Review of MCIS from Get Out Magazine in St. Louis
A Little Melancholy, A Lot of Guitar Crunch, An Infinite Ego reviewer: Chris Dickenson from Get Out Magazine(entertainment magazine from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch date of article: November 22 1995
Liking the Smashing Pumpkins strictly rests on whether you can stomach the bands leader, guitarist-singer-songwriter Billy Corgan. "Mellon Collie" is a supreme test, wherein the great Pumpkins follows his egomaniacal muse and emerges with a two disk "concept" album. Brownie points are possibly in order for ambition, but far better for everyone had Corgan left half of this opus in his therapist's office.
On the plus side, there's plenty of guitar crunch here, and on that count Corgan is no slouch. "Zero" and "Fuck You(an ode to no one)" boast roaring, sludge-metal riffage that makes his lyrical complaining go by in a flury. On "Bullet with Butterfly Wings", he proves an adept practitioner of the tense, striped rythmic build that blasts into guitar cacophany.
But Corgan is so full of dippy proclivities that he's as much of a bonehead as a risk-taker. On the cloying "Cupid de Locke," he offers up lines like "Cupid hath pulled back his sweethearts bow" and "her mouth the mischief he doth seek." That sort of pretentious verbage hath left me hurling.
As always, Corgan's an acquired-taste singer who shifts between two vocal gears" sky-scraping screeching and mincing breathiness. The former works when he's ranting about feeling like a rat in a cage, but the latter is a dicey proposition at best. On the quiet, folk psychedelicism of "Farewell and Goodnight," Corgan evokes not brilliant conceptual stretch of Lennon/McCartney, but the white-bread simpiness of David Gates. And that is a concept more worth forgetting than resuscitating.