Smashing Pumpkins

It's 1995: the so-called Seattle scene is showing ever more obvious signs of rigor mortis, its standard-bearers Nirvana are already a memory, and what will shortly (horribly) be dubbed "nu-metal" is being born... but for now, MTV is going wild for the video of a song built on a classically crowd-pleasing grunge structure, quiet verse/angry chorus: it's called "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" and it's by Smashing Pumpkins, the Chicago quartet formed six years earlier around frontman Billy Corgan. The track, with its immediate emotional punch, bolstered by the lyric "despite all my rage I'm still just a rat in a cage" that Billy screams in the refrain, plays its role perfectly as bait for millions of kids who rush out to buy the album containing it, eager to fill the void left by Cobain and co.; but what these unwitting buyers get their hands on is far more than a simple collection of pop songs seasoned with punk-metal sounds (not that this was ever all a Nirvana album contained, but just to give an idea...). The title alone, "Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness", and the decadent, romantic artwork should already give the game away.

In this double album, which follows an immature but promising debut ("Gish", 1991), an absolute masterpiece capable of dismantling and rebuilding the coordinates of a new kind of rock ("Siamese Dream", 1993: in some ways close to the shoegazing movement, it's a record built on walls of heavily saturated guitars oscillating between metal and noise, alternated with oases of pure melodic serenity, over which Corgan grafts dreamy, sweet vocal lullabies), and a fascinating collection of rarities ("Pisces Iscariot", 1994), Corgan's uncontrollable ego is finally set free to roam every corner of the musical universe orbiting around the word "rock", even where it takes considerable force to bend things back into the genre's typical shape: the result is a collection of twenty-eight songs, split into two sections with the evocative titles "Dawn To Dusk" and "Twilight To Starlight", almost all of them stunning in their excessive, overflowing theatricality, and able to shift between wildly different styles and genres with disarming nonchalance.

It moves from the grunge-rock of the already mentioned "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" to the symphonic pop of the gorgeous "Tonight, Tonight", from proto-industrial experiments ("Love", "Tales From A Scorched Earth" - the latter decidedly Nine Inch Nails) to sad, semi-acoustic ballads like "In The Arms Of Sleep", "Galapagos", "By Starlight"; and again, from minor jokes like "Beautiful" or "We Only Come Out At Night" to radio-friendly rock (but with such class...) like "Here Is No Why" or "Muzzle"; from the hardcore of "X.Y.U." to the "Siamese Dream"-style rock of "Jellybelly", from tracks unmistakably progressive from their titles alone ("Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans", "Thru The Eyes Of Ruby") to the wonderful pop-wave of "1979", from metal ("Fuck You") to dream-pop ("Cupid De Locke"), in a bubbling cauldron of sounds, guitars, melodies, words. Over it all, Corgan's acidic voice, always pushing the limits of tolerability with that highly distinctive, nasal timbre that also serves as his trademark.

It's impossible to cover the entire musical range traced in this album by Corgan at the (despotic) helm of his pumpkins: the subject matter is too vast, the territories explored too far-reaching. Just as it's impossible to single out one masterpiece or one representative track - not by chance, six singles were pulled from the double CD, each released alongside several previously unreleased tracks (many of which, incidentally, are of great interest), testament to a moment of unstoppable creative grace.

The record's only trait d'union, as its title suggests, is an aura of decadent melancholy running through every track, sublimated into depressive rage in the more guitar-driven songs or diluted into languid romanticism in the more atmospheric ones; this element too helps make the final result unique, saving it from the risk of being merely a hodgepodge of disparate musical scraps and turning it instead into a complete, self-contained work.

Having explored rock far and wide, Corgan had nothing left to do in his own territory and had to change course. The results didn't live up to the man, and Billy's musical agony was (is it still?) long and painful, first with the later Smashing Pumpkins records and then with the Zwan project. What's certain is that with this double album, Corgan and co. left future generations a monument to music, a summa of rock (more or less mainstream) that, alongside a handful of other works, could serve as a primer or compendium for getting to know the endless facets rock evolved into from the Seventies through the Nineties.

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09/11/2006