Rotten Apples, The Smashing Pumpkins Greatest Hits, is a nostalgic gift to the adoring fans of one the greatest bands of the '90s. This album brings the listener back to the days when rock had a personal and poetic touch that is absent from today's emotionally barren wannabe rockers who sing about how much money they have or how many chicks they've scored with. Over their 10-year run, singer/songwriter/guitarist Billy Corgan, guitarist James Iha, bassist D'Arcy and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin experienced almost every possible high and low.

In 1991 they were a no-name band from Chicago whose indie label debut album Gish sold a shocking 350,000 copies, prompting Virgin records to quickly sign them to a major deal. They became megastars in the heyday of the alternative rock movement with 1993's Siamese Dream. They followed it up in 1995 with the highly successful Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, an epic double album that sprawled across many styles to showcase everything The Smashing Pumpkins were capable of.

Then came the topple from the top. At the height of their popularity, Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin were shooting heroin after a show. Melvoin overdosed and died, and Chamberlin was kicked out of the band. Melvoin's death, Chamberlin's exit from the band, Corgan's divorce and his mother's death in 1997 set the Smashing Pumpkins on a completely new and different course. The carefree attitude disappeared and a more serious if more personal Pumpkins emerged.

Adore, a eulogy to Corgan's mother, was well received by critics but had only lukewarm sales. Unfortunately, many of the fans did not grow with the band and the Pumpkins were not willing to give people a carbon copy of the hard rock from the previous two albums.

In the most economically prosperous time in the country's history, the masses were listening to the Spice Girls and Hanson, not a quietly textured exploration of various forms of love and death.

After that was Machina: The Machines of God, which saw the return of Chamberlin as drummer and which also had poor record sales. There was a Machina follow up in the works, but after a long fight with the record label over the increasingly bizarre and less profitable direction in which the band was heading, Corgan elected to give the album away for free on the Internet.

Despite their poor album sales, The Smashing Pumpkins continued touring the country, playing to packed concert halls. Eventually they decided that the time had come to call it quits. They played an extensive farewell tour, closing things out for good earlier this year in Chicago where the band was first formed.

Rotten Apples takes you though the mind of the band over the course of their 10-year history. The eager hard rocking of "Siva" shows the promise in a band that only a year before had been getting booed off the stage because of their drum machine accompaniment.

"Today" and "Disarm" are great reminders of the time when bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and The Smashing Pumpkins dominated the airwaves, MTV actually played more than 10 videos in its rotation and TRL was not the garbage-spewing, creativity-destroying, mass marketing product that now controls all mainstream record sales.

The Mellon Collie hits, "1979," "Bullet with Butterfly Wings," "Zero" and "Tonight, Tonight," rock as hard today as they did six years ago. While listening to them you don't have any foreshadowing of the tough times that were soon to befall the Pumpkins.

"Perfect," one of the best songs on Adore, still carries with it the painfully scarred memories from that time of their lives. A drum machine was used to fill the void left by Chamberlin's absence and the result is a robotic, creepy sound. The song alienates the listener at first, but it has deeper levels that beg to be explored. When playing "Perfect" live, the Pumpkins would often use piano and strings and eliminate the drums altogether, exposing the true beauty of the song that seems to be intentionally hidden in the album version.

The real treat on Rotten Apples is the album's final song. Despite the odd directions that the Pumpkins had taken in their later years, they wanted to reassert their ability to rock the house when they wanted to. Corgan did not want to go out with doubts that they were one of the best rock bands of the '90s.

Right before they broke up, they went into the studio one last time to record one last song. Aptly named, "Untitled" cuts out all the distortion and computerized recording effects that populated Machina. A combination of acoustic and electric guitars, hard pounding drums and a flowing bass line give "Untitled" plenty of reason to be counted among their greatest hits. "Untitled" speaks from the heart: "Many times while you sleep / I'm dreaming of what to keep / You know your wish, hold it true / To slay the things that trouble you."

Corgan seemingly gives explanations for why they became what they did and not to doubt what they were always able to be: "Suddenly I'm out of reach / Listen here, feel me / Just believe, just believe / You'll see."

For all it is and all it says, "Untitled" is a great end to The Smashing Pumpkins career.

Judas O, a collection of B-sides and rarities, is the second disc on the album. After Siamese Dream, the Pumpkins released Pisces Iscariot, an album of B-Sides and other unreleased music. Judas O is a similar concept but it encompasses unreleased music from the second half of the Pumpkins career.

Some of the songs like "The Aeroplane Flies High," "Marquis in Spades" and "Set the Ray to Jerry" were all released before on the post-Mellon Collie- box set. "Believe" is one of the few songs written and sung by James Iha that made it to the Pumpkins lineup. He has a smooth voice and he sings with great emotion, it was always a shame that more of his songs did not end up on Pumpkins albums.

The rest are the B-sides from the Adore and Machina albums. They generally follow in the same themes as the rest of the songs from that time period. "Winterlong" and "My Mistake" have the thoughtful and mellow sounds of the songs written while Corgan was mourning the loss of his mother. "Lucky 13" has strange and wandering vocals and "Because You Are" has heavy and complicated distortion, two things that were both prevalent on most of Machina. Judas O occasionally gets very heavy, but it is an accurate reflection of the band at that point in their lives.

Rotten Apples and Judas O are a great memorial to a band that left a huge mark on the music of the last decade. Corgan is rumored to have recently formed a new band, Zwan, which will be touring this summer. Fans have likely heard the last from the Pumpkins, it will be interesting to see what direction Corgan takes with a new project, a new band and a fresh start.

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