The Smashing Pumpkins

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Essential Albums

  • Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (2012 Remastered)
    Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (2012 Remastered)
    Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (2012 Remastered)

    By every conceivable metric—album sales, chart rankings, Grammy Award nominations, sheer running time—Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was the biggest album of The Smashing Pumpkins’ career. But those stats don’t fully convey the sheer aesthetic vastness and outsized passion of this two-disc, two-hour, 28-track colossus. With the Pumpkins’ 1993 predecessor, Siamese Dream, band brain trust Billy Corgan had already proven he possessed a widescreen, auterist vision that set him apart from his alt-rock cohorts. But with Mellon Collie, he entered the rarefied headspace previously occupied by Pete Townshend circa Tommy or Roger Waters on The Wall, exhibiting a sense of self-belief that borders on supernatural possession. On Mellon Collie, every aspect of the Pumpkins’ sound is pushed to the extreme: The signature grungy riffs are hardened into mutant metal (“Zero”, “Tales of a Scorched Earth”); the ballads plumb new depths of tenderness (“Thirty-Three”); the orchestral flourishes hit with cathedral-shaking force (“Tonight, Tonight”); and the latent proggy affinities blossom into unabashed Rush homage (“Porcelina of the Vast Oceans”). But even as he was positioning himself among the gods of classic rock, Corgan could still tune into the emotional wavelength of us mortals and misfits: At a moment when teen angst was still paying off well for many, no other song of the era articulated the frustration and futility of raging against the machine as bluntly as “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”. At the same time, Corgan could guilelessly conjure the carefree promise of youth on the iridescent “1979”, a New Wave daydream soundtracked by motorik rhythm and threaded with hypnotic guitar textures. In its fusion of mosh-pit aggression and high-art ambition, Mellon Collie both marks the apex of the early-1990s alternative revolution and, by extension, anticipates its retreat from the center of popular culture over the back half of the decade. Knowing full well that Mellon Collie was all but impossible to top, Corgan would push the Pumpkins in the completely opposite direction for 1998’s Adore, trading in pomp-rock fantasias for beat-driven synth-pop. But in hindsight, that move seems less like a knee-jerk reaction to Mellon Collie’s unabashed excess than a mission-accomplished affirmation of its chief purpose: To explode the possibilities of what a guitar-powered alt-rock band could achieve.

  • Siamese Dream
    Siamese Dream
    Siamese Dream

    Twenty-five seconds. That’s precisely how long it took for the members of The Smashing Pumpkins to transform themselves from promising alt-rock underdogs into certified Gen-X icons—a metamorphosis that can be plotted in the amount of time it takes Siamese Dream’s atomic lead track, “Cherub Rock”, to achieve liftoff. From its opening militaristic drumroll, the song builds and intensifies like an army being mobilised, one member at a time. Then comes a fireball of a guitar riff that doubles as a declaration of war: Against the cynical scenesters who doubted the Pumpkins’ indie credentials; against the underground’s rigid aesthetic orthodoxies; against anyone who dared to write off their generation as navel-gazing nihilists. On first listen, 1993’s Siamese Dream feels like a quintessential Clinton-era alt-rock artefact: Billy Corgan and James Iha’s smeared, swirling guitar noises on tracks like “Cherub Rock” and “Rocket” hit the sweet spot between Nirvana’s gritty riffage and My Bloody Valentine’s sensory-overloading splendour. And the ready-made anthem “Today” dresses up prevailing themes of self-loathing in an ironically sunny sing-along wrapped in a candy-coated fuzz; it’s a song that makes bitter sentiments like “I’ll burn my eyes out!” seem almost sweet. But Siamese Dream’s heart truly belongs to the gatefold-album epics of the mid-1970s, when groups like Led Zeppelin, Queen and Pink Floyd were elevating rock ’n’ roll into the realm of transcendental, quasi-religious experiences (and bitchin’ planetarium laser shows). As the mosh pits of America raged, the Pumpkins were taking a stage-dive into the stratosphere. None of the band’s Lollapalooza-era peers were attempting the sort of multi-tracked guitar-architecture that thrusts the grunge-gaze groover “Hummer” through its heady peaks and immaculate comedown. And even in the age of peak MTV Unplugged, no other alt-rock outfit was crafting acoustic ballads as cinematic and dramatic as the string-swept “Disarm”. True to its title, Siamese Dream brokers a harmonious coexistence between the Pumpkins’ muscular and melodic extremes, as best exemplified by the totemic mid-album double shot of “Geek U.S.A.” and “Mayonnaise”: The former is a furious blast of pure psych-metal savagery, the latter a slow-motion, hazy-headed lullaby that’s become one of the most beloved album cuts in the Pumpkins’ canon. At a time when fellow alterna-nation deities like Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were exhibiting allergic reactions to their newfound celebrity, Corgan gamely stepped up to fill the void—as both an unapologetic rock star with stadium-sized ambitions, and as an open-hearted empath eager to cultivate a profound emotional connection with his fans.

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About The Smashing Pumpkins

If, as Sonic Youth famously proclaimed, 1991 was the year punk broke, then 1993 was the year prog struck back—thanks to Smashing Pumpkins’ sophomore blockbuster, Siamese Dream. Though the Chicago group had formed in 1988 in a thick cloud of grunge grime and shoegaze haze, their second album cleared the path for them to become the next Nirvana—just a little more enamoured with Queen and ELO than the Pixies and Melvins. But as much as Siamese Dream consolidated the Pumpkins’ strengths—the swirling twin-guitar attack of Billy Corgan and James Iha; the cyclonic rhythms of bassist D’arcy Wretzky and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin—it also offered the first real glimpse of Corgan’s auteurist ambitions via “Disarm,” a dramatic orchestral ballad offering a nakedly emotional antidote to the ironic alt-rock of the day. That vision was blown up to widescreen proportions with 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, a wildly ambitious double album that spanned symphonic lullabies, metal ragers, and New Wave reveries, yielding a bounty of teen-angst anthems that elevated Corgan into a hero for zeros around the world. However, Chamberlin’s departure prior to 1998’s synth-pop curveball Adore presaged a long series of shake ups and breakups: If the Pumpkins were seen as Corgan’s baby before their initial 2000 disbandment, then post-hiatus releases like 2012’s Oceania (featuring no other founding members) all but confirmed it. But with Iha and Chamberlin back in the fold, 2018’s taut and effervescent SHINY AND OH SO BRIGHT VOL. 1 / LP: NO PAST. NO FUTURE. NO SUN soundly re-established the telepathic connection and arena-sized ambitions that still exist among Corgan and his original accomplices. “We’re still playing guitars,” Corgan enthused to Apple Music, “and we’re still little kids chasing the riff.”

FROM
Chicago, IL, United States
FORMED
1988
GENRE
Hard Rock

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