Smashing Pumpkins
Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness

THE REVIEW

Many claim that this album marked the end of the grunge era. I completely agree. Not because it was the best thing of that season as many believe, but in my opinion because it demonstrated that grunge had evolved into something monstrous: a gaudy AOR for the pimple-ridden MTV generation and the wanking journalists who followed the phenomenon. Indeed, this album has a pompous sound, veiled with violent and unnecessary guitar riffs, and an unbearable progressive grandeur that resurrected the ghosts of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
Melancholy consists of two CDs, the “The Wall” of the 90s (damn!). The first is electric, the second full of nauseating super kitsch ballads. There's little to salvage from the first CD. A bit of third-rate grunge, made pompous and heavy with AOR nuances (“Bullet with butterfly wings”, “Zero”, “Muzzle”), the usual Jane's Addiction mixed with NIN in “Fuck you”, a decent homage to Grateful Dead (“Porcelina of the vast oceans”), and the first ballad that already starts to render the atmosphere soporific (“Tonight, tonight”). All in all, a passable album, certainly there aren't those crisp nice pieces from the past like “Snail” or “Cherub rock”, but years pass for everyone. Then, there's the unbearable usual shouty and grating voice, as if coming from a rusty intercom.

The second CD, however, is truly terrible, containing a series of crappy ballads with grotesque arrangements that transport us into a dimension of sterile and self-indulgent progressive, which even crosses into the glossiest Bon Jovi-esque AOR: listen to “Thru the eyes of Ruby” or “In the arms of sleep”, although what really knocks us out is the series of slow ones: “33”, “Beautiful”, “Lily”, “By starlight” and the mawkish Beatles-esque lullaby “Goodnight and farewell”, where Corgan shows his severely limited songwriter abilities. The whole thing seasoned with an exasperated voice, as if the Japanese guitarist was squeezing his balls, or sucking him directly. By that point, we're already fast asleep. Let's draw a dignified veil over the lyrics: Billy Corgan has always been one who had fun, but has cunningly ridden the wave of youth turmoil within grunge (people like Staley or Cobain truly suffered, and this was palpable in their music, regardless of the quality of their music). Corgan, who notoriously never had issues except how to invest his fucking dollars or how to treat his hemorrhoids, what the hell does he have to complain about???
And his lyrics abundantly demonstrate this falsehood, being absolutely banal. Supermarket slogans like: “Love is suicide”, “and I still believe that I cannot be saved”, “The endless drags of a death rock boy” or “God is empty just like me”. Empty or not, thank God they broke up.