The Smashing Pumpkins 1991 to 2000: every album, every song

There doesn’t seem to be many books out there on the Smashing Pumpkins and that’s a shame, given how influential they are. That, however, doesn’t mean you should have to put up with this phoned-in hack job.This is such a tedious book: it’s basically a description of each song from the first decade of the band’s career, saying laughably vague things like ‘the pulsing intro of Cherub Rock fully justifies why it was chosen to open the album’. Wow. This level of waffle continues throughout the entirety of what is a small, annoyingly insight-free book.The entire bibliography is websites, so the author hasn’t bothered trying to contact anyone for first hand material at all. It’s just a fan who has written a long high school-level essay with facts taken from the internet.Even more annoyingly, the author also tells us which songs they reckon are the better ones, which always seems like an invasion in such a book. Objectivity might be impossible, I accept that, but this is basically a fan site printed onto a little book with nothing to add to what’s already out there. It’s written in a pretty prosaic ‘blogger review’ style too, which devalues things further. So basic!Even the photo section provides mainly album covers and video stills: in other words, less than any standard Google search would reveal for you on your phone.The Smashing Pumpkins are a significant band and it’s annoying that the few books on them that do exist are such lazy, reductive, unnecessary hack jobs.Honestly, Wikipedia is a better source and it’s free. I’m sending this back. Such a pity, I was really excited to get my hands on this one. This is my second ‘On track’ book (the other was the Opeth one) and it was as bad. Avoid!