It was a fun weekend, starting off
with drinks with my coworkers, and morphing into my first community theatre in
a decade (a performance of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” at Langham
Court Theatre). Then it was a friendly game of Ultimate Frisbee, an evening
with a good friend preceded by a day spent decorating our newest addition – our
hidden bookshelf door!
I could write an entire entry
about how happy I am with the new door, and the great work that John of “A Cut
Above Joinery” did, but why bother when Sheila has already done a fine job of
it. To check out the Hidden Bookshelf, visit the entry on her blog, Sheilaephemera! If you also would like some great woodworking, check out The Cut Above guys on Facebook. These guys are amazing!
And if you are wondering why we
would build such an elaborate door, the answer is partly to dampen sound but also because it was fun! Life
should have some adventure in it, and why can't that adventure start in your own home?
Disc 632 is….Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Artist: The
Smashing Pumpkins
Year of Release: 1995
What’s up with the Cover? I assume it is an
artist’s rendering of our title gal, Melon Collie, experiencing her sadness in
the infinite vastness of space. You know, Melon, the universe may already be
contracting, which means your sadness is not actually infinite.
I
guess I’m a “universe half-full” kind of guy.
How I Came To Know It: My old roommate Greg put me onto
the Smashing Pumpkins but we were already in our own places when this came out,
and I only heard bits and pieces of it for years. Then maybe ten years ago I
spotted a used copy on sale at a local record store (Lyle’s Place, I expect)
and took a chance on it.
How It Stacks Up: I have two Smashing Pumpkins albums – this one and
1991’s “Gish”. I might one day get “Siamese Dream” but I’m in no hurry. Of the
two I have to put “Mellon Collie” tops.
Rating: 3 stars but almost 4
“Mellon Collie and the Infinite
Sadness” is a hard album to classify. It has the thick crunch grooves of stoner
metal, but it also has that melodic fuzz of grunge. At times it is sweet and
sad. At other times it is angry and shout-y.
I guess you could say it is proto-Screamo – I’m sure front-man Billy
Corgan would love that. Don’t judge the Smashing Pumpkins for the horrors that
came after, though; they can only answer for themselves.
On that front, there is a lot to
recommend “Mellon Collie,” which shows the range the Smashing Pumpkins have as
a band at this point of their career, both in terms of the songwriting and the
many styles they incorporate into a single record. Some songs are crushing
metallic grooves and others are symphonic pop numbers that are light and airy. Despite
this the album still feels like a cohesive whole.
The problem isn’t one style or the
other, it is that there is too much of both. Like so many double albums before
it, “Mellon Collie” is just too damned long. At over two hours of music and 28
tracks this record shows a band that has come off some commercial success and
given a bit too much free reign to do what they want. I hate soulless record
execs as much as the next guy (maybe more) but one was needed here to tell
these guys to tone it down.
Still, any album that can have the
smoldering stoner rock of “Zero”
alongside the uplifting symphony of “Tonight,
Tonight” nail them both, and then later combine the two styles into the
nine minute opus “Porcelina of the Vast
Oceans” is getting something right. Hell, getting a song called “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” to live up
to its pretentious name is a feat in and of itself.
My favourite song on the record is
“Bullet with Butterfly Wings.” Few
bands do angry and disaffected as well as the Smashing Pumpkins, and “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” is the biggest,
shiniest jewel in their golden crown of gripe. The song gets its angry on early,
opening with:
“The world is a vampire, sent to drain
Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames
And what do I get, for my pain
Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game”
Before launching into a churning
and irresistible guitar riff as Corgan spits the chorus:
“Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.”
As much as I often want Billy
Corgan to just lighten up, if he did he wouldn’t be able to write classics like
“Bullet with Butterfly Wings.”
Unfortunately, writing this stuff requires you to be at the edge, and it is
inevitable that other songs like “Fuck
You (An Ode to No One)” fall off the edge of Anger Mountain and become
directionless frustration.
The album experiments freely, and
for the most part it works. Not so much, the excess distortion of “Love.” Some would say the distortion –
which is so bad it almost prevents you from hearing what Corgan is singing – is
a sign of the times. I would reply that this may be true, but that doesn’t make
it good.
Despite all their rage, the
Pumpkins are more than a rat in a cage, and on “Mellon Collie” they prove it
with genuinely tender songs. The oddly spelled “Galapogos” is an introspective mood piece that has an emotional
core to it that rings true despite lyrics that are slightly overwrought.
And the groove and the emo come
together nicely for the mid-tempo, “1979,”
the Pumpkins most famous song. This song is a bit too perfect to fit on a
double album so full of misfit anthems, but I found it refreshing for Corgan to
write a song where the outcasts feel one with the night, instead of awkwardly trapped
inside it.
The album was flagging by the second
half of disc two. This could be that the songs lost some of their quality, or
it could be I was just fatigued with hearing so much of the same music. This
record could easily be a four star masterpiece if they had just edited it down
a bit. Everyone likes a little sadness, but no one wants it to feel infinite.
For that reason despite the classic greats on “Mellon Collie and the Infinite
Sadness” I’m bumping it down to a three.
Best tracks: Mellon Collie
and the Infinite Sadness, Tonight Tonight, Zero, Bullet with Butterfly Wings,
Galapogos (sic), Porcelina of the Vast Oceans, 1979, We Only Come Out At Night, By Starlight
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