Pumpkins dream up smash hit

Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream (Virgin). EVERY so often an album like Siamese Dream comes along that makes you wonder why other people bothered to learn their instruments.

The Smashing Pumpkins have been lumped in as grunge wanabees, but Siamese Dream leaves most grungites flailing away in its wake, as it feeds the history of rock 1966 onwards (basically since the invention of the fuzzbox) into a blender and cooks up a richly seasoned epic.

There is everyone in here: the guitar on Soma could be Brian May of Queen and the riffs anyone from T-Rex to Metallica. Much of the album sounds closer to the jarring, jagged melodies of the last but one generation of American alternative bands - Sonic Youth, The Pixies and the Throwing Muses - than grunge. Yet none of it is derivative.

The greatest strength of Siamese Dream is the Smashing Pumpkins' ability to produce rich, multi-layered and textured songs.

Disarm and Spaceboy drip with tender fragility, while Cherub Rock or Geek USA hum along with raucous guitars chiming the death knell of mediocrity.

The highlight, Soma, with its agonised lyric ''I'm all by myself, as I've always felt, and I'll betray myself to anyone but you '', moves from sublime calm to heart-wrenching power and back again with the control of a symphony.