#952 The Smashing Pumpkins - Vinyl Tracklist: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

I'm very tempted to use this as an excuse to visit one of the (probably the) formative album of my teenage year, or to go on and on about the ways that formatting and physical packaging affect listening, or otherwise to make the entire article as longwinded and unreadable as this opening sentence. But! Let me just briefly go over what this packaging's effect has, splitting as it does the album into 6 sides, 5 songs each (the original 28 plus two bonus tracks), across 3 discs.

First of all, this is in no way a triple album. Each of the 3 discs would read as a desperately offkilter combination of sides with no reason or flow. Rather, perhaps inspired by the Mellon Collie era's The Aeroplane Flies High boxed set, which packaged 5 singles onto their own thematic EP-length discs, this plays as 6 individual EPs. This is a fun way to break up a sprawling double album that was necessarily jarringly sequenced by the expansive range of its contents.

Another reason to take this as 6 separate offerings? The first and last are clearly the worst of the lot, making for a drearily halfhearted opening and a whimpering end. Considering the former. So, sure, the Mellon Collie / Tonight Tonight opener was a strikingly bold move on the original disk, completely baffling the expectations of anyone coming at this fresh from Siamese Dream. But then it kicked directly into the payoff of Jellybelly. Here, we follow with a swap into disc 2's anti-two-punch 3-4 combo of Thirty Three and In the Arms of Sleep, into the whimpy wafering of Take Me Down, which is all to say, 5 of the album's whimpiest, whiniest songs all back to back with no payoff: it doesn't work on its own, and it doesn't work as a first half or third or sixth of anything that comes after. The last side similarly just packs too many of the weak-spirited songs that were vulnerable and refreshing on the original but that just puddle together here. Infinite Sadness is a welcome new track, but it follows Farewell and Goodnight, adding up to too many goodbyes.

Rounding out the "low" sides, the clear winner is the 1979/Beautiful/Cupid/By Starlight/We Only Come Out at Night side that builds a wonderfully misfit crew of sensitive weirdos into something far more touching than the sum of their parts.

The hard ones though? This is where you get your money's worth. I don't want a return to Siamese Dream's (to say nothing of Zeitgeist's) comparative homogeneity, but its thrilling to hear the rougher, tougher, noisier crush of the album's heavy element clench up into little 5-track fists. The Jellybelly / Bodies rush is bracing, if sunk by To Forgive, and thereafter sinks into some of the middle-ground songs that I guess had to go somewhere.

But hearing Fuck You into Love into XYU is a rush, topped only by the reason for this whole thing to exist:

1. Bullet with Butterfly Wings
2. Thru the Eyes of Ruby
3. Muzzle
4. Galapagos
5. Tales of a Scorched Earth

All I can say is that I'm glad that never existed as an EP when I was 15, because it would have blown my goddamned mind. That's about as fine a slice of this era of the Pumpkins as you could hope for, sandwiching some of Corgan's most underrated, soaring anthems between two of his most searing screeds. The frustration of Bullet bleeds into Ruby, the wondering and the "the night has come" bleeds into Muzzle's "the silence of the worlds" and on into Galapagos's desperate search for feeling, into a blistering comebacker of a climax that begs to loop right back into another go at Bullet, that the ebb and flow of stress and beauty never find its rest. Its moments like this that excite me about this artifact.

Is that all ridiculous? Probably, but in the highly unlikely event that anyone ever reads this far down this mess I can safely guess that you are (were) reasonably fanatical about this band and this album, and the mere idea of considering how it might be differently composed is itself might be cause for interest for you, damn near however it was actually done. This was an album for those who wanted to feel music deeply at just the moment they were just finding the need to feel deeply, and to listen to this album in a new way is a route to revisit and rethink those fecund, halcyon days.

Corgan confides freely that he wrote this album specifically to be for and about that longing segment of youth, and it was the perfect artifact for your moment when the world opens too big and we need to find ways to frame it into songs and albums and scenes and stories and stages to keep from being overcome. Hearing these songs again, maybe I just couldn't resist the pull of doing it all again.

This does nothing to replace the original: if you're not already ardently familiar with it, start there. But if your worldview was ever framed by this album, the opportunity to see it from another angle is recommended with a whole heart 4/5