The Smashing Pumpkins’ diamond-certified magnum opus Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness turns 30 years old this year so what better time to revisit this seminal and wonderfully ambitious record. The 30th anniversary is being celebrated through a range of special releases, from an extended streaming edition featuring live tracks, to a 4 CD release and a super deluxe 6 LP set that comes with its own set of tarot cards.
Though an important album for me as a teenager the truth is I have not listened to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness in its entirety for at least a couple of decades. Of course, there are a number of constant favourites that have remained in my playlists throughout the years, but this is the first time I’ve sat down to listen the 2 hour recording all the way through in a long, long time.
A sprawling double album that still somehow can’t quite contain the sheer breadth of Billy Corgan’s incredible ambition and tireless song writing, Mellon Collie is a sonically diverse, multi-genre experiment in excess, from the hopeful piano instrumental title track that opens the record to the angry thrash metal of Tales of a Scorched Earth, it is filled with dirty grunge riffs, distorted vocals, synthesised buzzy droning, orchestral rock, and tender ballads. More organic in its song writing and collaborative recording process than previous Smashing Pumpkins records, the famously fractious band found themselves on the same wavelength this time around and the results speak for themselves.
An album designed for and enthusiastically embraced by a whole generation of 90s teenagers, it perfectly encapsulates the confusion and turmoil of growing up an outsider while desperately holding on to the promise that there exists a future where everything will one day make sense. The stylistic and emotional whiplash of the music can feel exhausting at times and the oft criticised lyrics run the gamut from poetic and vulnerable to childishly immature and stubborn; they are filled with contradictions, wildly fluctuating between anger and aggression, regret, mournful lamentation, naive optimism and idealised romanticism.
This is what it looks like when real, flawed humans make music – ambitious, unwieldy, indulgent, but genuine and unfiltered. Is this Smashing Pumpkins record perfect? – of course not. Will you skip some songs? – of course, but unlike most albums where these skips are consistent, here they will depend entirely on your bearings within the emotional landscape of your life at the time.
Originally structured (at least on cd and cassette) as 2 distinct sections of 14 songs each Dawn to Dusk / Twilight to Starlight, the song placements can at first feel a little haphazard (that change up from the orchestral flamboyant sincerity of Tonight, Tonight into the heavy guitar of Jelly Belly is not for the faint of heart), but in time you begin to recognise there’s actually an intention behind the overall structure.
Dawn to Dusk embraces the chaos, cacophony and frustrations of the day, pushing and pulling and stretching our nerves across the whole range of emotional responses. But there is beauty to be found in this maelstrom. The aforementioned Tonight Tonight, Zero, teen angst anthem Bullet With Butterfly Wings, Love, and Muzzle are all standouts.
The second section Twilight to Starlight, contains personal favourites Thirty-Three, We Only Come Out at Night and the iconic and flawless 1979 – a song drowned in a kind of instant nostalgia for a childhood that never really existed. Despite containing a couple of heavier, rockier outliers (Bodies / tales of a scorched earth – an angry, heavily distorted screaming shock that comes out of nowhere – and X.Y.U.) this second section moves towards a softer, mellower and more contemplative sound. The stresses of the day are mostly over and the ballads and lullabies of Stumbleine, By Starlight and finally Farewell and Goodnight, which sees us serenaded by all four band members on vocals, guide us gently into sleep and the endless possibilities of our dreams.
Listening to the full recording of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness as an adult reveals a depth to the thematic concepts not easy to appreciate when listening as a teenager. There’s a recognition and identification with the broader themes of what it means to have lived a life where possibilities have inevitably narrowed.
Corgan has been quoted as saying the album was a way for him “to sum up all the things I felt as a youth but was never able to voice articulately. … I’m waving goodbye to me in the rear-view mirror, tying a knot around my youth and putting it under the bed.” – 30 years later, those teenagers who once clung to this album like a life raft and who are now returning to it can finally do the same. The world is still a vampire, but somehow we made it through.
Written by Lee Crawford.