost Children" all stand side-by-side with the better songs in the Pumpkins' discography. Overall, the album is too long and doesn't have enough variation between songs or any sense of actual dynamics -- but none of the songs here are truly duds. Dip in at any point and you'll find a well-written tune, if you have the ears to hear past the myriad problems.