One of the best ever albums by a duo, actually. Jimmy Chamberlin did the drumming (and did it damn well, I should note), but despite the credits, as was later revealed otherwise this was His Not Then Baldness Billy's show all the way, all guitars, bass, everything. And what a damn good job he did.
So Mr. Corgan is seen as overly precious, whining, what have you. Heard it once, heard it a thousand times, no need to belabor me with the obvious. What wasn't as obvious -- but which I was always convinced of even before it was made more fully clear later on down the line -- is that he was one of those guys who grew up with Big Eighties Rock Dreams and then discovered alternative along the way in the latter years of the decade, especially going nuts for lots of things gothy and English. Considering I pretty much followed the same exact path, what I get from Siamese Dream is a bizarre sort of empathy, about what happens when you put everything together. One reason why in an interview some months after this came out, Corgan said that the whole goal of the band was to imagine Bauhaus as arena rock. No arguments here! The fact that he also clearly and openly worshipped before an icon of Kevin Shields certainly doesn't hurt my love of him or his band either (hints of the full-on MBV overdrive are everywhere, unsurprising considering how many songs from Loveless and earlier ended up sounding like SP songs in weird retrospect, and the opening notes of "Hummer" are pure Shields whalesong guitar).
There was some other comment along the line by some reviewer, I recall, about how noting Corgan was probably the only guy who obviously grew up reading all those bad American Guitar Player wank-shred magazines, painstakingly copied all his favorite riffs and actually did something good with all that. Quite. It's why that one snarl before the solo on "Cherub Rock" is so friggin' perfect, a neat little hint that something is about to explode big time, or why the intro to "Rocket" is so big and Mick Ronsony or why the solo on "Soma" makes you suddenly connect the Hendrix-Prince-Corgan dots in unexpected ways.
As for the solipsism of the lyrics and the strained vocals -- two words: Robert Smith. Not saying that if you like one you must like the other (or if you don't like one, etc.), but given that the Cure had already clearly demonstrated more times over than is worth counting that you can make something which pushes a variety of different buttons which can touch millions, why was it so surprising that somebody like Corgan, with his own goth history (I've seen the photos, and his haystack hair could have been designed by Smith himself) would pick up on that and do things that could be pop as much as they could be extremely unpop, and put it together on an album just the way he wanted to? If it all seemed embarrassing at times, Corgan himself admitted that he picks the most personal, embarrassing lyrics for his songs. I've heard of worse.
So you either laugh it all off or you surrender and don't come back, there's no real middle ground, it seems. I've long ago surrendered to it all, the mellotron on "Spaceboy," the dreamy middle part leading to the big rock fuckoff ending of "Geek U.S.A.," the frazzled but hopeful wanderlust of "Mayonaise," the strings and bells and the sending of this smile over to you on "Disarm," the way "Silverfuck" wants to rip your head off and sing quietly at you as well. I have no regrets, not a single one.
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