Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness by Smashing Pumpkins
January 30, 2007 by Jo Minor
Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness is a gargantuan effort from the Smashing Pumpkins, in many ways.
The album is a double-disc affair, and the CDs are titled Dawn To Dusk and Twilight To Starlight. This is a nice touch by mastermind Billy Corgan, who did not resort to the standard option of naming the discs by numbers 1 and 2 or the letters A and B. This is the very first hints of what’s to come in Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness.
When it was released, this album was highly-acclaimed by both critics and fans - and was quickly branded as one of the best, if not the best, Smashing Pumpkins album of all time - thanks to songs like the unforgettable 1979, the crushing Bullet With Butterfly Wings and the melancholic Tonight Tonight (probably one of the greatest love songs of all time!). That’s a great feat indeed, considering the superb quality of other such Pumpkins albums like Gish and Siamese Dream.
The first disc, Dawn To Dusk, has in it’s capacity 14 amazing tracks, while the other disc Twilight To Starlight boasts another 14 tracks as well. If I’m not mistaken, the pleasantly haunting title track - present in the first disc as an instrumental album opener - actually won a Grammy award!
The ultimate charm of Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, however, is how the band - and Billy Corgan in particular - managed to intricately weave all 28 tracks in the album into a marvelous musical journey. It might be a little time consuming, but I strongly recommend the listener to sit down and enjoy the album from start to end, at one go - with only toilet breaks in between - to fully appreciate the album in its element.
Strangely, the tracks present do not work in tandem with each other like most concept albums - but somehow, in some strange, unexplainable way - they just fit in extremely well with each other. I wonder how Billy Corgan managed to accomplish this - it would be mind numbing for anyone else to even try to fit in 28 totally unrelated tracks into one single album - but then again, Billy Corgan is a songwriting God who walks among songwriters.
Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness is the Smashing Pumpkins at their very best, and is a must have for fans of alternative rock or modern rock. Dare I say that it is the best double-disc modern rock album of all time?
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