The Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Por um escritor misterioso

Last updated 19 setembro 2024

The Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

“Let’s approach this like it’s our last album,” Billy Corgan claims to have said to his bandmates, in so many words, before work began on their supersized third record, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It wasn’t the last gasp of the Smashing Pumpkins, or even of the original, pre-breakup iteration of the group, before Corgan slapped the retired brand on his glorified solo campaign. But the album certainly felt like a swan song — the endpoint these alt-rock heroes had been working towards since they became a four-piece in the autumn of ’88. All sides of the Pumpkins sound are present and accounted for: Squealing hard-rock tantrums (“Jellybelly”) share space with soaring arena fodder (“Tonight, Tonight”), fragile acoustic ballads (“Stumbleine”), and fledgling stabs at the Goth lullabies (“In the Arms of Sleep”) these four would begin to indulge on their downer of a fourth record, Adore. Some double albums grow organically out of a wealth of material. Mellon Collie was engineered to be an epic, with Corgan hiring hot-shit producer Flood to help him realize his dream of a bifurcated magnum opus — more than two dozen tracks spread across two hours, two themed discs, and six sides of vinyl. The ambition paid off: Mellon Collie was a monster success, a chart-topping […]