Siamese Dream

Billy Corgan buried his misery under so many layers of overdubbed guitar that despair came out sounding like a sunrise, and "Today" — a suicide note sung as a jangling anthem — is the proof.

That contradiction runs the whole record: the beauty is real and so is the rot underneath it. Butch Vig and Corgan reportedly stacked guitar tracks by the dozen until "Soma" swells from a single fragile piano into a roaring flood and back again, and the strings on "Disarm" turn a song about broken childhood into something almost hymnlike. Corgan famously played most of those parts himself, chasing a sound in his head with a perfectionism that nearly wrecked the band making it. What survives is an album where every gorgeous wall of noise carries a knife inside it.