Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

I had a friend in college whose favorite band was The Smashing Pumpkins. My awareness of them was limited to their goofy band name and the fact that they misspelled “melancholy.” I heard about 15 seconds of Billy Corgan singing and decided I couldn’t get past his harsh, pinched voice. Up until now, that was the only intentional interaction I’ve had with The Smashing Pumpkins.

But I got this album today, and was excited to give them another chance. In college, I was a needlessly judgmental music major (undergrad insecurity mixed with narrow pop exposure). My tastes have developed significantly, my opinions have developed much greater nuance, and my ears appreciate different sounds now.

My god, I loved this. A tour de force of songwriting, an exceptional mishmash of genres, an expertly curated collection of sounds, tones, and production. Billy Corgan’s voice is certainly not pretty, but it works. It suits the songs, and as the album wears on, I’d find myself appreciating his vocal performances more than I’d ever imagined.

A new favorite, and one that enters the pantheon of great discoveries from this project.

Ya ya Billy Corgan kinda went off the deep end in the last few years but the Smashing Pumpkins older albums are still pretty great

Has some good songs, but waaaaaay to long for what it brings.

One of the best of the 90s no doubt

1/30/26 - Listened throughout the workday. Album is too long, wasn't able to make it through the entire thing in one sitting. If this was cut down to one album, it would have been even more highly regarded.

Best Song - Muzzle

For a two hour album this flies by. There's absolutely some fat to trim, but so much of the album is pure quality

Ts the longest one i’ve listened to but it’s okay the album is great. At least three absolute bangers, fav is “Thru the eyes of Ruby”. Not a full 5 star but banger to bad ones ratio is acceptable so.

There’s a lot of good songs on here. There’s also a lot of songs.

What this experience is almost teaching me is that double albums are almost universally shit . Everyone so far is bloated and should be a single album
Great 90s indie but 2 hours come on - by song 2 I was on Thanos’ side.

A long album of long songs . Some trimming called for . It’s is good, really good even , but too long to be great

3.5 again . Now do I round up or down ?
Disc 2 drops the average down to a 3.

Would be generous with this if it wasn't two hours long.

UGH. I just can't stand Billy Corgan. I was planning on giving this a 2, but found myself so annoyed with this album and its length, that it's getting a 1.

Zo te horen een definiërend album voor de '90's. Ik kende van deze band met name de radio hits. Maar nu kom ik erachter dat deze band zich daar niet perse op focust. Er staat een hoop kwalitatieve muziek op dit album. Maar: het is wel lang zeg. Te lang eigenlijk. De band lijkt dat ook gedacht te hebben en brengt af en toe wat variatie. En hoewel ik normaal variatie waardeer, merk ik dat dit in dit geval juist afbreuk doet. Wat moet ik met het zeurende eind van cd 1? Dat kan nog smaak zijn. Maar wat moet ik met die punkachtige geluiden (bv Tales of a scorched earth of, helemaal belachelijk, de ontwikkeling van X.Y.U.)?

Dit soort dingen halen me helemaal uit het album. Pumpkins, blijf gewoon bij je leest en lever één uur '90's-rock.

3,5 ster.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is utterly fascinating. After 2 successful, well-received albums, Billy Corgan simply decided that the next Smashing Pumpkins album would be the most enormous, ambitious, eclectic masterpiece possible: while making it he even told the press to expect "The Wall for Generation X". This is the kind of insane, ego-serving move that usually collapses under its own weight well-before coming to fruition. The fact that all 2 hours of this album got released in a complete state was frankly improbable. The fact that Mellon Collie is fantastic from front to back is a miracle without compare in the world of 90's music. That being said, the cost of Mellon Collie's success was Billy Corgan's ensuing obsession with creating an even bigger, better album. But by that point, the ego/talent/ambition ratios were all off, and The Smashing Pumpkins never put out another truly great album again. Regardless, we do still have Mellon Collie, so we may as well enjoy it. I knew several songs here going in, but I was still waiting for a bad song, and it was truly shocking that I never found one. Let's get this out of the way early, if you can manage to release 2 consecutive hours of music without a bad song, then you're already close to the 5. But frankly, most of these songs are great to fantastic. *And* the full picture here is a cohesive piece of art. This album was made with the stated intent of stepping outside of The Smashing Pumpkins' established sound. While you do get some of the band's characteristic grunge-y fuzz rock, and and grunge balladry here, especially on singles like Bullet With Butterfly Wings, Zero, 1979 and Muzzle, a lot of this album pushes well outside of this box. We have rich, neo-classical strings, electronic textures, decidedly un-grunge balladry, and some borderline noise rock. The change is immediately noticeable. After a brief intro, we get Tonight, Tonight, a single propelled by beautiful, epic, swelling strings and commanded by the drums, whose momentum truly makes the song. Then this is followed by Jelly Belly, which couples unbelievably distorted guitars with sugary pop-rock melodies. Both of these songs overshoot The Pumpkins' earlier sound and set the stage here incredibly well before plunging back into the familiar with the *very* good Zero. Before I get too far, I would like to talk briefly about how this album is structured. This is a doubled LP with a loose conceptual focus. Disc one is the day, and disc two is the night. In a fascinating interpretation of this, both discs feature the full array of this album's sound. But Where the first disc keeps it's songs relatively digestible and welcoming no matter the sound. Disc two seems to push all of the album's ideas to out of its comfort zone. On disc one, you have songs augmented by beautiful, strange textural work like on To Forgive and Cupid De Locke, fuzzy, 3 minute long barnburners like Zero, Jelly Belly and Ode To No One, and ultra melodic, fragile balladry on Galapogos, Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans and Take Me Down. But on disc two, you have songs dominated by textural experimentation like We Only Come Out At Night and Beautiful, noise/alt-metal opuses like Tales Of A Scorched Earth, Bodies, and the brutal, searing, 7 minute long X.Y.U., and you have balladry so damaged and fragile it borders on abstraction with songs like Stumbleine, Lily and Farewell and Goodnight. This approach contributes to the album's cohesion. You get to see all of Mellon Collie's tricks and ideas on disc one, and then it subverts all of them in a way that is identifiable, but challenging on disc two. Any of the songs I've brought up before now could be considered my favorites. Like I said, the amount of truly great material here is remarkable for such a long album. The biggest complaint I have is that the pacing gets a little off during the last stretch of disc two, but the songs are still great. If the biggest issue with your *two hour* long album is a minor pacing hiccup, then you're doing pretty well. This is one of the defining albums of the '90s for good reason. This serves as a monument of what could have come after grunge if the rest of the scene was brave enough to follow. The material here plays so nicely with The Smashing Pumpkins' earlier material, but still has such a distinct, eclectic identity of it's own. I'd love to have seen what would have become of The Pumpkins if Corgan had backed away from his ill advised pursuit of perfection. But at least Mellon Collie gives us a glimpse of what a perfect Smashing Pumpkins album could look like.

Imagine being so self-important that you think the world nears to hear 2 hours of your uninterrupted whining. Whilst I do love some of the SP’s output, including some of the songs on this double album, there is just too much filler, too much Billy and not enough real ideas going into this opus.
If he could’ve employed some self-restraint and culled this down to a solid 45-50minute album, it could be a classic. In the end, in spite of some great tracks, I can only give it a 3/5. Can’t really see myself sitting down to listen to the full 2 hours of this again in a hurry

This record’s delightfully broad range is what stops its two hour running time from being an issue. It is not consistent enough in tone to become boring.

The lazy thing to say about a 2 hour album is “if only they cut out X number of songs they could have had Y quality record,” but that would miss the point of Mellon Collie. The Smashing Pumpkins are, at this time, a band with an uncontrollable number of ideas in their heads who would have had to significantly tone down this LP to be able to settle on a concise view of what it should sound like.

You could cut three or four totally different albums out of this record. The metal elements on a cut down version could be used as short moments of contrast to show how far the band could push things in another direction. Instead they really go there and counterbalance the big breezy indie rock hit singles with sections of complete madness.

It’s an exceptionally brave release, just not one that you can listen to over your lunch break. It's impossible to get to know as a casual listener, so if you can break through that it could make you a fan.

Too long

omot me jako napaljuje

no sam album i ne baš. mislim, nije loše, al nije baš kvalitetno dosljedno, osim kvalitetnih ima i značajnijih stilskih skokova, svakako zanimljivo. iznenadila me žestina pojedinih pjesama (manje mi dragih). glazbeno mi je čak dosljedno dosta dobro, al vokal ne silazi sa skale kojom ustrajno skakuće: pristojan - blago nepodnošljiv - naprosto nesnosan. tekstovi bi isto mogli biti bolji... sve u svemu, ajde trojka, premda je dugo, nije mi uopće bilo naporno i ostavilo mi je bolji dojam od njihova prvijenca

Billy Corgan wanted to make The Wall for GenX? Unfuckingbelievable, the stones on this guy. First of all, The Wall was The Wall for GenX. Secondly, this album isn't any better than all the other albums in the mainstream that year. In fact, pretty sure The Bends came out that year. Get over yourself, bro.

Ok, now that's out of the way...

This is actually a decent album, but it definitely should have been two. I don't see why making it a double was necessary when there is no unifying theme or narrative. Two hours is a long time to listen to unrelated songs.

I wish this album wasn't so goddamn long. This has to be the longest album besides Ella Fitzgerald and 69 love songs. Despite that it's a good album though. Some songs feel a bit pointless and some drag on for too long, but there are a lot of good and great tracks here. The variety is astounding and the some go from quick and grungy to lush and slow seemlessly. There are a lot of stand outs here, too many to mention.

I have long ago stopped listening to these songs as singles and only listen to this as a whole album, usually the second one, but I realized while the songs are great, the truly magical thing about this album is how they are arranged. Like he wrote a greatest hits just for a single album and this is the perfect live set list. The high points and low points all seem so expertly interwoven. I could listen to the end of Where boys fear to tread and the beginning of bodies forever just for that anticipation. He really hit a high point with this, and if it makes the people that hate him feel any better I'm pretty sure he resents this album as much as you do. He can't out do this for a million different reasons, and I think there is a part of him that is destroyed by that.

If this had been cut from 2hrs to 1 hr it could have been 5 stars. On the first disc you have a 9min song that in no way justifies the length or a place on the album. The self-indulgence really let's this down along with some melodramatic lyrics. It's a shame but you also have a bunch of timeless pieces on this album.

I like The Smashing Pumpkins and have seen them live. Originally had this as a 4 but 2hrs is just too much and the 2nd disc is a slog at times. 3/5.