Review of Mellon Collie from Hour magazine - November 28, 1995.
Transcribed by Simon Coyle
I sympathize with Smashing Pumpkins' vocalist Billy Corgan. i really do. It's got be hard being as successful, popular, presumably wealthy and in reasonably good health, and the butter for billions of teenage muffins, and still manage to be profoundly unhappy. That kind of self-obsessiveness takes work.
But never mind the long-faced lead guy - once you get past the bile-rising album title, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, there are actually some passably decent songs. Hell, with that kind of saturation songwriting - 28 songs on this double-album epic tragedy - it would be hard to miss, eh? With this, the Chicago-based foursome's third major release following the fantastronomiphenominal success of their debut, Gish and 93's Siamese Dream, fans will find the bumpkins broadening their bases a wee bit.
Corgan pushes back the limits vocally, sacrificing control and boosting the dynamics considerably. As expected, crooning lamentation and navel-gazing characterizes the bulk of the songwriting on both discs, though there is the occasional all-out rocker such as Bullet with Butterfly Wings that finds the band flexing musical muscle. The addition of strings and the occasional unexpected arrangement show off the band's technical maturation, though the lyrical content is still too self-involved to be anything other than tedious at best, juvenile at worst.
On a some what fitting note, the sweetly sad Take Me Down was, it seems, just too much for my CD player to bear. No preset, no playback and no power. Smashing Pumpkins killed my discman.