"Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness"
St. Louis Post Dispatch - November 22, 1995
A Little Melancholy, A Lot of Guitar Crunch, and Infinite Ego Liking the Smashing Pumpkins strictly rests on whether you can stomach the band's leader, guitarist-singer-songwriter Billy Corgan."Mellon Collie" is a supreme test, wherein the great pumpkin 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 the count Corgan is no slouch. "Zero" and "Fuck You(an ode to no one)" blasts roaring, sludge metal riffage that makes his lyrical complaining go by in a fury. On "Bullet With Butterfly Wings," he proves an adept practitioner of the tense, stripped rhythmic 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 sweetheart's bow" and "her mouth the mischief he doth seek." That sort of pretentious verbiage hath left me hurling.
As always, Corgan's an acquired-taste singer who shifts between two vocal gears: sky-scraping screeching and mining breathiness. The former works when he is ranting about feeling like a rat in a cage, but the latter is a dicey proposition at best. On the quiet psychedelicism of "Farewell and Goodnight," Corgan evokes not the brilliant conceptual stretch of Lennon/McCartney, but the white-bread simpiness of David Gates. and that's a concept more worth forgetting than resuscitating.