Double Trouble - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Smashing Pumpkins - Virgin Records
By Robert Duncan
There's a damn good single album in here. But it's up to you and me to program it into our CD players because, in his quest for a Meaning of Life epic, the Bible according to Smashing Pumpkins, Billy Corgan ain't gonna cut a minute.
Smashing Pumpkins, "Stumbleine" (from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness)
Which begs the question (with apologies to J. Parker Channon): has there EVER been a good double album? That is, one containing less than an album's worth of filler, failed experiments, refried juvenilia, and other self-indulgent etc., etc., etc., etc., e tc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.?
We all know the answer (as do all the guilty artists, starting with the Beatles and their unmodestly untitled ur-self-indulgence known as the White Album on through His Supreme Self-Indulgence Himself and Sign 'O the Times).
But in the interest of modeling for young Mr. Corgan the adage that "Brevity is the soul of wit," I'll get on with it.
The good news is the dude has the fire in the belly. The bad news: he also has a tendency to bend over and stare at it. (And I'll merely point out that this double album was immediately preceded by a disk of b-sides and outtakes and juvenilia.)
Which is not to mention that he's further unburdening himself in psychotherapy at the moment (as he unburdened to RollingStone), letting go of hangups and getting in touch with his inner child, when what he should be doing is getting in touch with his punishing superego.
(Interesting that the album where he control-freaked outSiamese Dreamand started playing the other guys' axes is actually more taut and less indulgent than this return to at least nominal democracy.) Anyway, here are the cuts you'll want to program in:
Well, if you were really in a hurry, you could just plop on the second disc and stop it when it gets to selection 10 (aka the Esquivel-influenced [you heard me] "We Only Come Out at Night"). In that tight little set you'd have, among other delights, the sneaky, Voodoo Chile-ish guitar dialogue that opens "Where Boys Fear To Tread," you'd have the prettiest overall slow song, "Stumbleine," and you'd have the album's most upliftingand, yes, besttune, "1979" (which Mike Spiegel says sounds like some New Order song, but I don't want to know about it). You'd have some other decent ditties, and some of the package's best turns of phrase. Of course, you'd also have to endure a smattering of Bill's Sylvia Plathitudes. But after a half-dozen listens I even found myself singing along with that "Love is suicide" line from "Bodies."
And, my god, we could argue all day about the role of words in rock. I mean, Led Zeppelin (a not inconsequential influence on the Smashings, in case you hadn't noticed) managed to achieve eternal pop life behind the execrable magick mots of R. Plant. At the same time, Elvis Costello's ultimate commercial failure may have everything to do with the true magnitude of his literary talents: too clever, too verbal equals too cold. And of course as Little Richard once pointed out: "Womp-baba-loo-momp-alop-bam-bo om." But you do have to deafen yourself to a lot of late-breaking adolescent angst to enjoy some of the tunes on this pair of platters.
And while the press of brevityand a genuine affection for the artist under discussionprevents me from fully plumbing the verbal depths (e.g., the album title?!?), I must report that at times I listened incredulously. Am I hearing what I think I'm hearing? Is it irony? Suffice it to say, modern rock hath few words more peculiar than those of "Cupid de Locke," which hath the words "hath" and "morrow" and "doth," which doth suck. But back to our programming.
Add to cuts 1-9 of disk 2, cut 6 of disk 1, which is the single, "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" ("Despite all my rage/I'm still just a rat in a cage"). If not perfectly original, it's thoroughly satisfying. And a nice showcase for Corgan's underrated (to put it kindly) whine. Here's a cat who really blows (in the saxophone sense of the term) with his voicefrom choirboy smooth to screechy loud to hiccuppy country to Marilyn Monroe whispers to trans-nasal dental drill sometimes all in one song. And why hasn 't anybody noticed how much he sounds at his best like the trans-nasal, whiny, wheedling Mick Jagger at his best, circa 12 x 5 and England's Newest Hitmakers?
Add "Muzzle" (cut 12, disk 1), a rocking anthem (with, incidentally, some of his most truly revelatory lines: "I fear that I am ordinary/Just like everyone"). Pick up cut 2, disk 1, "Tonight, Tonight," one of those high-contrast, power chords vs. arpeggios things, albeit with a Moody Blues string-section overlay. Throw in "Fuck You (An Ode to No One)," which is much better than its title or sentiment, and "Zero," which I think sounds like a heavied-up version of Gary Numan's "Cars" (although J. Parker doesn'tand surely it's an odious comparison anyway).
Put 'em all together, and you have yourself, as noted, one damn good, 14-song, Smashing Pumpkins disc (for the price, alas, of two).