Virgin – 7243 8 40861 2 1 729.37MB FLAC
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is the moment when the Smashing Pumpkins decided that being a successful rock band was not enough. Released in 1995, the double album behaves like an attempt to build an entire emotional universe: twenty-eight songs divided between “Dawn to Dusk” and “Twilight to Starlight,” moving through orchestral music, enormous distorted guitars, acoustic songs, electronics, piano, metal, psychedelia, lullabies, adolescent fury and exhausted tenderness. Billy Corgan was already operating on an unusually large scale after Siamese Dream, but Mellon Collie turns scale itself into part of the subject. Everything feels bigger than necessary because excess is exactly what the record is interested in. Love is enormous. Anger is enormous. Childhood is enormous. Loneliness is enormous. Even saying goodnight requires two discs.
The album opens not with guitars but with the title piece, a short instrumental piano composition that feels almost like music beginning before the band has arrived. It establishes the record as something closer to a book, film or theatrical production than a collection of singles. “Tonight, Tonight” follows by exploding outward with strings, drums and one of Corgan’s most openly romantic melodies. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra players give the song an almost old-Hollywood sweep, but Jimmy Chamberlin’s drumming prevents it from floating away. The arrangement is grand enough to risk ridiculousness, which is one of the essential qualities of Mellon Collie. The record repeatedly walks directly toward melodrama instead of protecting itself with irony.
“Jellybelly” destroys that atmosphere immediately. Suddenly the guitars are enormous, compressed and violent, with Chamberlin attacking underneath them. That collision establishes the album’s operating method. Mellon Collie does not gradually move from soft to loud. It keeps throwing different emotional environments against one another. “Zero” becomes almost mechanical, reducing the Pumpkins to a serrated riff and Corgan’s self-negating language. “Here Is No Why” opens the sound back into melody while retaining the guitar weight, and “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” turns frustration into one of the defining choruses of 1990s rock. The line about the world being a vampire has become almost inseparable from the era, but the song survives familiarity because the band makes the resentment physical. Chamberlin’s drums and the guitar dynamics repeatedly drag the song from restraint into eruption.
“To Forgive” pulls everything inward again. Mellon Collie is full of songs where Corgan looks backward toward childhood, memory and injuries that cannot be repaired by simply becoming an adult. “An Ode to No One” then responds with one of the record’s harshest guitar performances. The sequence can feel psychologically unstable because it is. Softness does not resolve anger; anger does not eliminate vulnerability. They coexist.
“Love” pushes into processed, almost electronic distortion, one of several reminders that the Pumpkins were never simply interested in preserving the standard guitar-band format. “Cupid de Locke” sounds delicate and antique by comparison, filled with unusual percussion and a kind of miniature chamber-pop atmosphere. “Galapogos” becomes one of the first disc’s great emotional centers, starting quietly and gradually opening into something enormous without losing intimacy. “Muzzle” follows with another gigantic chorus, but underneath all the volume is a lyric about mortality, identity and the strange realization that a life can already feel partly historical while it is still happening.
“Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” is the first disc’s great long-form piece. At more than nine minutes, it moves through drifting introductory textures, huge guitars, quiet passages and repeated surges. The title sounds invented from some private mythology, and the music earns it. This is the Pumpkins operating at maximum widescreen scale. “Take Me Down,” written and sung by James Iha, closes “Dawn to Dusk” by becoming almost weightless. After Corgan dominates thirteen tracks, Iha’s soft vocal feels like somebody else entering the room after a storm.
Then the second disc begins again.
“Where Boys Fear to Tread” is immediately dark and heavy, followed by “Bodies,” one of the most ferocious songs on the entire album. The guitars are nearly industrial in their density, but Corgan still puts a melodic vocal line over them. This combination is crucial to the Pumpkins. Even at their heaviest they rarely abandon melody. “Thirty-Three” moves to the opposite extreme, built around acoustic guitar, piano and restrained percussion. It sounds almost domestic compared with the enormous architecture surrounding it.
“In the Arms of Sleep” stays in that nocturnal emotional space before “1979” arrives and changes the album again. “1979” may be the record’s most perfect small world. The programmed pulse, soft guitars and barely dramatic vocal create a sensation of suburban movement without requiring much plot. Cars, boredom, friendship, possibility, nighttime and adolescence become enough. The song feels less like remembering a particular event than remembering what time itself felt like at a certain age.
“Tales of a Scorched Earth” then arrives like someone setting fire to that memory. Corgan’s voice is deliberately shredded and buried inside one of the ugliest guitar mixes on the album. It is not supposed to be pleasant. “Thru the Eyes of Ruby,” by contrast, stretches past seven minutes and returns to the Pumpkins’ combination of heaviness, psychedelia and romantic grandeur. It is one of the tracks that makes Mellon Collie feel impossible to reduce to its singles. The deeper into the album you travel, the more enormous its internal geography becomes.
“Stumbleine” sounds almost like a home demo intentionally left exposed. Acoustic guitar and voice suddenly occupy a space that feels only a few feet wide. “X.Y.U.” then kicks the walls out again. The performance is brutal, repetitive and increasingly unhinged, with Corgan pushing his voice toward screaming while the band locks into a riff that feels less composed than endured. If “Tonight, Tonight” represents the record reaching toward the stars, “X.Y.U.” represents it crawling through the basement.
“We Only Come Out at Night” is weirdly playful after that assault, almost nursery-rhyme music made with cheap keyboards and acoustic textures. “Beautiful” continues into dreamy pop, and “Lily (My One and Only)” becomes deliberately old-fashioned and theatrical. One of the strangest accomplishments of Mellon Collie is that these songs do not feel like novelty interruptions. By this point the record has established such a broad vocabulary that almost anything can belong inside it.
“By Starlight” brings the album toward its end with one of its most beautiful slow songs. The guitars become atmosphere rather than weapon, and Corgan’s vocal floats through the arrangement. Then “Farewell and Goodnight” closes everything as a literal group goodnight. Corgan, Iha, D’arcy Wretzky and Chamberlin all participate vocally, returning to the piano theme from the beginning and giving the huge double album a surprisingly intimate ending. After two discs of emotional maximalism, the band does not finish by detonating another guitar wall. Everybody says goodnight.
The physical design is inseparable from the experience. The original CD edition is not simply two discs stuffed into an oversized jewel case. It unfolds like a small illustrated book. John Craig’s collage-based artwork and Frank Olinsky’s design create an imaginary Victorian-celestial world populated by stars, planets, antique engravings, strange faces and impossible bodies. The famous cover figure, a woman emerging from a star, is itself assembled from older images. The entire package treats reproduction, recombination and fantasy as legitimate ways of constructing a new visual world, much as the album takes decades of rock, metal, psychedelia, pop, folk and electronic music and recombines them into something identifiable as the Pumpkins.
The Oakland Public Library copy photographed here belongs to the West Oakland Branch, and it is a particularly good survivor. The black outer double-CD case still holds the elaborate packaging, but the library has turned it into equipment. WEST OAKLAND is stamped across the front artwork. Another label reads WEST / CD / ROCK / SMASHING. Both discs carry Oakland Public Library hub rings stamped WEST OAKLAND, transforming the faces printed on the discs into strange municipal portraits.
The two discs are visually beautiful. “Dawn to Dusk” uses a pink face derived from an antique engraving, while “Twilight to Starlight” uses a blue one. The library circles occupy the centers of their foreheads and noses, almost perfectly interrupting the images. It is hard to imagine a commercial designer choosing to do that intentionally, but once the stickers are there they become impossible to separate from this particular copy.
The back has accumulated even more physical history. The original artwork shows the orange celestial face emerging from darkness beneath the handwritten-looking track list. Above it sits the Oakland Public Library barcode. Below it is a large square RFID tag, the circuitry visible through the translucent material. This is especially striking against artwork that already mixes nineteenth-century imagery with cosmic fantasy. Victorian moon faces, barcodes and radio-frequency identification all coexist on the same object.
There is something appropriate about seeing Mellon Collie in this condition because the album itself is obsessed with time. Childhood keeps resurfacing inside adulthood. Old imagery is used to package contemporary rock music. Futuristic guitar production lives beside music boxes and antique typography. The songs repeatedly move between remembering the past and imagining some enormous unknowable future.
This copy has now acquired another layer of time that the band could not have designed in 1995. It became library property. It was catalogued, tagged, checked out, carried around Oakland, returned, shelved and borrowed again. The scratches, library labels and RFID square are not part of the original Mellon Collie artwork, but they document what happened to the object after release.
And there is a lot of object here to use. Two discs. Twenty-eight songs. More than two hours of music. A book-like package. Two named halves. A complete sequence beginning with dawn and ending with goodnight. Mellon Collie comes from a period when a major rock band could use enormous commercial success as permission to become less restrained rather than more efficient.
That may be the album’s defining quality. It refuses efficiency.
A normal album could have contained “Tonight, Tonight,” “1979,” “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” “Zero,” “Thirty-Three” and a few other songs and become a tremendous commercial record. The Pumpkins instead made room for “Cupid de Locke,” “Stumbleine,” “Tales of a Scorched Earth,” “We Only Come Out at Night,” “Porcelina,” “X.Y.U.,” “Lily,” two James Iha songs, orchestras, piano instrumentals and everything else they could fit around them.
The excess is the meaning.
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness does not sound like a band deciding what is important enough to include.
It sounds like a band deciding that, for one moment, everything is important enough to include.
— ChatGPT
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.