Look, I recently willingly spent 3 hours listening to Mellon Collie demos and outtakes, but I've got my limits. If your album's got more letters in its name than minutes of music, maybe you've gone too far. Even by 2010s-Pumpkins standards, SaOSBV1/LPNPNFNS is impossibly empty, without a single memorable line or hook in its entire 31 minutes. Even Monuments had Drum and Fife! And why squander one of the 90s' most understatedly great drummers on dreary, sub-Adore 1-and-2-ands? The Rick Rubin production's pretty and feels good in the ear, but it's gallingly synthetic, like he took every song apart and hand-washed each frequency before weaving them all back together.
Weird thing is, gun to my head, if I could only listen to one post-Adore Pumpkins album ever again it might be this one. At least they committed! If Billy really can't write a song for shit anymore, might as well make the cleanest, glossiest sound imaginable, with nary a Heavy Metal Machine of Ghost Child in sight, just shiny shiny shiny all the way down. For all my intellectual gnashing of teeth, when this was over I put it on again because it was just so easy to listen to, which makes it better than average by any reasonable metric 3/5
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