A New Era Has Begun For Dooyoo- Resurrection! (Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness - Smashing Pumpkins)

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Product:	Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness - Smashing Pumpkins
Date:	15/02/03 (24 review reads)
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Advantages: Great Varierty Of Songs, Very Little Filler, Six Classic Singles

Disadvantages: Quality Lags In A Few Places, Corgan's Whine Can Become Annoying, Abrasive Production

And just when you thought the band couldn't get any weirder, The Smashing Pumpkins produced one of the only double-albums of the past decade, pushing their artistic and songwriting credentials to the very limit of musical paradise.

It was the album that got them known worldwide and it improved ten fold on the radio-friendly jibes of their magnetic, melodic breakthrough hit, Siamese Dream (1993). But what makes this album... or rather The Smashing Pumpkins so good, so daring, so damn original? What seperates them from their grunge peers? Well, the answer is frontman Billy Corgan, as miserable as Cobain and more bloated than Bono. He refused to resort to any grunge cliches, tinkering in the studio for hours so that all of his songs would sound perfect, dynamic and original. The Smashing Pumpkins never really DID grunge so it is still surprising today why they are always put in that bracket. The only probable answer is that their breakthrough singles Cherub Rock, Today and Disarm were all bona fide rock'n'roll classics that emerged during grunge's peak. And if the guitar solo laden, impromptu jamming and hushed vocals of the lush Siamese Dream didn't seperate them from their peers (e.g. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden), it was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness that stabbed the final nail in the coffin.

A double album, consisting of two discs- one describing the daily duties of the day and the other delving into the tortured nightmares or the lavish dream-like quality of the night can only be described asn powerful, very VERY powerful. When Corgan screams "Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage" backed by an explosion of manic guitar solos and power-drumming on par with Dave Grohl's finest work on the show-stopping single Bullet With Butterfly Wings, you can't help but scream with the self-stylised pagan of the gothic world. When he utters "With this ring I wed thee" backed by some solemn keyboa
rds before Thru The Eyes Of Ruby plunges into 56, yes 56, seperate guitar tracks, the listener cannot help but be utterly exhilerated. Listening to Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness is like watching The Fellowship Of The Ring and The Two Towers back to back, the initial radio-friendly numbers of Disc 1 mimicking The Fellowship's light touch, while the dark, frosty guitar churning of Disc 2 revelling in the same sort of darkness and nihilism that made The Two Towers so good in the first place.

Spread evenly across the two discs are a fair share of epical orchestral ballads, riff hungry monsters and subdued, but rarely acoustic tracks that have a magical, dreamy sense of style about them. The highlights are obviously the six singles. The lush, sweeping strings of Tonight Tonight ("If I can make it, you're not stuck in vain"), the fuzzy, radio friendly, laid back hit 1979 ("cool kids never have the time"), the sudues hush of 33 collide brilliantly with the moshpit mania of Bullet With Butterfly Wings ("The world is a vampire, sent out to drain") and the heavily Metallica influenced Zero ("God is empty, just like... me") to create a wide variety of sounds, indeed there is something eher for everyone.

The album songs, while not as immediate as the singles, are just as good. The dead end, sarcastic jibes of Billy Corgan ("We're going nowhere fast, nothing here ever lasts") are overlayed perfectly onto drilling guitar lines on Jellybelly while the feel-good rocker Muzzle ("My life is ordinary, just like everyone") and the pschedelic Love are indescribably addictive with their melancholic melodies and a rhythm section that just never lets up. The more nightmarish rockers on Disc 2 are just as "subtle" but far more experimental in where they want to go with their tunes. Bodies' hook lies in an abrasive two chord guitar line, Tales Of A Scorched Earth is the hardest th
ing on this album, only breathing a short sigh of relief during a short two second, pop chorus while XYU starts out slow but eventually builds up its boiling rage towards its eight minute ending, letting rip finally with a guitar solo that can only be described as cataclysmic while the backing revels in its own impromto catastrophe jam.

The lighter material is either glaringly radio-friendly, like the wonderful acoustic strummer Stumbleine, the sunshine chorus of Here Is No Why, the gloomy wave of To Forgive, the lovely, cello-laden Take Me Down (sung by guitarist James Iha) and the dreamy feeling of Galapagos or the lighter material (more often on the second, experimental, disc) is far less consumer friendly, taking its time to build up slowly but surely, emerging in the end as great songs. Indeed, In The Arms Of Sleep and We Only Come Out At Night might sound very basic, guitar, piano, drum tracks at first, but drip feed their charisma and charm into your head until you can't stop singing the lovely chorus of "We Only Come Out At Night, The Day Is Far Too Bright, We Only Come Out At Night". The last four tracks of Disc 2 are all very mellow, providing a gradual decrease in guitar overdrive until the happy sing-a-long chorus of Farewell And Goodnight is reached (again sung by guitarist James Iha).

In the end, Mellon Collie is nothing short of a classic. Corgan took his band to their very limits on this album and it didn't seem that they could go any further than this huge gambit. Indeed, following albums like the elctronically influenced Adore and the rock out Machina/The Machines Of God were excellent, but a slight regression from this double-album of instant classics, growing favourites and downright ugly moshpit monsters. Afterall, nobody's brvae enough to release a triple, or quadruple album...

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