“Pumpkins mix self-pity with ambitious music”
‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’ review
** ½
Southtown Economist (Chicago, IL) – October ??, 1995
By Southtown Economist writer Joel Brown
A double-CD set that debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart is essentially critic-proof. “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” the new album from Chicago’s Smashing Pumpkins, accomplished that feat this week. But “Mellon Collie” practically begs for a beating anyway, for a lot of reasons, beginning with that too-cute-by-half title.
It contains 28 songs - only two less than the Beatles’ “White Album”! There’s plenty of filler here. And the pervasive mirror-gazing despair of the Pumpkins’ singer, guitarist and songwriter Billy Corgan makes the average Nine Inch Nails track seem like “We Are The World.”
Maybe that’s a selling point for the teen Doc Martens crowd. But the only mildly anguished listener may lose patience as Corgan sings on and on in a pinched snarl: “I’m in love with my sadness!” “I’d die just to feel!” “Love is suicide!” “Living makes me sick, so sick I wish I’d die!” “Despite all my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage!”
Hey, somebody call the Samaritans! It’s grim stuff and, especially in such large quantities, ridiculous coming from a successful rock star. He barely even reveals the real suffering in the world - Corgan doesn’t sing about Bosnia or Calcutta or the Robert Taylor Homes, about poverty or hunger or war. The horrors afflicting him are personal, vague, abstract. It’s a misery that few people other than rock stars are able to maintain past adolescence. Of the 31 tracks on the album, he wavers from this vein of self-centered nihilism on less than a third, usually to suggest the possibility of redemption in romance.
But Corgan and his bandmates are too talented to turn out a disaster. His self-pitying poetry is set to some of the Pumpkins’ most varied, ambitious music.
The industrial sturm und drang of tracks like “Bodies” and “Tales of a Scorched Earth” seems all the more potent contrasted with the pop smarts of tracks like “Love,” “1979” and “Galapagos.” And the first single, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” makes the most of the whisper-to-scream format the band perfected on it’s last album, “Siamese Dream.”
Corgan has always had a wide range of influences, as the band’s excruciating cover of Stevie Nicks’ “Landslide” demonstrated a couple of years ago. “Mellon Collie” contains nods to glam-era Bowie (“Here Is No Why” and “Love”) and the lighter side of the Beatles (“They Only Come Out at Night”) and Harry Nilsson (“Lily”). “Beautiful” sounds like it was accidentally omitted from Prince’s last album.
The Pumpkins’ ability to craft a song - be it Ozzy-inspired rocker or harp-twinkled ballad - is undeniable. But too often there’s no room for anyone else in Corgan’s private theater of pain.