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Rock microbiologists might argue that grunge fermented in the late 80s solely in the ceiling sweat of Seattle hardcore clubs. But by 1991 it was definitely airborne and US-wide.
Originating in the torture dungeons of Pixies, Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr, cross-germinated with psych rock and early British shoegaze at super-spreader events like the Reading festival and spread across the States by Sub Pop mail-order packages and Lollapalooza, by the time the scene broke cover the new American sound of grimy guitars and angst-lashed melody was already endemic
Just look. Way across country in Chicago, and released just as their then-unknown producer Butch Vig was about to start work on Nirvana’s Nevermind, Smashing Pumpkins’ debut album Gish emerged that May as a convergent evolution of Seattle’s grunge explosion.
Billy Corgan and his already frustrated crew (Corgan re-recorded most of his bandmates’ guitar and bass parts himself) were hippier at heart, writing songs on LSD in the hope of blending Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Cure, My Bloody Valentine, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles, and were lampooned by their grungier peers as “mainstream” for it. But Gish – newly reissued in variously coloured vinyl for its 35th anniversary – was the multilayered, 10-dimensional record that would help imbue grunge with a panoramic afterburn long after its initial garage-punk spark had flamed out.
Described by Corgan as a very spiritual album (Siva, for example, is a deliberate misspelling of the tantric concept of Shiva) – Gish embraces quiet-loud, but in the manner of mashing Jimmy Page-style solos and Zep rock grooves into interludes of acid folk, shoegaze and trippy psychedelic angst akin to a K-holed Doors.
It’s no stranger to the era’s harder core – witness Bury Me and Tristessa providing the missing links between the psych funk of Jane’s Addiction and Pearl Jam’s power grunge. But its charm lies in its subtler approach: the way Rhinoceros twists unhurriedly from a sweet acid ballad into a psychotropic glam vortex, its narco-Pixies melody brushed rather than battered; the way Suffer is doused in desert prog atmospherics right down to what sounds like a pan-pipe solo, or Crush uses the burgeoning shoegaze sonics to try to tease open a wormhole back to Woodstock.
There was pomp, panache and psychedelic prissiness buried within Gish’s grime, and in there was also the seed of grunge’s blooming.
