Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Robert Christgau | C+ |
| NME | |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Slant Magazine | |
| Q (magazine) | |
| Spin (magazine) | |
| CDNow | |
Machina is the second lowest-selling commercially released Pumpkins album to date, with U.S. sales of 583,000 units as of 2005. Although it entered the U.S. charts at number 3, selling 165,000 copies in its first week, sales declined sixty percent the second week, and continued to slide. Regarding the disappointing sales, Jimmy Chamberlin commented, "It was like watching your kid flunking out of school after getting straight As for ten years." Billy Corgan, in 2008, summarized the failures of the album:
| “ | I think the combination of the band breaking up during that record, D'arcy leaving the band... Korn was huge at the time, Limp Bizkit was huge at the time, so the album wasn't heavy enough. It wasn't alternative enough, it was sort of caught between the cracks. And it was a concept record, which nobody understood. So the combination of those elements was a career-killer... Adore didn't alienate the audience, they were just sort of like, 'Oh, it's not the record I want.' alienated people. | ” |
According to Metacritic the album received generally favorable reviews scoring 66 out of 100 based on 15 reviews. NME criticized the album for not sounding like a band effort. Others contend that Machina brought together the rock sensibilities of Smashing Pumpkins' early albums with the atmospherics and lyrical maturity of 1998's Adore. Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun-Times called Machina "an exceedingly impressive and hard-driving record" and contended that it was the band's "masterpiece".
Read more about this topic: Machina/The Machines Of God
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