THE SMASHING PUMPKINS
"Earphoria"
Virgin Records America, Inc. (7243 5 42706 8)
Release Date: November 26, 2002

Eaphoria was originally a promotional CD that was released in 1994 in conjunction with the release of the Vieuphoria home video; it was finally made commercially available in 2002. The disc contains live performances and previously unreleased studio material. The live material includes: "Quiet" (performed in Atlanta), "Disarm" (a "harder" and more "aggressive" performance from English TV), an acoustic performance of "Cherub Rock" from MTV Europe, "Today" (performed in Chicago), "I Am One" (performed in Barcelona), "Soma" (performed in London), "Slunk" (performed on Japanese television), "Geek USA" (performed on German TV), an acoustic performance of "Mayonaise," and "Silverfuck" (performed live in London, and includes an a cappella verse of "Over The Rainbow," Dorothy's classic song from The Wizard of Oz). Overall, the sound quality for the live material is rather decent (except for "Geek USA" and "Silverfuck," which both have a more "hollow" sound to them). And on most of the live tracks, you can hear the audience in the recording (except for "Disarm," "Cherub Rock," and "Slunk").

The disc also contains five unreleased studio tracks. The CD opens with the first one ("Sinfony," which is a short instrumental piece with some guitar and bass). "Bugg Superstar" is a more electronic-sounding piece (with keyboard, bass, and percussion) than one would have expected from the band at that time, and it only has one line of vocal ("superstar") that appears once in the whole piece; "Bugg Superstar" was named after James Iha's dog. "Pulseczar" has distorted guitar and vocals, and at some points in the song you can hear the channels switch. "French Movie Theme" only has one line of vocal that repeats throughout it ("yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah," with an occasional "bonjour" thrown in); the instrumentation of the track includes keyboard, acoustic guitar, and minimal percussion. The last new studio track ("Why Am I So Tired") closes the disc, and is a fifteen-minute long instrumental that features guitar, percussion, and bass with some distortion; the track starts out promising but never really progresses, and becomes redundant and boring very quickly.

The tracks on the CD are arranged in the order they appear on Vieuphoria; unfortunately, this means that the two longest tracks ("Silverfuck [Live] / Over The Rainbow [Live]" and "Why Am I So Tired") appear back to back, making the last half-hour of the disc very tedious to listen to. While it makes sense for "Silverfuck" to be the last live track for both the video and the CD (since the band closed their shows with that song during that era), it would have been better if these two long songs could have somehow been separated on the disc.

Overall, this is a decent CD, and should be in the collection of any die-hard Smashing Pumpkins fan or collector. However, it's unlikely that a more casual fan of the band would get very much out of this CD.

(reviewed by Lesley Muir on February 28, 2003)